This could be permanent for those already claiming they can't wait until Anakin gets sent back after all of this. I DON'T recall saying he'll get sent back. Maybe I enjoy writing Anakin, Luke, and Leia so much that I want him to stay in the future. People who often get sent to the past stay in the past. Sometimes, people who go to the future can stay in the future. Can't make every story the same. LOL

Chapter 2

Anakin choked on his breath, feeling phantom pain shooting through his body. For a split moment, his vision snapped into a deep bit of darkness, then restored the next moment. The disturbance pulsated through the Force as thousands of voices ripped inside of his head and then cut off promptly. He didn't know what the kriff happened, forgetting even who he was for a split second, before that came to him as well. He felt like he was molded into pieces yet again and broke down.

He'd thought he sensed something, far more intense to him.

One name came to mind: 'Padmé?'

Nothing.

The bond they'd shared was black and gone.

Anakin Skywalker tried a look at his surroundings, but now he couldn't see. His vision blurred in and out, his chest beating heavily, movements gone from him. His arms began to shake and gave out underneath the weight. The steel provided no cushioning to the fall. Pain shot upwards from Anakin's legs to his back. Stars flashed on the backs of his eyes. Instinctively, he reached for his legs, but couldn't do so.

Anakin felt gloved hands reach for him. Surprisingly, the hands were tender and gentle. Dazing in and out of consciousness, one commanded the rest to bring him somewhere else. Not one said his name.

"Lay him down," the Commander told his soldiers.

Anakin felt the soothing touch of a cool mattress.

The pain rippled upwards from his entire body, burning the nerves.

More words were thrown around, but Anakin couldn't discern them. He felt the tinges of unconsciousness flooding in.

A medical droid at the bedside examined him. "There's no bleeding or wounds of any sort. Just sleep-deprivation."

"Watch him," the Commander demanded. "Princess Leia would want to hear of this."

What happened next Anakin missed as his body slid into unconsciousness.

When the blackness faded from the world above, he felt a coldness shot through his body.

Anakin couldn't understand what the kriff just happened. He knew Obi-Wan, Ahsoka, and even Padmé would have been amused...

Wait...

Wait a minute...

He froze, shocked and horrified. He reached out for the Force bonds of his family, looking for them. Something to draw strength from in his time of need. He could feel NONE of them anymore. Kenobi and Ahsoka were... cold. Padmé was gone. Impossible... how could they all have died, just like that, or just go mute? How could everything just go so blank?

Either way, the end result was the same. He was severed from his friends and family.

When a concerned face swam into his vision. A woman. She was beautiful. Her hair was brown, in a bun and plait, dignified, and nicely groomed. Her eyes were glistening with concern. He knew at once that she wasn't a threat.

It felt like it took decades for his head to stop spinning, but when it did, the face remained the same.

"Hello there, I'm Princess Leia Organa."

Organa? Did Bail Organa have a distant cousin or something? The young woman eyed him.

"I'm going to assume that you aren't part of the Empire."

Empire?

"Who are you?"

Part of Anakin wanted to say something really nasty, but the way she'd stared at him, her concerned orbs reading him, made his heart freeze in his chest. He couldn't do it.

"Anakin Skywalker, Jedi Knight." He answered. Knowing technology, they would have found it out through a blood sample, something that would have happened anyway.

The Princess's eyes went wide with surprise, then narrowed. "That is a strange coincidence."

Curiosity bit. "Why?" He didn't know what she was getting at here.

"Another Jedi who gone by the name of Anakin Skywalker died nineteen years ago."

"What?!" He exclaimed. That was impossible. There hadn't been other "Anakin Skywalkers" in the Jedi Order that the young Jedi was personally aware of. But what else was the Jedi hiding from him? Seriously, what else was new?

"Yes, he was slayed by Darth Vader in the Jedi Temple..."

Darth Vader?

Vader?

The air rang with equivocation and frigidity.

Evil.

Perhaps incinerate.

But the name still didn't ring a bell.

"Is Darth Vader the Sith Lord behind the Clone Wars?" Anakin asked in complete and utter befuddlement. It would most certainly make sense. Maybe Palpatine wasn't the sole Sith keeping the war going and genuinely had the Republic's best interests at heart. Maybe the two Sith weren't working in cahoots and decided to fall on opposite sides until one true victor emerged.

"No," the Princess's lips churned up in a flustered frown for a moment, giving him a look like he was mad, but it passed. "Darth Vader is the Enforcer of the Emperor. The secret weapon behind the Empire."

"What is this Empire?" Anakin asked slowly.

"The Galactic Empire was constructed after the then Chancellor Palpatine took control of the Senate and reformed the corruption within to be more paramount. Due to the various deals with local governments, it was with unqualified support that the Republic would be reorganized in the first Galactic Empire."

Palpatine...

So Palpatine and Vader weren't enemies after all. If that were the case, Vader could sabotage missions deliberately. Must have been someone who Palpatine kept hidden, possibly in plain daylight.

"...Where's Senator Padmé Amidala? She could clear this up." Anakin replied slowly. His wife was better at handling this than he was.

"She... is dead too. Senator Amidala died after the rise of the Empire."

Anakin's blood went cold. Suddenly, his entire body began to convulse. No! No! Not her! Anyone but her! He began to cry in despair and anger.

The entire medical facility started to tremble, and the lights down the halls dimmed. Equipment raised in the air, droids likewise, the empty beds as well. Powers he kept dormant were about to be unleashed.

As he stopped his sobbing, the anger in his eyes started to swell, and he turned to the Princess, looking completely and utterly terrified.

His eyes burnt a hot golden, the life from his face devoid of all natural emotions, teeth gritted together...

This is how it feels to be Anakin Skywalker, forever:

The heart in your chest clenched tightly.

You aren't the same. You will never be the same. Part of you have just died when you'd discovered that the love of your life died.

Your wife, she is gone. She is gone, died nineteen years ago if the girl spoke the truth. You can't stop it. You can't ever stop it. You can't even slow it down.

You aren't even there to stop it.

Your soul is broken. It is fortunate, you later realize, that you were exhausted, because you would have killed everyone in here if they'd gotten in your way and searched for your wife until the ends of the galaxy if you had to.

You hate what happened.

It is terrible.

A hideous manifestation of helplessness.

Because you didn't know what happened, and there is no reversing this. This reality you are dragged into. Is this to be the consequence of coming to the edge of revoking the Jedi Code?

This burns hotter than any battle ever did.

No! She is gone! The one so precious to you is gone and never coming back!

You love her. You have always loved her. You will never abandon her side.

Never.

But you remember…

You remember all of it.

You remember the dragon forth from your heart to slay. You remember the cold venom dipping in your blood. You remember the furnace of the dragon's fury, and the promises to save her from certain death...

And there is one blazing moment in which you finally understand that there was no dragon. There is only you. Anakin Skywalker. You failed completely and utterly.

That it is all you. Was you.

Only you.

You did it.

You couldn't be there when she needed you.

You left her to die because, finally, when you could have saved her, when you could have gone away with her, when you could have saved her, you weren't even there-dragged here for some reason...

It is in this blazing moment that you finally understand that life would bring you nothing but pain—

Because now yourself is all you will ever have.

And you are seconds away from raging and screaming and reaching through the Force to crush everyone around you...

'Anakin, don't.'

The voice echoed in your mind. One so faint. So prominent in his childhood.

'This is not what she would have wanted. These people are innocent. They're only trying to help. Don't do it. Remember the Tuskens.'

You can't process it, but it soothes your heart. You think about Padmé Naberrie, think about how she would have reacted if she'd seen you seconds away from killing innocent people who showed no hostile intent, and you don't do it. Something broke through that cloud.

And you can't touch the woman. For some strange reason, you can't bring yourself to inflict harm on the woman. She is looking down at you with concerned eyes, eyes that Padmé had looked at you too. You can't do it. There is a mysterious connection with her. A connection that you would have to search into later.

You can easily.

But...

In the end, you do not even want to.

In the end, you know that killing these people won't bring her back.

And within your furnace heart, you burn in your own flame.

This is how it feels to be Anakin Skywalker.

Forever…

He didn't want to believe it. This had to be some trick. But he felt the sincerity in her words. Knew that his beloved, the angel of his life, was gone. She was taken from him, and Anakin didn't know. Did he fall asleep in the Council Chambers and was relocated by someone? But how could that be? If he was apparently slayed by this Darth Vader...

Maybe he had a fierce battle he couldn't remember, and his vision betrayed him as it did during that terrible night in the village when he'd lost his mother.

Anakin's breathing picked up rapidly.

"Who killed her?" He asked, his voice deceptively calm. Was Palpatine right? Did the Jedi...

The Princess looked taken aback by the darkness in his tone, but she responded, nevertheless.

"Publicly, the Jedi were framed for it. My father told me Darth Vader did."

That monster! He would make that monster pay for what he'd done! Fury burned so hot inside of him! Who dared to be the one who killed the love of his life?! What did Padmé ever do to get dragged into that sort of fate?! Soon, Anakin was going to hunt Darth Vader to the edge of the galaxy, and kill him! The Sith Lord better be good a using a damn lightsaber, because if he ain't, Anakin would make sure that he lived to regret the day!

"Where was I found?" he asked, a flatness in his tone.

"Kattada. The Kattadans found you and brought you to the nearby Rebellion's base where we'd processed you. I'm here to decipher if you're a threat or not." Princess Leia stared at him slowly. "...What is the last thing you remember?"

"I was in the Jedi Council Chambers at the Jedi Temple and..." he began honestly when a shot of pain went through his forehead. "I can't remember the rest."

The Princess snorted. "Considering the condition you were brought to me in when you apparently appeared midair in the fields, that's no small wonder."

But that didn't make sense. If he just passed out, he would have aged. A body didn't just collapse and black out and go without aging. It went against all logical meaning. It was not the same as being frozen in Carbonite or one of the other contraptions that ceased aging.

Anakin tilted his head slowly, "How many years since the first Invasion of Naboo?"

Organa said as if it was obvious... "Thirty-two years."

Thirty-two.

Not thirteen.

"Holy kriffing bantha," Anakin murmured.

"What?"

"Ma'am... I think I'm not in the right time." How else was he supposed to kriffing word it?! "I'm in the future."

The woman didn't give the reaction Anakin would have if their positions were reversed. She merely blinked.

He elaborated, "Nineteen years to be exact. Likely by the Force for whatever reason."

"What do you mean?" She didn't get it through her head yet, not that Anakin could blame her.

He'd tried to come up with a preferable way to lay out the truth, before just coming out with, "I time traveled nineteen years."

Her eyes went wide. Somehow, she was able to keep her composure. "Time travel is impossible, and it's illegal, even under the Empire."

"The Force doesn't care about legalities," he responded flatly because he knew that had something to do with this. "Are you familiar with General Grievous and Count Dooku?"

She nodded, "Yes, Grievous led many assaults during the Clone Wars against the Republic at the time before he perished to General Kenobi by the end of the Clone Wars, and Count Dooku was the leader of the Confederacy of Independent Systems before he was killed during the final days of the Republic by..."

"By me. A few days after, my Master, Obi-Wan Kenobi, went to fight on the planet of Utapau just recently and fought General Grievous, while the Jedi Council had selected me to spy on Chancellor Palpatine to find out what he was up to." Even now, he felt the bitterness inside of him. Right, they may have been about Palpatine, but it was still treason. If they were caught, Skywalker could have been arrested and executed with nigh support.

Leia's eyes darted back and forth. "But..." She looked utterly speechless. "That doesn't..."

"That's mine..." he motioned to the hilt in the Princess's hand.

The Princess was processing what was being told to her. Her very first instinct was to dismiss his words as utter nonsense. But she'd actually read about such things in the past. The last she'd heard was one Bosbit Matarcher who engaged the hyperdrive on his newly purchased Delemedian starhopper, intending to take a short trip from his homeworld of Delemede. Due to faulty relativistic shielding, what he experienced as a two-hour trip took 190 years from the perspective of the rest of the galaxy. His experiences brought him brief notoriety when he arrived in the beginning of the Clone Wars, resulting in a HoloNet News interview. Matarcher took the experience in stride, as his run-down homeworld had become prosperous in the meantime. However, he decided to let someone else fly him home. Matarcher's trip was not strictly defined as "time travel" to the future, however, as he did not "skip over" any period of time. Instead, time merely passed in a distorted manner for him due to the well-known effects of time dilation.

And simply, from her perspective, he'd gone into too much detail for her to blatantly dismiss his claims to be a lie. He wore black Jedi robes, fit the description of Anakin Skywalker to the tea, and this... could be an amazing chance for the Rebellion to have another ally. They needed warriors. Something within her was telling her that he was telling the truth. But she knew she couldn't rely on some sort of gut instinct. She needed to check on that blood sample she'd extracted when he was unconscious.

She nodded. "Can you stand?"

"Yes," he managed gravely, drawing up to his full height and putting on the cloak nearby, fixing his robes to make himself look more presentable.

She hesitated for one final moment, but she knew if he wanted to, he could have already taken his lightsaber forcibly. Cuffing him was a possibility, but the Rebellion was supposed to be different from the Empire. Innocent until proven guilty was one of the mantras that they would follow.

So she held out the hilt in his direction. He gripped the offered hilt and placed it on his belt. And she smiled, this time politely.

"Welcome to the Tantive IV."