Spectre: This one needs no introduction. The Chapter title says it all, and leave a review after this!
Chapter 34: Downfall
Within seconds, Sidious let out an ear-piercing scream towards the Masters as he moved in. A smear of red-flashing darkness hurtled from behind the desk.
Saesee Tiin's head bounced when it hit the floor. Smoke curled from the neck, and from the twin stumps of the horns, severed just below the chin.
"Master Tiin!", Kit Fisto cried out in horror and complete denial as they watched as one of their fellow Council members was killed in what they could piece out as a lightning bolt.
Said Jedi Master's mouth was left open in both dread and complete bafflement upon seeing himself falling to the Sith Lord in a matter of seconds. Any sense of hope and confidence fading within himself.
And with that, the hearts who are currently inside the chamber were struck by one thing: fear. And the Jedi were in dread upon seeing one of their Council members fall to the Sith Lord so easily.
"What in the universe just happened?!", Ki-Adi Mundi nearly shouted in anger and disbelief, and there are more than a few members of the audience trying what they could to maintain their composure while watching the gruesome scene.
The headless corpse, still standing, twisted as its knees buckled, and a thin sigh escaped from its trachea as it folded to the floor.
"It doesn't..." Agen Kolar swayed.
His sapphire blade shrank away, and the handgrip tumbled from his opening fingers. A small, neat hole in the middle of his forehead leaked smoke, showing light from the back of his head.
"... hurt..."
He pitched forward onto his face, and lay still.
"Kolar!", Master Fisto cried out again, almost furious as he watched another fellow Council member and comrade fall to the Sith Lord, just easy as what happened to Saesee Tiin.
The Jedi tried what they could to hide or suppress their anger, fear, and denial at what comes in the near future. And they were confident that they may be able to defeat Sidious quite easily since he was only one man left who could truly be considered as a true Sith.
But upon witnessing the quick deaths of Tiin and Kolar, the Council's (sans Yoda and Mace Windu, who were observed Sidious silently) hopes were dashed. And the truth that they have underestimated the Sith came crashing down upon them.
"Can...we even stop him?", Caleb uttered out to his Master, who could only spare him a glance of uncertainty as they continued watching.
"Long hidden in the shadows, the Sith have", Yoda said, his tone grim. "Grown stronger in the Force, they had become"
"By the Force, if Dooku and Maul were powerful enough as apprentices...what more could have Sidious have in store for them as the Master?", Shaak Ti uttered out in complete dismay and of uncertainty, trying to maintain her calm demeanor amidst the obviously chaotic sequence they are witnessing.
For Anakin, he saw what kind of a monster that lay behind that serene mask that led him to be enthralled by his words. And now, he felt helpless upon witnessing the deaths of two of the most powerful swordsmen that he knew among the Council.
For Windu, his distrust to Palpatine turned into anger as he hoped for the best in Master Fisto and himself, hoping that they could still stop him in his office, but the established future had said otherwise.
Palpatine stood at the doorway, but the door stayed shut. From his right hand extended a blade the color of fire. The door locked itself at his back.
"Help! Help!" Palpatine cried like a man in desperate fear for his life. "Security—someone! Help me! Murder! Treason!"
Then he smiled. He held one finger to his lips, and, astonishingly, he winked.
In the blank second that followed, while Mace Windu and Kit Fisto could do no more than angle their lightsabers to guard, Palpatine swiftly stepped over the bodies back toward his desk, reversed his blade, and drove it in a swift, surgically precise stab down through his desktop.
"That's enough of that."
Ahsoka's eyes widened in immediate realization, remembering what her future self had told them regarding the Jedi. "The Chancellor is using this incident as evidence for the Jedi's treason!", she pointed out.
Mace Windu quickly caught wind of the Togruta's statement, the fact that his actions to rush in Palpatine had sealed their fate. "And in this case...the Jedi's reputation as keepers of peace within the Republic had died here...", he reluctantly uttered.
"And Sidious chose the right time to strike once the war is coming to an end...", Shaak Ti added, carefully gathering the pieces together.
He let it burn its way free through the front, then he turned, lifting his weapon, appearing to study it as one might study the face of a beloved friend one has long thought dead. Power gathered around him until the Force shimmered with darkness.
"If you only knew," he said softly, perhaps speaking to the Jedi Masters, or perhaps to himself, or perhaps even to the scarlet blade lifted now as though in mocking salute, "how long I have been waiting for this..."
"Palpatine...", Anakin seethed out his name, clenching his fist in complete anger that was sensed by the Jedi inside the chambers. "You will pay for this..."
He felt a hand placed on his shoulder as Padme tried to calm him down, glaring at the elderly man who was responsible for the dark future that their son had to go through, and of what had happened to her family.
Anakin's speeder shrieked through the rain, dodging forked bolts of lightning that shot up from towers into the clouds, slicing across traffic lanes, screaming past spacescrapers so fast that his shock-wake cracked windows as he passed. He didn't understand why people didn't just get out of his way. He didn't understand how the trillion beings who jammed Galactic City could go about their trivial business as though the universe hadn't changed. How could they think they counted for anything, compared with him?
How could they think they still mattered? Their blind lives meant nothing now. None of them. Because ahead, on the vast cliff face of the Senate Office Building, one window spat lightning into the rain to echo the lightning of the storm outside—but this lightning was the color of clashing lightsabers.
Green fans, sheets of purple—
And crimson flame.
He was too late.
The green fire faded and winked out; now the lightning was only purple and red.
The Council's eyes widened in fear, knowing this could only mean one thing; Master Fisto had fallen to the Sith, leaving Mace alone to fight off Palpatine. Said Master could only close his eyes in denial and of faint hope, but it was already clear to him when he compared himself to Sidious. The Korun Master only gave him what seemed to be an apologetic look, for leading them to their deaths without any plan against Sidious.
His repulsor lifts howled as he heeled the speeder up onto its side, skidding through wind-shear turbulence to bring it to abobbing halt outside the window of Palpatine's private office. Ablast of lightning hit the spire of 500 Republica, only a kilometer away, and its white burst flared off the window, flash-blinding him; he blinked furiously, slapping at his eyes in frustration.
"That blast of that lightning made Count Dooku's own look like a mere spark compared to a storm". Plo Koon noted, the fact that his own version of the technique looked so miniscule compared to Sidious'.
The colorless glare inside his eyes faded slowly, bringing into focus a jumble of bodies on the floor of Palpatine's private office.
Bodies in Jedi robes.
"What...what am I doing there?", Anakin questioned, not having the details that were shown to the Council members and Anakin could see to his future that he was agitated, worried, afraid but for what? For once, he wanted to know the truth now, and keeping any more secrets is not an option.
However, the Council could not turn to give him the answers he needed right now. Right now, they have to see how this plays through.
On Palpatine's desk lay the head of Kit Fisto, faceup, scalp-tentacles unbound in a squid-tangle across the ebonite. His lid-less eyes stared blindly at the ceiling. Anakin remembered him in the arena at Geonosis, effortlessly carving his way through wave after wave of combat droids, on his lips a gently humorous smile as though the horrific battle were only some friendly jest. His severed head wore that same smile.
Maybe he thought death was funny, too.
Anakin's own blade sang blue as it slashed through the window and he dived through the gap. He rolled to his feet among a litter of bodies and sprinted through a shattered door along the small private corridor and through a doorway that flashed and flared with energy-scatter.
Anakin skidded to a stop.
Within the public office of the Supreme Chancellor of the Galactic Republic, a last Jedi Master battled alone, blade-to-blade, against a living shadow.
Sinking into Vaapad, Mace Windu fought for his life. More than his life: each whirl of blade and whipcrack of lightning was a strike in defense of democracy, of justice and peace, of the rights of ordinary beings to live their own lives in their own ways.
He was fighting for the Republic that he loved.
The Jedi were astounded as to how the Korun Master held his own against the Sith Lord when others could not, with Caleb and Ahsoka watching in awe as Mace managed to fight Sidious in a standstill, and all that they could figure, are blurs of crimson and amethyst blades in such speed that they could never match up.
As for Mace, he silently observed Sidious' movements rather than his own, studying his dueling style that he could almost certainly point out that he utilizes all seven forms of combat.
Vaapad, the seventh form of lightsaber combat, takes its name from a notoriously dangerous predator native to the moons of Sarapin: a vaapad attacks its prey with whipping strikes of its blindingly fast tentacles. Most have at least seven. It is not uncommon for them to have as many as twelve; the largest ever killed had twenty-three. With a vaapad, one never knew how many tentacles it had until it was dead: they move too fast to count.
Almost too fast to see. So did Mace's blade.
Vaapad is as aggressive and powerful as its namesake, but its power comes at great risk: immersion in Vaapad opens the gates that restrain one's inner darkness. To use Vaapad, a Jedi must allow himself to enjoy the fight; he must give himself over to the thrill of battle. The rush of winning. Vaapad is a path that leads through the penumbra of the dark side.
"Master, didn't you learn this style from Master Windu, too?", Caleb asked, seeing that if his master's master could be this powerful, then he was certain that Depa also learned this technique when she was under his tutelage.
"I did, Caleb", Depa answered him, but let out a resigning sigh. "But I was not worthy enough to use such a style, and it resulted in dire consequences to not just myself, but to several others"
Mace Windu created this style, and he was its only living master. This was Vaapad's ultimate test.
Anakin blinked and rubbed his eyes again. Maybe he was still abit flash-blind—the Korun Master seemed to be fading in and out of existence, half swallowed by a thickening black haze in which danced a meter-long bar of sunfire. Mace pressed back the darkness with a relentless straight-ahead march; his own blade, that distinctive amethyst blaze that had been the final sight of so many evil beings across the galaxy, made a haze of its own: an oblate sphere of purple fire within which there seemed to be dozens of swords slashing in all directions at once.
"This is the true power of Vaapad...", Obi-Wan mavelled in complete fascination.
"Channel an opponents power back at them through the force", Yoda observed, impressed on how Mace's unorthodox dueling style managed to keep up with Sidious. "His judgement be clouded by the strong emotions. A Sith's greatest weakness once drawn to deep to the dark side"
Anakin watched in complete amazement as he heard Yoda's statement, confident that Mace should be able to destroy the monster of a Sith Lord that fooled him for years. And now, he is only wishing that his future self didn't do anything that could be considered as stupid.
The shadow he fought, that blur of speed—could that be Palpatine?
Their blades flared and flashed, crashing together with bursts of fire, weaving nets of killing energy in exchanges so fast that Anakin could not truly see them—
But he could feel them in the Force.
The Force itself roiled and burst and crashed around them, boiling with power and lightspeed ricochets of lethal intent. And it was darkening. Anakin could feel how the Force fed upon the shadow's murderous exaltation; he could feel fury spray into the Force though some poisonous abscess had crested in both their hearts.
There was no Jedi restraint here.
Mace Windu was cutting loose.
Mace was deep in it now: submerged in Vaapad, swallowed by it, he no longer truly existed as an independent being.
Vaapad is a channel for darkness, and that darkness flowed both ways. He accepted the furious speed of the Sith Lord, drew the shadow's rage and power into his inmost center— And let it fountain out again.
He reflected the fury upon its source as a lightsaber redirects ablaster bolt.
There was a time when Mace Windu had feared the power of the dark; there was a time when he had feared the darkness in himself. But the Clone Wars had given him a gift of understanding: on a world called Haruun Kal, he had faced his darkness and had learned that the power of darkness is not to be feared. He had learned that it is fear that gives the darkness power. He was not afraid. The darkness had no power over him. But—Neither did he have power over it.
"Master Drallig would be impressed if he were here to witness this spectacle", Saesee Tiin spoke, his hopes placed in Master Windu at avenging their deaths and to stop Sidious.
"The Force is with Master Windu at this one...", Master Mundi spoke, placing his faith on the Korun Master.
Vaapad made him an open channel, half of a superconducting loop completed by the shadow; they became a standing wave of battle that expanded into every cubic centimeter of the Chancellor's office. There was no scrap of carpet nor shred of chair that might not at any second disintegrate in flares of red or purple; lampstands became brief shields, sliced into segments that whirled through the air; couches became terrain to be climbed for advantage or overleapt in retreat. But there was still only the cycle of power, the endless loop, no wound taken on either side, not even the possibility of fatigue.
Impasse.
Which might have gone on forever, if Vaapad were Mace's only gift. The fighting was effortless for him now; he let his body handle it without the intervention of his mind. While his blade spun and crackled, while his feet slid and his weight shifted and his shoulders turned in precise curves of their own direction, his mind slid along the circuit of dark power, tracing it back to its limitless source.
Feeling for its shatterpoint.
He found a knot of fault lines in the shadow's future; he chose the largest fracture and followed it back to the here and the now— And it led him, astonishingly, to a man standing frozen in the slashed-open doorway. Mace had no need to look; the presence in the Force was familiar, and was as uplifting as sunlight breaking through a thunderhead.
The Chosen One was here.
Anakin's glove-covered robotic hand held the lower half of his face, sweat dropping from his forehead upon seeing himself in the middle between Mace and Sidious. He remembered, his future had no knowledge on what the likes of Sidious or Tarkin had done to countless innocent people that could surely question his perspective. With that in mind, he knew his future self still cared for that monster responsible for the galaxy's sufferings, for reasons that he had not known yet.
Yoda and Obi-Wan felt that something was terribly wrong in the future Skywalker's presence, feeling a sense of dread that this is portion is but a test where Anakin's loyalties truly lie; to Palpatine or to the Jedi.
Windu sensed Yoda and Obi-Wan's thoughts through the Force. And all confidence that he still had were removed, sensing the same thought for Skywalker.
Mace disengaged from the shadow's blade and leapt for the window; he slashed away the transparisteel with a single flourish. His instant's distraction cost him: a dark surge of the Force nearly blew him right out of the gap he had just cut. Only a desperate Force-push of his own altered his path enough that heslammed into a stanchion instead of plunging half a kilometer.
From the ledge outside. He bounced off and the Force cleared his head and once again he gave himself to Vaapad.
He could feel the end of this battle approaching, and so could the blur of Sith he faced; in the Force, the shadow had become a pulsar of fear. Easily, almost effortlessly, he turned the shadow's fear into a weapon: he angled the battle to bring them both out onto the window ledge.
Out in the wind. Out with the lightning. Out on a rain-slicked ledge above a half-kilometer drop.
Out where the shadow's fear made it hesitate. Out where the shadow's fear turned some of its Force-powered speed into a Force-powered grip on the slippery permacrete.
Out where Mace could flick his blade in one precise arc and slash the shadow's lightsaber in half.
One piece flipped back in through the cut-open window. The other tumbled from opening fingers, bounced on the ledge, and fell through the rain toward the distant alleys below. Now the shadow was only Palpatine: old and shrunken, thinning hair bleached white by time and care, face lined with exhaustion.
"You are under arrest," Mace said evenly, staring past his blade, "My Lord."
The audience resisted the urge to cheer or be relieved at what appeeared to be their triumph over the Sith Lord, as a means to keep themselves out from the Chancellor's radar. But they felt respite, assurance and promise when they saw the cleae outcome of the duel.
"He has done it...", Mundi spoke out loud, his voice carrying much needed relief. "He has bested Darth Sidious"
"No, Master Mundi...", Mace interjected, observing the scenario more carefully. "Our duel does not lie between Sidious and I. It lies with Skywalker..."
"He's seen what Palpatine did to Masters Fisto, Kolar and Tiin, why would Master still side with the Chancellor on what he is?", Ahsoka reasoned out, confused as her master and Padme.
"There is much that you have not yet known that we have seen to ourselves, little 'Soka", Plo Koon professed, slowly realizing what this meant for Skywalker as well.
Neither Anakin or Padme liked what they heard from Master Plo.
"I told you it would come to this!" Palpatine's voice once again had the broken cadence of a frightened old man's. "I was right! The Jedi are taking over!"
"Treason? What does he mean?!", Anakin questioned almost incredulously, wanting to know he had not from the Council members present. He would never believe anything that came out of Palpatine's mouth after the revelation of him being a Sith Lord.
"The oppression of the Sith will never return." Mace leveled his blade. "You have lost"
Palpatine lifted his head. His eyes smoked with hate.
"No," he said. He lifted his arms, his robes of office spreading wide into raptor's wings, his hands hooking into talons.
"NO!" His voice was a shout of thunder. "YOU WILL DIE!"
Lighting blasted the clouds above, and lightning blasted from Palpatine's hands, and Mace didn't have time to comprehend what Palpatine was talking about; he had time only to slip back into Vaapad and angle his blade to catch the forking arcs of pure, dazzling hatred that clawed toward him. Because Vaapad is more than a fighting style. It is a state of mind: a channel for darkness. Power passed into him and out again without touching him.
And the circuit completed itself: the lightning reflected back to its source.
Palpatine staggered, snarling, but the blistering energy that loured from his hands only intensified.
He fed the power with his pain. "HE'S A TRAITOR!"
"HE'S THE TRAITOR!" Mace called back. His voice sounded distant, blurred, ;if it came from the bottom of a well. "Anakin, help me! This is your chance!"
He felt Anakin's leap from the office floor to the ledge, felt his approach behind—And Palpatine was not afraid. Mace could feel it: he wasn't worried at all. "I have the power to save those you love!" the Chancellor said, his voice raised aver the howl of writhing energy that joined his hands to Mace's blade. "You must choose! This isn't an arrest! This is an assassination!"
"An assassination that you have orchestrated!", Obi-Wan called out, hoping that to the very least, things would be different. "Don't listen to him, Anakin!"
Anakin gritted his teeth, finding the strength to call out. "Forget about me, Master Windu! Finish him!", he shouted, realizing that he could not place his hopes to himself in the future.
That was when Mace finally understood. He had it. The key to final victory. Palpatine's shatterpoint. The absolute shatter-point of the Sith.
The shatterpoint of the dark side itself. Mace thought, blankly astonished, Palpatine trusts Anakin Skywalker...
Now Anakin was at Mace's shoulder. Palpatine still made no move to defend himself from Skywalker; instead he ramped up the lightning bursting from his hands, bending the fountain of Mace's blade back toward the Korun Master's face.
Palpatine's eyes glowed with power, casting a yellow glare that burned back the rain from around them. "Don't let him kill me...I am too weak"
"You're the chosen one, Anakin," Mace said, his voice going thin with strain. This was beyond Vaapad; he had no strength left to fight against his own blade. "Take him. It's your destiny.'"
Skywalker echoed him faintly. "Destiny..."
"Help me!" The yellow glare from Palpatine's eyes spread outward through his flesh. His skin flowed like oil, as though the muscle beneath was burning away, as though even the bones of his skull were softening, were bending and bulging, deforming from the heat and pressure of his electric hatred. "I...can't hold any longer—"
Mace's blade bent so close to his face that he was choking on ozone. "Anakin, he's too strong for me—"
"Ahhh—" Palpatine's roar above above the endless blast of lightning became a fading moan of despair. The lightning swallowed itself, leaving only the night and the rain, and an old man crumpled to his knees on a slippery ledge. "I... can't. I give up. I... I am too weak, in the end. Too old, and too weak. Don't kill me, Master Jedi. Please. I surrender."
"The true face of a Sith...", Luminara spoke out, feeling irked at Palpatine's now-deformed appearance.
"His serene mask is all but shattered, Master Unduli", Shaak Ti agreed with her. "Behind it shows the Dark Side personified"
Victory flooded through Mace's aching body. He lifted his blade. "I am going to end this once and for all!"
" You can't—" Skywalker seized his lightsaber arm with desperate strength. "He must stand trial!"
"What?! No! END HIM NOW!", Anakin urged to the Korun Master on screen, thinking what insanity that came into his future self's mind.
"What is going on with Anakin?", Padme hurriedly asked, wondering why he would still protect Palpatine despite the revelations. The Council looked at her, promising that they would tell both of them at the right time.
"He controls the Senate and the Courts! He's too dangerous to be left alive! If you could have taken Dooku alive, would you have?"
Ahsoka's eyes widened. "He...killed Count Dooku?", she uttered, not believing that the Sith Lord could have fallen to Anakin anytime soon from all the times they had fought together. Anakin likewise felt the same, as his objective was to capture Count Dooku whenever possible, and never kill him.
Skywalker's face swept itself clean of emotion. "That was different—it's not the Jedi way! He must live!"
Mace turned toward the cringing, beaten Sith Lord.
He raised his lightsaber.
"NO!"
Before he could follow through on his stroke, a sudden arc of blue plasma sheared through his wrist and his hand tumbled away with his lightsaber still in it and Palpatine roared back to his feet and lightning speared from the Sith Lord's hands and without his blade to catch it, the power of Palpatine's hate struck him full-on.
"UNLIMITED POWER!!!!", Sidious roared as lightning struck the Korun Master
"NOOOO!!!", Anakin shouted in complete dismay to himself, and what did he mean by needing Palpatine to save Padme?
The Jedi were shocked, horrified, and in disbelief that the Jedi Knight had done. Padme and Ahsoka could only watch in complete silence, their eyes widening in horror at what had transpired.
Mace Windu wanted to react, either by renewed anger or hostility towards Skywalker. That he was right that he shouldn't have trusted him in the first place, but he was unable to do so, as if something is preventing him to.
Depa covered her mouth with both hands in shock, fearing at what is to come for her master despite not having the best history between them. Masters Fisto and Tiin could not believe what Skywalker just did, despite the obvious mutual distrust between the two. Yoda only closed his eyes in surrender, saddened of the outcome for Anakin. "Towards a dark path, young Skywalker had chosen"
And Obi-Wan could only watch helplessly as he witnessed his apprentice aided the Sith Lord in disposing the Master of the Order.
He had been so intent on Palpatine's shatterpoint that he'd never thought to look for Anakin's.
Dark lightning blasted away his universe. He fell forever.
Anakin fell to his knees, overwhelmed in regret and anger to himself on what he did to Master Windu. "Why?", was all that he could say.
Anakin Skywalker knelt in the rain.
He was looking at a hand. The hand had brown skin. The hand held a lightsaber. The hand had a charred oval of tissue where it should have been attached to an arm.
"What have I done?"
Was it his voice? It must have been. Because it was his question.
"What have I done?"
Another hand, a warm and human hand, laid itself softly on his shoulder.
"You're following your destiny, Anakin," said a familiar gentle voice. "The Jedi are traitors. You saved the Republic from their treachery. You can see that, can't you?"
"You were right," Anakin heard himself saying. "Why didn't Iknow?"
"You couldn't have. They cloaked themselves in deception, my boy. Because they feared your power, they could never trust you."
Anakin stared at the hand, but he no longer saw it.
"Obi-Wan—Obi-Wan trusts me..."
"Not enough to tell you of their plot."
"What does he mean? Tell me! What does he mean?!", Anakin again urged, only to be met by sympathetic silence from most of the audience.
Treason echoed in his memory.
... this is not an assignment for the record...
That warm and human hand gave his shoulder a warm and human squeeze. "I do not fear your power, Anakin, I embrace it. You are the greatest of the Jedi. You can be the greatest of the Sith. I believe that, Anakin. I believe in you. I trust you. I trust you. I trust you."
With those words, Anakin's hate for Palpatine exploded, knowing his trust is nothing more than lies that made him no different from the Jedi, resisting whatever urge he had to come straight to the Chancellor's office and end him there, not caring of the consequences any longer.
Anakin looked from the dead hand on the ledge to the living one on his shoulder, then up to the face of the man who stood above him, and what he saw there choked him like an invisible fist crushing his throat.
The hand on his shoulder was human.
The face... wasn't.
The eyes were a cold and feral yellow, and they gleamed like those of a predator lurking beyond a fringe of firelight; the bone around those feral eyes had swollen and melted and flowed like durasteel spilled from a fusion smelter, and the flesh that blanketed it had gone corpse-gray and coarse as rotten synthplast.
Stunned with horror, stunned with revulsion, Anakin could only stare at the creature. At the shadow.
Looking into the face of the darkness, he saw his future.
"Now come inside," the darkness said.
"At this point, he no longer had a choice", Mace finally spoke in a disappointed tone towards Skywalker, not feeling any sort of empathy for him despite the fact that they could still prevent all of this. "He has taken one step, and there was no turning back"
"No, he could still reject him! There has to be another way!", Padme snapped in denial, desperately hoping that there is one that Anakin could quickly think of, but when she turned to Obi-Wan, her hopes were dashed when she saw him shook his head apologetically.
After a moment, he did. On the mountain peak within himself, he weighed Padme's life against the Jedi Order.
It was no contest.
He said, "Yes."
"No...no, no, no, no, no. NO!", Anakin cried out repeatedly, dismay and anger overtaking him as he glared at his future counterpart. "Don't do this!", he pleaded And once again, the Jedi watched as Anakin fell apart once more, to which most would feel the same as he did.
Meanwhile, Rex only watched with an obedient expression, void of any emotion as he watched Lord Sidious before him.
"Yes to what, my boy?"
"Yes, I want your knowledge."
"No knowledge of the Dark Side is worth turning back on the Jedi Order!", Obi-Wan vainly pleaded, even though he knew that Anakin couldn't hear him.
"Good. Good!"
"I want your power. I want the power to stop death."
"That power only my Master truly achieved, but together we will find it. The Force is strong with you, my boy. You can do anything."
"The Jedi betrayed you," Anakin said. "The Jedi betrayed both of us."
"You were used by him, Anakin", Plo Koon spoke in a grim tone. "All of us were..."
"As you say. Are you ready?"
"He's not ready nor he will ever be ready to serve you!", Master Fisto shouted at Sidious in the screen in anger.
"I am," he said, and meant it. "I give myself to you. I pledge myself to the ways of the Sith. Take me as your apprentice. Teach me. Lead me. Be my Master."
"Master...please..." Ahsoka begged, anguish surging through her.
Sidious raised the hood of his robe and draped it to shadow the ruin of his face.
"Kneel before me, Anakin Skywalker."
Anakin dropped to one knee. He lowered his head.
"Anakin...", Obi-Wan uttered, feeling helpless like he had when he saw the lives of Qui Gon and Satine fade before him. They were gone but he still have his brother, and he wasn't ready to lose him either.
"It is your will to join your destiny forever with the Order of the Sith Lords?"
There was no hesitation. "Yes."
Darth Sidious laid a pale hand on Anakin's brow. "Then it is done. You are now one with the Order of the Dark Lords of the Sith. From this day forward, the truth of you, my apprentice, now and forevermore, will be Darth..."
A pause; a questioning in the Force— An answer, dark as the gap between galaxies— He heard Sidious say it: his new name.
Vader.
A pair of syllables that meant him.
Vader, he said to himself. Vader.
"Thank you... my Master."
And just like that, they witnessed the downfall of Anakin Skywalker, the Jedi Knight. And the rise of Darth Vader, the Sith Lord. And none of them could comprehend on how Palpatine's machinations have got them this far. Padme's eyes were on the verge of tears upon seeing her husband's deeds, but the question is why does she need to be saved? She did not have any illnesses to begin with, and she could easily access the Republic's finest medical equipment in that case.
"No...",
Everyone heard Anakin's wail as he sat down, covering his face with both hands in both shame, anger, grief and denial to himself with Padme and Ahsoka trying what they could to console him. The errors of their judgement came crashing down upon them, how they hoped Anakin would help the Jedi through his political connections through Palpatine, and it has only led him to a spot that the Sith Lord managed to lay down carefully and executed it in the right spot.
"Master...", Anakin spoke to Obi-Wan almost in a whispered tone, almost ashamed to address him by that title, after witnessing himself willingly abandoning both the life and family that he ever knew. "What happened to me...what was I thinking...why have I done this?"
"Anakin...", Obi-Wan tried to speak as reasonable as he could, but the conflict within his apprentice made him realize that he needed answers, now. "There is much that you have to know...about you and the Chancellor"
Before Obi-Wan could continue, a familiar pair of holograms re-appeared merged from the holovid, with the female figure stepping over to address them. "If you wish to proceed as to what lies before you, it is imperative that you follow our instructions. It would concern both the Jedi and the Grand Army of the Republic"
Rex's eyes widened, not liking where this is going. "Us? But why?", he spoke out loud, being the only Clone present in the Council Chambers. Immediately, the thought for Clone Commanders Cody, Wolfe, Gree, Bacara, Grey and many others were on the minds of the Council members who had fought alongside with them for so long, and they were immediately worried as to what happened to the Clones that they cared for, when no one else could.
The male hologram stepped forward. "Because if you don't...all that you have learned here will come to waste"
Spectre: You know where I'm going next after this...hope the Jedi do have therapy sessions as well as some pills and drink for that!