ladykf | Entries tagged with anakin skywalker

This is along a similar premise to my "Two of a Kind" ficlet, where Revan meets Anakin. Again, using my headcanons for Revan. [Tumblr post here]

“Don’t do it.”

The voice stopped him cold, as sure as the young Jedi had been that no one was there. Paying better attention, however, Anakin was suddenly aware of a presence. Looking that way didn’t show him anyone, but he felt power. Power, even, because this was beyond even his own blossoming abilities. “Who’s there?”

There was a sudden brightness, before a shimmering blue figure was present. Small, dressed in flowing robes with a hood and a mask even beyond that. Something about it tickled his memory, but the figure removed it to regard him somberly. “While I wouldn’t say I’m the poster child for obeying the Jedi Order, going to the Dark Side isn’t going to help you. The Dark consumes, corrodes, and eventually destroys everything in its path. It is a ravenous power, and takes no care for your goals.”

She heard. How this being heard his conversation with the Chancellor, Anakin didn’t know. But he wasn’t going to be ordered around. “Why should I listen to you? The Chancellor is my friend, I don’t even know you.”

“Most people don’t, these days. The tales of Revan aren’t ones people would have passed on to younglings, particularly after the Reformation.” The woman - without the mask he could make it out - looked thoughtful, gazing at nothing he could see before looking back to him. “Who do you want to save so badly you’ll give up on everything you’ve been taught, and everyone else?”

Anakin paled, jaw tightening. “I don’t have to tell you-”

“Someone you love, clearly,” she interrupted, smile surprisingly gentle. “There was a man I knew once who said that what Jedi needed was to be taught to control their passions. Passion leads to the dark side. Love and passion aren’t the same thing at all. Love, he said, will save you. And he was so very right.”

Mouth suddenly dry, Anakin swallowed uselessly as he stared at her. “Who are you, and why are you here?”

“I imagine I’m here because like draws to like, and you’re a lot like me,” she sighed, putting her hood down and walking towards the window. “Coruscant has changed in so many ways, and stayed the same in so many more… it’s been over three thousand years since I walked this planet alive.”

“Force ghost.” It clicked immediately, part of the puzzle coming together. “My… energy… drew you?”

“Maybe. Or the Force trying to be a little more… self preserving, perhaps.” She shrugged, not seeming overly concerned. “It was a surprise, I admit. Of all the places to draw me, Coruscant was not what I expected. Neither were you, though. I can read some things, of course, but I’d rather just be straight. Name for a name?”

Was there any reason at all not to? “Anakin Skywalker.”

“Riayn,” she smiled warmly, if a little wry, “Revan might be better known, though if they call me knight or darth depends on the council’s view at the time. I was both, then neither.”

Anakin stared in shock. “You can’t be both.”

“I didn’t say at the same time,” she pointed out. “I was a knight, then a darth, then… well, it was complicated. Again, not a story they tell around the creche or to impressionable padawans, I’m sure. But as I said, I’m not the poster child for… anything Jedi. I could never be, not after everything… I’m not Sith, not Jedi. Gray, perhaps, like the Force itself. I’ve done both, and I won’t follow either.”

Anakin frowned, glancing at her. “You have a lightsaber.”

“Two, actually.” Revan shrugged, brushing her robe aside. “They’re mine, crafted by my own hand away from any temple or enclave, on a ship I stole from an Exchange crime boss on the way to save the galaxy. It’s a long story.”

Anakin found himself smiling a little bit. “I think I could use some stories. Perspective. You… you said you’ve been Jedi. And Sith. And… nothing?”

“I’ve never been nothing - I’ve always been me, whatever that was at the time. Even when people tried to make me something else.” There was an intensity in her words that promised a story that Anakin suddenly needed to hear.

“Tell me.”

Revan smiled, a little crooked but something understanding there. “They called it the Jedi Civil War…"

I really, really want to eventually write a whole piece where Revan and Anakin meet, because that has some serious potential. A lightside!Revan is exactly the kind of influence Anakin could have desperately benefitted from in the prequels. Someone who would understand him. And someone who could tell him how to walk a middle path no one had ever told him was an option. [Tumblr post here]

She was dead. His mother was dead and for the life that was taken, he took all of theirs. The men with their masks and howls and gaffi sticks, and their women and the children who would grow up into the same savages. He killed them all but it didn’t bring her back. He was too late for that, and not strong enough.

It was never enough. He should have come sooner, he should have been able to save her, his mother who had given him so much and the dreams had warned him but he let her die -

“It wasn’t enough, was it?”

Anakin whirled, blue lightsaber hiss-snapping as it came to life in the dark, his eyes seeking out the voice. There was a person there, in the shadows, dimly lit blue. The voice was female, the person tall and robed. He couldn’t make out more. A mask, maybe. A hood. At the waist, by her belt… a lightsaber?

“Who are you? How did you get here? Did the Council send you?” Emotions still running high, he took a step forward, ‘saber raised, only to falter. It wasn’t the light of his blade that had made the glimmer of blue - the entire figure before him was, like the hologram of a comm but full sized and almost solid enough to touch.

The woman laughed softly, but somehow he knew it wasn’t at him. “I haven’t answered to the Council in a very long time. Not even when I was alive.”

Understanding dawned, and he lowered his blade. It wouldn’t help him here, not now. “You’re a Force Ghost.”

“I am,” she agreed. “It’s been a very long time since there was a power strong enough to draw me. You’re not like the others. Perhaps that’s why.”

Anakin flinched a little, all too aware of the bodies, still warm so newly dead. Dead at his hand. “I am a Jedi.”

“Maybe.”

“I’m not a Sith!” He remembered Naboo, the Zabrak who had cut down Master Qui-Gon, the first person to ever believe in him, the one to set him free…

“You say that like there’s nothing but one or the other.” Her tone was so mild that it stopped the new surge of anger in its tracks.

Anakin stared at the apparition, confused and conflicted. “There isn’t.”

“The Force is light and dark - there has to be something that’s not just one or the other.” Gods, but she sounded so reasonable. It was nothing he’d ever heard before.

And in that moment, maybe it was exactly what he needed to hear. “The Jedi serve the Force.”

“The Jedi serve the light, and shun the dark - a whole half of the Force.”

“The Sith serve the dark and shun the light,” he countered. But that was what she’d said, wasn’t it? That was just half. They didn’t serve the Force either, not really. “I don’t understand.”

“That’s nice to hear someone say.” She walked towards the fire, weaving between the bodies even though he couldn’t imagine that she’d really be able to touch. “You know, the masters even in my time were loathe to say that.”

“Mine too,” he breathed, not even noticing when he lowered his lightsaber. Not turning it off, not yet. But he didn’t feel like he was in danger. Listening to her almost felt like the first time he’d traveled through space, really seeing that the galaxy was so much bigger than the world he’d known. “And they don’t listen. They think they know better and they don’t. They’re the ignorant ones!”

“There is no ignorance, there is knowledge,” she quoted softly. “That is a very ignorant thing to say. Ignorant and arrogant.”

“It is,” he agreed, stepping closer. What she was saying… it was putting all the things he’d been so conflicted about into words. “Who are you? What are you?”

“I am neither Jedi nor Sith, though I’ve been both. I traveled the galaxy and learned so much, and not all of it was true. Ferreting out truth from the lies was… difficult. And people I should have been able to trust were not always so, even though they did think they were doing the right thing.” She turned to face him, removing the mask and spending a moment looking at it. “I am Revan. And I think you and I have a lot to talk about.”

There was a gif set on Tumblr of that painful moment on Mustafar, where Anakin is dying, screaming about how he hates Obi-Wan, and Obi-Wan says he loves him like a brother. This was my response to it. [Tumblr post here]

The most painful thing to me, in that entire gif set, is how Obi-Wan says “You were my brother, Anakin. I loved you.”

I’ve commented before, can’t recall if it was here or not, but I think it always needs remarked on that the implication - that past tense here means the feeling is gone - is a lie. In that moment, even as Obi-Wan knows he has to walk away, even as Anakin is losing himself to the darkness and screaming that he hates him, Obi-Wan still loves him.

He hates what he’s done. He hates that he’s fallen. He hates that he feels like the Jedi - he - failed him. He hates that he’s losing his brother. And all he can do in that moment, as choked as he is by circumstances and the rigid, unforgiving Jedi code that he was raised on, is tell him I loved you.

But he still loves him, there is anguish there, because he still loves him. And in time - in DECADES - he will be an old man on Tatooine who says Darth Vader killed Anakin Skywalker. And it’s true, from a point of view - the point of view of a young Jedi, too soon a knight, far too soon a Master, who watched his little brother fall beyond his grasp. Who watched for all that time, desperate for some hint of the young man he knew and loved. And, unable to find it and just as unable to ever hate Anakin, he divorced the two in his mind.

He can hate Vader, he can hate the faceless monstrosity that he sees on the galactic feeds - and he does, don’t let the “Jedi serenity” fool you, Obi-Wan has always been passionate, merely a controlled passion - he can wish Vader gone and eventually send Luke on a path to kill him.

Because Anakin is dead. Anakin has to be dead, he has to be dead and it’s Vader now, and they don’t teach you how to deal with that in the Temple in Obi-Wan’s time. That was part of the problem, but that’s a rant for another day. In the end, the point of view is Obi-Wan’s, the Obi-Wan you see there on Mustafar with so much pain thick in his voice, and heartbreak in his eyes. Anakin is dead, preserving who he had been - who he could have been - a man with so much passion and skill and intelligence and promise, a man about to be a father, a man who was misguided and exemplifies the phrase “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

A man Obi-Wan loved - and never stopped loving. No matter what he implies, in the end, he never actually says otherwise. If it’s past tense, it’s because of the view that Vader killed Anakin, and Anakin is dead.

I think that’s quite possibly the most painful part of that scene, for me.