Star Wars: Balance of the Force (Anakin Skywalker Redemption)

16 - New Perspectives

I'm coming...

Leia awoke with a start, the strange touch she'd just felt so...strange.

Luke stirred beside her, blinking the sleep from his eyes as he frowned at her. She heard the question clearly, Did you feel that?

She nodded.

Obi-Wan?

It didn't feel like him, she shook her head.

They sat in silence for a moment, though she knew exactly what Luke was thinking.

'He's dead,' she whispered, though she heard the hollowness to it.

Luke raised his brows, 'Since when have you believed that?'

It was their little secret, the one they had never told their mother, nor any of the Jedi. Leia was smart enough to know now that no one would believe them even if they shared their theory, but something about it was...personal. It was her secret, and Luke's.

Anakin Skywalker...their father was gone, she knew that. But dead? No, that had never felt right. She had always wondered if there was a fate worse than death. Perhaps that was why everyone grieved him so much. But as they got older, Leia began to realise that everyone truly thought he had died.

So, she and Luke had continued with the ruse, unsure themselves of what had become of Anakin, and with no way of learning about him themselves.

Their mother had only just started talking about him, and Obi-Wan did so with such a strained voice they often left it alone. Ahsoka was rarely better, her stories sounding mechanical and vague, as she tried to avoid feeling any of the emotions that she associated with them. Leia saw through their coping strategies, to the pain beneath.

This brush from the Force was something unique though. Leia had wanted it to be Anakin, promising to find them at last, but it was not him. Or at least, not quite. It was familiar yet different, like the feeling she had got in the temple on Tatooine, though not quite as angry.

'If it was him,' Luke sighed, flopping back down onto the bed and tugging the blankets around him, 'I'd like to know where he's been all these years.'

Leia tugged the blankets back, laying down as well, 'Maybe he was captured by the Empire and tortured or experimented on. You remember those reports we found.' Stole, more like, but Leia didn't need to explain to her brother. It had been his idea after all.

'Maybe,' Luke frowned, considering it. 'Or maybe he was encased in carbonite and kept on display in the Emperor's throne room.' Leia shivered, thinking of another rumour they had heard about.

They had to think that such horrible things might have happened to him, because there was no way he would have abandoned them. No, the incredible Jedi Knight Anakin Skywalker would not have rested until he had returned to them.

'It wasn't him,' Leia sighed after a moment, making her decision.

'How can you be sure?' Luke asked, suddenly the skeptical one.

She shrugged, 'I'm not. But it didn't feel like...like Anakin. It felt...grey somehow. Lost. Like a shadow.'

Luke thought for a moment, 'So why did it reach out to us?'

'I don't know.' It was a strange feeling, and an even stranger thing to consider. What in the galaxy would know about the two of them? And more importantly, why was it coming for them?

***

Luke did his best to keep his thoughts as far away from the memory of the Force reaching out to them. If he did think about it, Leia would think about it, and then they'd both start arguing again about what it was and what to do about it.