Healing Hurts (Anakin Skywalker)

Prologue

Anakin Skywalker was never alone.

How could he be? She was always there.

She had always been there, of course. Well, maybe she wasn't there beside him, but she was there in the sense that he could always feel her. He knew when she was smiling or laughing, filling him with a warmth he'd come to hate from the twin suns, but adored from her. Each time Anakin's chest swelled with warmth, he knew that she was happy. Similarly, he felt a sharp coldness overcome him and knew that something was wrong with her. He couldn't explain why, but he just knew what those strange sensations meant, even if they were planets apart.

He never told his mother that part. That was for him to know - only him.

Over time, the visions of the girl were what got him through the long, miserably hot days on the desert planet. When he fell and scraped his knee, when he fought with the other children nearby, or when he was punished by his master... she was there, just waiting for him to make it home for the end of the day to see her in his dreams. And somehow just that thought filled him with enough courage to continue on with his day - to do what needed to be done.

But it wasn't just her presence that he knew and cherished so deeply. It was her appearance and her voice that brought him the most joy.

Most nights when Anakin laid his head upon his thin pillow and went to sleep, he saw her. She was like an angel, he thought. Always smiling, always laughing. She seemed so happy and carefree, and Anakin couldn't help but marvel at her kindness and positivity. He watched as she drew pictures, or colored on the walls instead of her coloring book. He watched entranced as she danced around her bedroom in her poofy pink skirt and a crown, declaring to all of her stuffed animals that she was the princess and that she could do anything she wanted to.

He saw her family vacations and camping trips, and watched the light in her eyes when she went stargazing and witnessed the unpolluted beauty of the milky way galaxy for the first time. That was the happiest he had seen her - 6 years old with that telescope in her small hands, looking at the stars.

"I want to go there!" She'd cried. "Can we go there, daddy?"

"No, sweetheart. Only astronauts get to explore space in their big, poofy spacesuits!"

She was quiet for a moment, as if contemplating his words. Then she grinned wider than ever before and proudly announced to her family, "I'm going to be an ash-tro-not one day! I'll see space for REAL, then!"

Anakin didn't see the big deal. Space travel was the norm. It happened every day on Tatooine - ships coming and going, traveling between worlds. The only thing he wished was that he could travel to different planets, too. Him and his mother. And that is why he was so desperately trying to build a scanner - to find the chips that bound them to slavery and remove them. 

And on that day, Anakin's dream changed. Of course he still wanted to save himself and his mother from slavery - that would never change. But now? He wanted to travel, to explore all of the different planets in the galaxy and find the mysterious redheaded girl that he had grown to love from afar. He wanted to be free, like the girl in his dreams, to find her and prove to his mother that she was real, and not his imaginary friend like she had said.

And then he actually was freed.

And when Qui-gon Jinn saved him from a life of brutal slavery, Anakin Skywalker only knew two things for certain.

He was going to become a jedi, and he would return to free his mother as well.

He would find his angel girl, and he would finally show her the stars.