What Could Have Been Part III: The Destined Warriors

Out of His Hands

      Anakin

      "Anakin! Anakin wake up!"

      Huh? Where am I? The blurry figures standing over Anakin swayed in and out of focus. Daylight blinded him, adding to his confusion as the Jedi tried to piece together what had happened. The ship. Captain Fett. Padme. And then the escape pod. Before he could detach his pod from the ship that was about to literally go down in flames, the glorious spacecraft combusted. It was lucky that his tiny escape vessel crashed on Onderon in one piece and a miracle that Anakin had survived.

       With the chain of events flooding back into his brain, Anakin couldn't manage to work out what was happening around him. Bodies kept hovering around him and would occasionally press a finger to his wrist or upper neck. There was one figure that stayed next to him though. One with small, gentle hands and a soft yet distressed voice. The kind of voice that once you hear it, you want to hear over and over again. You hear it in your dreams and in the birds singing and in just about every beautiful thing, you hear it. Even when Anakin realized who the voice was, the sweet sound of her words only lulled him into a sleepy trance that he welcomed with a smile across his face.

      And then the voice started yelling.

      "Anakin Skywalker, I know you can hear me!" his wife finally shouted and Anakin eased into consciousness the way one would awaken from a lucid dream. The smile on his face widened so that it stretched his cheeks all the way to his ears. "Am I in heaven?" he asked lazily. Padme pressed a palm to the side of his face where his grin was still lingering. She shook his head. "You gave it your best shot, though." Anakin saw his wife's distraught features ease back into a concerned expression. Her still-nervous hands kept brushing back his hair from his face as he chuckled to himself.

      "Then why did I wake up to the face of an angel?"

     Whatever stress inside of Padme finally shattered as tears of relief rolled out from her almond brown eyes. She wrapped her arms around Anakin's neck and hugged him for what felt like only a second but really lasted much longer and this, Anakin decided, was better than an early ticket to the heavens.

      "General, I-"

      The next figure that joined the Skywalker couple was Rex and Anakin immediately sensed his urgency to speak to him. He sat up and felt his throb a little. "Rex." He felt his breath catch for a second. "Where's Luke?" The fact that his son wasn't with the captain told Anakin that something was definitely wrong. Padme set her hand on Anakin's shoulder. "What do you mean? Luke's here isn't he?" she asked her husband before turning to Rex. "Isn't he?"

       Rex was slow to speak again and the time between Padme's question and his answer felt like a wide cavern that Anakin was balancing on the edge of. The air around him felt heavy, the way it did before monsoon season on Naboo or before a rainstorm on Kamino or Arkanis. Before he knew, Anakin was filling his brain with every memory he had of rain, from his first storm while on Coruscant when he held onto Obi-wan's cloak because he had never seen rain and he couldn't understand what was making all the clouds cry, to the morning showers he watched from the balcony on Naboo with Padme back when their marriage was a secret and the time when he kissed her goodbye before leaving for a four month campaign and once the rain started, he couldn't tell the difference between the rain and the tears. All of these memories, Anakin forced himself to think of so as not to fall into the cavern of space between questions and Rex telling him the Luke had gone missing after a scouting mission and all that the had found was his wrecked speeder.

      Now, the cavern seemed to be filling with water as Padme cried into Anakin's cloak. The aged Jedi, however, sat quietly for a moment. He didn't know if he had simply run out of tears of loss to cry. If he had used them all up after losing people ever since he was nine and his last tears had already fallen and now there was no more pain left to be felt for his precious son, or maybe because he didn't quiet believe it to be true. Perhaps it was denial, but that had never really been Anakin's way of escaping pain. No, Luke was alive. His son was alive and he was here on this planet still.

       Despite this realization, Anakin remained frozen because his son was alive...

       And in pain.

       And this was much worse than being dead.

       Oh Force, this is out of my control. If there's anything that can be done, please don't put my son through that kind of torture...

       Dang I didn't mean for this chapter to end so depressing like but I can't waste time with Anakin cause I gotta get dis thing done and we still got the final battle stuff to get into and that's all I can say for now soooooo.... yeah peace out!