morally_cryptic | [for fulcra, an AU]

[for fulcra, an AU]

Padme had tried to dissuade him from this and of course she'd made plenty of good points.

You saw the report too, she was reported dead on Mandalore.

Which was true but then...he's seen the report that went out reporting his death in the Jedi Temple so really, how much stock can he really put into that?

They're hunting Jedi still, Anakin and you know Palpatine is hunting you specifically.

Maybe, but Anakin was determined not to live his life in fear of the old man. Not after all of the lies. Not after what he had done and what Anakin had done for him. Let them catch him, he thought a little recklessly, and when they brought him before Palpatine he'd do what he should have done that night in Palpatine's office.

There'd been other arguments given as she tried to convince him not to go on this hunt for someone who was likely dead with no other evidence that Ahsoka was alive save Anakin's conviction that if she weren't, he would know it...feel it in the Force somehow. The only thing Padme hadn't tried was what might be termed the nuclear option: using their children as motivation for him to not leave them.

She might have won the argument with that, at least for the time being, but he would have been hard pressed to forgive her for it.

And so she let him go after extracting from him a promise to send her frequent updates as to his progress...which was really just a way of saying she wanted to not have to worry whether he was lying dead somewhere or captured and being taken to the Emperor.

Privately, Padme wondered if Anakin's determination to track down Ahsoka had as much to do with attempting to assuage his guilt for what had happened in the Jedi Temple as to assuring himself that she was safe.

For Anakin it took a few weeks of chasing vague feelings from the Force and rumors of a Togruta female seen carrying lightsabers (one of those rumors had led him on completely the wrong track and he'd wasted days only to find a Twi'lek trader with stolen lightsabers...suffice to say that trader was no longer in possession of them). Eventually, his path took him to Takodana and Maz Kanata's castle. This tip was supposedly actually good. It had come from Padme, of all people, and though she hadn't said as much in her message he was pretty certain she'd actually gotten it from Organa.

It feels right, too, he thinks as he lands even if he's not getting any more specific feelings about it. For now he'll take it.

When he enters the castle and finds his way to a table, no one gives him much of a second glance...which is just fine by him. The average person who might have known what Anakin Skywalker looked like would be expecting someone with longer hair, Jedi robes, and a prosthetic arm covered with a heavy glove. This Anakin Skywalker has cut his hair, taken up dressing in well-worn spacer gear, and he'd finally gone the route of having his arm covered in synthflesh so to look at him one would never know he'd lost it in the first place. Also, it appears he's got a blaster on his hip instead of a lightsaber.

Sighing, Anakin orders a drink and settles in to wait. The tip hadn't said when she'd be there, just that it was likely to be "soon".

He really hates waiting.

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"Yeah, maybe if you wanted to raise your family to be smugglers," Ahsoka quips lightly, a hypothetical situation. Even if Anakin did have kids at some point, she was the last person allowed to call anyone out on being a pilot of questionable legality these days.

Anakin wrinkles his nose, "well, smuggler is more likely now than Jedi."

Though he's fairly certain even if there still was an Order, he wouldn't have allowed it to take his children. He'd always sort of thought in the back of his mind he might have left it, himself, once the war was over. Then he has to remind himself that that's basically exactly what he did do...in just about as explosive fashion as possible.

"But I doubt Padme would care for that."

"Probably not." Better not to comment on the Jedi business. They're both far away from that now.

Ahsoka leans forward, her smile less forced as she asks, "How is she, anyway?"

Of course he'd never been able to entirely hide how he felt about Padme, particularly from those closest to him but there's a far more blatant warmth that colors his presence in the Force as the subject shifts to her. So what he feels for her feels more like a small supernova now compared to barely-controlled wildfire of before.

Or something like that, anyway.

"She's doing well," he smiles, "she thought I was crazy to be doing this. At first. She'll be glad to know you're safe, too." Anakin cocks his head to the side, studying her for a moment, "you should come visit."

There's a second where she almost agrees out of happy, relieved instinct. Then there's a second of insecurity and paranoia. And then- "We'll see how things play out."

Because what if two Force users in the same place puts Padme in unnecessary danger? What if there's some reason that Bail hasn't recruited her into his blossoming rebellion yet? How many things could possibly go wrong?

"But I'm really glad to know you're both alright. I... feared the worst."

Anakin can't quite help the stung look that crosses his face, even if some pragmatic part of him could agree with her reasoning. He hasn't spent this long keeping his family safe for nothing.

That does not mean, however, that he doesn't still want her to see them. All of them. They'll just have to be careful in how they manage it.

So he straightens out his expression and nods. "It was..." Anakin's gaze goes distant a moment, as if he's gone somewhere else before he focuses on her again and smiling crookedly to cover the lapse, "....it was a close thing."

"I can imagine," she replies softly and honestly. On Mandalore, once she knew that Rex could get away and take care of himself, she'd only had herself to worry about. Padme was as capable as politicians came, but if she and Anakin had been in different places on Coruscant when the chaos broke it, it couldn't have been easy.

"You didn't feel-" It didn't feel the same, Ahsoka wants to say of their connection, the one weathered by Barriss's betrayal and Ahsoka's decision to leave the Order, but one she'd still been able to feel when she'd left for the mission on Mandalore. She shakes her head, allowing herself a moment of being the uncertain young student she was to him not too long ago while she sorts out her words. "I couldn't reach out to you. And maybe it was safer that way, but I didn't think you were still alive, Anakin. I thought you were gone."

"I-" he hesitates over what to say next but he doesn't want to lie to her. "I kind of was. For a while."

In some ways he always will be. He may have walked away from Palpatine and turned away from what he'd been headed for but it had still followed him. There's a darkness trailing in his wake now greater than anything she might have sensed from him during the war even that when he'd wanted nothing more than to murder the man called Rako Hardeen for Obi-Wan's 'death'.

Slowly, he adds, "The- Palpatine wanted me to help him." And of course she knows how close Anakin had been to the former Chancellor.

That explains a lot, Ahsoka realizes with a little pang of heartache. It's why he had felt further from her than ever before, why there's this feeling about him that she had been attributing to the general bleakness of the contemporary galaxy.

"That couldn't have been easy," she says, but doesn't clarify if she's talking about Palpatine asking him or him walking away. "But I'm glad that you didn't, for what it's worth."

"No," he shakes his head, dreading what's likely to come next but unable to stop himself. "You don't understand. I was there in his office when Master Windu confronted him. I stopped him from killing Palpatine. I did some terrible things that night, Ahsoka."

"You... What?" It doesn't feel like Anakin is lying, but those words don't sound like they could be true, either. She stares at him a moment, face scrunched in confusion as she tries to reach out to him with the Force, leaning on the bond forged through training together for so long.

"Why?"

He's trying to hold some of it in, not just blast her with his guilt and regret but that doesn't mean it isn't leaking out around the edges. He's definitely not lying.

"I. Helped him. I wanted to believe the things he told me, I-..." Anakin shakes his head, "it doesn't matter. I was fool and I lied to myself as much as he lied to me." He doesn't meet her eyes, looking somewhere over her shoulder instead, "people think I died defending the Temple but the truth is that I was the one that led the attack."

Ahsoka doesn't mean to freeze up like this. She just... sort of does, that stark stillness of a predator that seems unnatural among humans. But she doesn't know what to say, doesn't even know what to think here. She doesn't want to believe that, even as she knows that she has to.

"But the Temple was a place of peace, I- Anakin," she breathes out finally, shaking her head, gaze dropping to the table. "I can't believe... What did he say to you? What made you do that?"

Flexing his right hand open and shut a few times down by his side, Anakin sighs. "It's hard to explain. It all just feels like making excuses, now. But you don't known what it was like then, Ahsoka." He'd done a good job on Mandalore, he'd thought, at covering up just how exhausted he was.

"The Battle of Coruscant...we saved the Chancellor," we being him and Obi-Wan, of course. "I defeated Dooku." Killed an unarmed old man. "The war was basically over." Sure there was Grievous and the Separatist council but without Dooku managing things they were easy enough to deal with. "And Padme told she was pregnant. That we were going to have a child." He looks up at Ahsoka, raw emotion clear in his gaze when he speaks of his family. She knows just how far he's gone in the past for those he cares about. Including her.

"It was...a blessing I never thought to ask for. Never thought I'd be allowed to have. But then everything started falling apart. The Council wanted me to spy on Palpatine. Palpatine wanted me to inform on the Council." And trying to dividing Anakin's loyalties would have been difficult at the best of times which this clearly wasn't. "I was having visions of Padme dying horribly in childbirth. Palpatine was the only one that suggested any sort of actual solution." Which implied he'd tried to seek guidance from someone in the Jedi and come away not hearing what he'd wanted to. Certainly she knows the Jedi would've spoken of the will of the Force and celebrating those who become one with it.

"Palpatine told me he was the Sith lord. He told me how I could find the power to save Padme through the Dark Side. How we could bring peace and order to the galaxy. I didn't kneel to him then. I told Mace Windu. I thought we'd...I don't know. That we'd go together to arrest him, bring him to justice. Windu told me that if what I was telling him was true I would have finally won his trust." Bitterness coils around Anakin even now, thick and ugly and never properly purged. It takes him a moment to shove it back down again. "He took several Masters and they went to kill him, not arrest him. I ended up following but by the time I got there Mace was the only one still alive. He had Palpatine on the floor and was ready to kill him. We argued. I stopped him. Palpatine threw him out the window but it might as well have been me. And that's when I realized I'd chosen what the Sith offered over the Jedi." When he'd thought there was no other choice left to him and that that one step was enough that he couldn't turn back from it.

His tone is bleak, "that's what happened. If you want to leave I won't stop you."

She listens in silence, trying to settle the uncomfortable - hurt, confused, mad, worried - inside her in order to focus on the feeling of Anakin in the Force. Or whatever he isn't feeling. If they're both overwhelmed, it won't help anything. But by the time he finishes, she's not sure what will help anything at this point.

"I... guess I always knew you would do anything to save Padme. To save your family," Ahsoka says eventually, frowning but unsure. "But it was after that, after you let the Chancellor kill Master Windu, that you went back to the Temple?"

"Yes," he says. "With a legion of clones." She probably doesn't have to ask which legion. The 501st likely would have followed Anakin into hell and back, even without the chips.

"I'll never be able to make up for what I did there. Even if I destroy Palpatine and his Empire."

Their men storming the Jedi Temple, killing innocent Jedi, killing younglings, because they were following Anakin and Rex never had gotten everyone's chips out. She feels her jaw tense, trying to keep herself from being sick, and it's a moment before she shakes her head, leaning forward to rest her arms on the table between them.

"No, you won't be able to make up for it. But the very least you can do is join the Rebellion." If she sounds a little like a recruiter right now, it's because that's the only way to keep the hurt and disappointment to a minimum. "You owe it to the Jedi you killed to do that. You owe it to our men, too."

Anakin shakes his head, leaning back from her a little.

"No. I told you about Padme. The twins...I have to keep them safe."

He can't do that and fight a rebellion at the same time.

Twins. She wants to meet them, that's the first thought that crosses her mind, but she knows better. She has goals, things that she owes to the rebellion and to the people it's trying to protect.

"Anakin, you can't just turn your back on the galaxy," Ahsoka says, tone insistent. She hadn't intended to bring up her role in the new Rebel Alliance quite so quickly, but it's necessary here. "The rebellion could benefit so much from your skills, from your experiences. We need you."

"Did you miss the part where I already turned my back on the galaxy and was also responsible for the downfall of the Jedi Order?" He's snapping it but hey, the guilt is strong with this one. After all, it's technically Palpatine who's responsible for the Order's downfall. Anakin was just a tool.

A very effective tool right up until he decided not to complete the mission he'd been sent on even if it was really too little too late.

And Ahsoka really isn't tell him something he hasn't already thought about himself. He's not made for sitting back and hoping other people 'fix' things. Especially when they're messes he helped to create. It's mostly been his need to keep his family safe and a certain fear that if he gets into the mix again he'll just make things worse. Who's to say what would happen if Palpatine got hold of him again?

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[for fulcra, an AU]

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uggggh, been doing a lot of night shifts sorry

no worries!

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that icon's keyword....i lol'd