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“I liked Hell. I liked to go there alone, relieved to lie in the wreckage, ruined, physically undone. The worst had happened. What else could hurt me then? I thought it was the worst, thought nothing worse could come. Then nothing did, and no one.”
― Marie Howe, Magdalene
One of the babies is crying again. Anakin can’t tell which one. He’s not entirely sure it matters, anyway, because as soon as one starts the other does too. So the crying is never singular.
He thumps his head back against the wall of the refresher, where he’s been sitting on the floor for the past half hour, maybe? He’s lost track. He’d come in here to shower and then just wound up sitting on the floor and now the babies are crying again and he just wants to sleep except–
There’s a knock on the door, metal against metal, and Threepio’s worried voice asking, “Master Anakin, are you in there?”
Artoo trills something back at him that Anakin’s too tired to parse through.
“I know you said he went in and didn’t come back out but that was over an hour ago.” Threepio’s tone turns downright prissy as he says, “It’s polite to knock on the refresher door when it’s closed. Not that I would expect you to know that.”
Anakin raises a hand to slap against the panel and the door slides open, nearly sending Threepio stumbling inside.
“Oh!” Threepio says. “There you are, Master Anakin. I’ve been looking–”
Artoo beeps.
“–everywhere for you,” Threepio finishes. “Artoo has been helping,” he adds.
Anakin just stares up at him. He doesn’t point out that it’s a small ship, and that this is one of the only places to hide.
“The children are upset,” Threepio says.
“Yes,” Anakin says. “I can hear them.” It’s definitely both babies crying now, and it’s much louder with the door open.
“Neither child has soiled themselves,” Threepio goes on. “I’ve attempted to feed them but neither would accept a bottle. Oh, I’m truly at a loss as to why they are crying!”
Probably because I suck at this , Anakin thinks. He’s tempted to just close the door again, but forces himself to his feet, walking down the narrow hallway toward the cabin where the twins are. Threepio and Artoo trail after him, but don’t follow him inside.
One of the twins stops crying at the sight of him, staring up at him with watery blue eyes and a scrunched, red face. He’s not sure which one it is, if he’s being honest. They look too much alike, wrapped up in matching blankets. Same blue eyes and pale wisps of hair.
“Hey,” Anakin says.
The baby starts crying again.
“No, no. C’mon,” he reaches for the baby, lifting them up to his shoulder and cradling them in the crook of his mechanical arm, then scoops up the other one. It’s impossible to pat them both on the back at the same time, so he tries pacing around a bit.
The only thing that seems to have changed is that now they’re screaming directly into his ears, instead of from down the hall. He keeps pacing, back and forth, from one end of the tiny cabin to the other. It’s not helping. If anything, it’s making things worse. Now instead of just being able to hear them cry, he can feel it, both in the way that their tiny bodies are shaking against his chest and the way they’re both reaching out in the Force, emotions meshing together and battering against his own shields.
“Master Anakin,” Threepio says, still hovering in the doorway.
“What?” Anakin asks, making another turn.
“Might I suggest bouncing the children?”
Anakin stops, head swiveling to look at Threepio. He doesn’t have to ask what the fuck Threepio is talking about; Artoo does it for him.
Threepio seems to draw himself up as straight as he can. “I have conducted extensive research on the subject of human childrearing in anticipation of Mistress Padmé giving birth. Holding an infant and gently bouncing them in the parent’s arms is thought to be an excellent calming method.”
“Oh,” Anakin says. “I thought you meant… bouncing them on the floor or something.” He’s relatively certain you’re not supposed to do that with them.
“Of course not!” Threepio says.
“Right,” Anakin says. “Bouncing, okay.” He tries bobbing up and down a bit. One of the babies turns their head and practically howls directly into his ear. “C’mon,” he tells them. “Threepio says this works.” Then under his breath: “Please let this work.”
He’s not sure if the bouncing does work, or if they both just get too tired to keep crying, but eventually the screaming tapers off into exhausted hiccups and, finally, to sleep. Anakin’s still holding them, standing in the center of the cabin, and wonders if they’ll start again if he tries to set them down.
He tries the baby on his right first, and that one goes okay. The baby on the left opens their eyes again as he lays them down, and he whispers, “No no it’s alright. Don’t start crying again. Please.”
The baby stares back at him, nose scrunched up, as if to say that crying is an option, at any second.
Anakin holds a hand out towards it, and the baby reaches up to grasp hold of one of his fingers. Anakin winds up sitting cross-legged next to the bunk, letting the baby hold on, and watching as they slowly drift back off to sleep.
Asleep, the twins feel more like one presence in the Force than two. The way they’d felt before they were born, when he’d thought there was only one baby. They’re too young to dream, he thinks – though maybe Threepio, with all his new research, would know for sure – but he wonders if they’d share those as well.
He wonders, suddenly, if they’ve inherited his tendency toward dark nightmares and visions as well, and pulls his hand away from the baby’s grip.
The baby makes a small noise, arms moving, nearly smacking the other baby in the face, and Anakin freezes, watching them cautiously. They settle back down after just a minute, still asleep, and he waits another few before he risks getting to his feet and leaving the cabin.
He stops in the doorway of the main cabin, across the hall, and his hand hovering over the panel is enough to trigger the door to slide open. The lights flick on, and he’s confronted with the sight of the bed, still unmade.
He’s not sure how long he stands there before Artoo rolls up behind him and beeps, startling him.
“What?” Anakin asks.
Artoo beeps again, and tacks on a rude blat at the end.
Anakin steps away from the door to the cabin, waving a hand over the panel to close it again. “We’re taking the long way,” he tells Artoo. “We’ve got another five days before we get to Arkanis.” The long way involves flying from one ass end of the galaxy to the other and back again, but it’s all Anakin can think to do right now. And the only one around to call him out on flying around aimlessly is his droid, anyway.
Artoo does call him on it, complaining that they were just on Subterrel and Arkanis should only take one day to get to from there.
“If I need your help navigating, I’ll ask for it,” Anakin tells him.
“Your organic brain couldn’t calculate a decent flight path if it bit you on the ass,” Artoo says.
Anakin stalks away from him before he gives in to the urge to kick the little droid; he’ll only wind up with a hurt foot and Artoo laughing at him.
- - -
It’s after he’s changed the twins’ diapers the next day and started to dress them again that he stops, frowning. These clothes are from the med center on Subterrel and they’re a generic white. The blankets are white too. He should get them different clothes. Different colors.
“Hey Threepio,” he calls.
Threepio has been hovering non-stop, and was just outside the door. “Yes, Master Anakin?”
“Is there something we can mark them with?”
“Mark them, sir?” Threepio asks, sounding startled.
“Not permanently.”
“Sir?” Threepio manages to sound horrified, now.
“I said not permanently,” Anakin grouses. And then, because Threepio is a droid and there’s no one else he can say this to: “I can’t tell them apart.”
Artoo, ever helpful, beeps from the doorway to say, “All organics look alike.”
“We really don’t,” Anakin argues. It’s a weak argument because dressed in matching clothes the twins do look the same, which is the problem.
Artoo lets out a blat of disagreement.
“What did you have in mind?” Threepio asks.
Anakin looks down at the twins and racks his brain. Luke – he can tell it’s Luke because he just put their diapers on and he set Luke on the left and hasn’t moved them yet – is gnawing on his fingers. Leia is looking at Threepio. Or, at least, that’s what Anakin thinks she’s looking at. It’s hard to tell when her eyes don’t really focus.
“Maybe Padmé has something we could use,” he suggests, and it’s not until after he’s said it that he realizes he’s used the wrong tense.
It stops him for a second, a moment of complete non thought, like a malfunctioning droid, before he blinks and Threepio is saying, “I believe she kept some hair ribbons in her wardrobe on board.”
“Sure,” he manages.
He doesn’t move while Threepio is gone, staring at the wall and panicking because Padmé is gone and he couldn’t save her, even after everything he’d done he still hadn’t been able to do the one thing that mattered, and now he’s here on her ship, with the twins and the droids and the entire galaxy hunting for him because he’s a traitor to both sides now. There’s nowhere safe to go. Nowhere to take the twins. No one he can turn to because Padmé was everything and it’s all fucking gone.
Leia lets out a wail, and Anakin looks down at her, panic shifting abruptly. “C’mon not again.” He picks her up and bounces her, and after a sniffly hiccup she stops, forehead pressing against his shoulder and rubbing back and forth.
Anakin holds her for another minute, before gingerly lowering her a bit. “Now if you could just stop that fast every time.”
Leia just blinks back at him.
He can hear Threepio coming back, and turns towards the door. “I found these, Master Ani.” He holds up several ribbons in various colors.
Anakin’s not sure he’d ever actually seen Padmé use these. Her hairstyles had always been so elaborate though, he might have just missed it.
Anakin sets Leia back down – on the right, he notes – and takes the ribbons from Threepio, then spends a few minutes figuring out how to attach them to the twins. He finally ties a different color on their wrists – red on Luke, green on Leia – and hopes he can remember which is which.
He can’t.
- - -
Anakin should not be sitting at this bar.
It’s pouring down rain on Arkanis, which is apparently normal, and Anakin’s cloak is soaked through. He’d stepped under the overhang of the door just to get out of it for a minute, and then noticed they were selling food inside. He hasn’t eaten anything but the instant meals on the ship in over a week, and the scent of hot food had drawn him inside.
The drinks the bartender is pouring have kept him there.
He’s on his second drink already, and he can’t seem to stop watching the screen above the bar showing the HoloNews.
The Sector Governors have been restyled as Moffs, and now report to an Imperial Advisor, who reports up to the Emperor. Anakin watches footage of Palpatine welcoming a select group of the advisors into what looks like it might be his office. It’s been redecorated, the desk and chairs removed and replaced by an actual fucking throne, but the windows are the same. The glass has been replaced, Anakin notes, downing the rest of his drink.
There’s no mention of the destroyed med center on Subterral that Anakin had left in his wake, but this far away he hadn’t really expected there to be.
“Another?” the bartender asks.
“Sure,” Anakin says.
The bartender follows his gaze to the screen. “Wouldn’t worry about it too much, mate. It’s been a couple weeks and nothing here’s changed yet.”
Anakin stares at him. He wants, suddenly and with a visceral rage, to destroy this bar, this town, this entire planet, so that this man can experience the same devastation that Anakin has. Nothing’s changed. The entire galaxy has changed. Anakin was the one to wreck it. He could wreck this man’s life just as well as he’s wrecked his own.
Something must show on his face, because the bartender has backed up a step. “How about the Corellian whiskey?” he offers.
Anakin stands up, shoving away from the bar, and turns on his heel to leave.
“Hey! You gotta pay!”
Anakin turns back and waves a hand across the man’s eyesight. “I already paid.”
It works – Anakin wasn’t actually sure it would, he’s never been this upset while trying that before – and the bartender echoes him. He can hear Obi-Wan in the back of his head, tutting about inappropriate uses of the Force.
Obi-Wan is probably dead, like all the other Jedi Anakin killed.
Anakin steps back outside and flicks his hood back over his head. There’s a patrolian sitting on the stoop, outside the overhang, getting soaked by the rain. They look up at him, red eyes narrowed. “Death stick?” they ask. “Or ryll?”
“You just sell that in the middle of the street?” Anakin asks.
The patrolian shrugs. “Only if you’re buying.”
He buys two death sticks, for a rate that seems much more exorbitant than what they go for on Coruscant. He clearly needs some cheaper looking clothes, if dealers are charging him that much for cheap drugs. He takes a hit off one as he walks away, just enough that the crushing pressure of the Force, calling out to him to go back inside and kill that idiot still, is lessened to background noise. It probably only costs him a few months off his life.
Buying things is weird, he thinks, and not just because the high from the death stick is making all the colors in the shop sort of neon. Jedi don’t carry credits, typically. They had an account to draw from for anything they needed, but usually people just gave them things: food, shelter, ships or passage to where they needed to go. He hasn’t had to keep track of how much the things he’s picking up cost and compare it against how much he has on him since he was a child.
He finds clothes in a secondhand shop, grabbing some things for the twins as well, and then heads into another shop to stock up on more instant meals and ration bars for himself. They have formula and diapers for the twins too, though it takes him a while to figure out which ones are for newborn humans, and there’s also a large display of bottles and other various baby things, all for a variety of species.
He stares at the display, trying to figure out if the twins need any of this stuff. They’ve been okay for the past two weeks, and Threepio hadn’t mentioned anything missing from the stuff they’d gotten at the med center. The floating cradle would probably be useful though, even if he only uses it around the ship.
One section has a flashing ad with footage of a crying human infant being held by an adult who places something in the baby’s mouth, then the baby seems to stop crying, before the ad repeats. Anakin watches it for perhaps too long, before searching the shelves so he can buy two of them.
He’s feeling pretty on top of things that night. The high has worn off but the Force is still just… less. It’s better like this. He figures he has a couple more hours before it comes back in full. And he can tell the twins apart with the new clothes – Leia is wearing yellow and Luke is wearing blue. When they start crying, he’s able to stop them within five minutes of it starting up by sticking the new pacifiers into their mouths. They both look surprised, teary eyes wide and mouths working like they do at a bottle.
“There, see,” Anakin tells them. Or maybe tells Threepio, who is hovering at the door as usual. “That was easy.”
“Oh, well done, Master Ani,” Threepio says.
Then Luke spits out the pacifier and starts screaming again.
- - -
Anakin is lounging in the cockpit one afternoon, taking another hit of the death stick, as he stares out at hyperspace and contemplates the ship.
He needs to sell it.
Or scrap it, honestly. It’s too recognizable. It’s a one of a kind ship, produced only for the Royal House of Naboo, and loaned to Padmé as senator. Even selling it on some backwater in the Outer Rim will make its way back to Palpatine. He’s already left a trail by holding onto it this long, but there’d been no time, before, as they just kept flying, only dropping out of hyperspace long enough to calculate another jump, and then he’d been more concerned about finding a secluded med center, about getting away from Subterrel quickly after he razed half that med center to the ground, about finding food and supplies and just making it through the day.
But it’s Padmé’s ship. Her clothes are still in the wardrobe and her shoes are still where she left them on the floor, complaining that her feet were swollen, and those fizzy drinks she’d liked are still in the cooler. Just thinking about getting rid of it feels like getting rid of the last piece of her that he has. He needs the ship, he thinks. He needs her things. He has nothing of his mother’s and he regrets that all the time. Sometimes he’s not sure if he’s remembering her face correctly, or how she’d worn her hair, or the sound of her voice. It’s just been so long. And one day it will have been years since he last heard Padmé speak, and he’ll have forgotten her voice as well.
He can remember it right now, but in his head she just sounds sad and frantic as she pleads with him. To run away from everything with her. To take care of the twins.
It’s that last one that hurts the most, he thinks. Mostly because it’s an invention of his own mind, and not reality. Oh, she’d talked to him, at one point, about how they were going to have to do whatever it took to protect the baby, made him promise. But it had still been the baby then, not the twins.
In reality, he’d been standing at her bedside, holding both newborns, and thinking for the first time that it was going to be alright because this looked nothing like his dream. Padmé wasn’t sobbing or crying out for him, she was smiling, exhausted but smiling, one hand on Luke’s head, and then her eyes had rolled back and she’d started seizing. And there hadn’t been anything he could do to save her then. The Force had been utterly useless.
The cockpit lift door slides open some time later, after the drugs have turned the standard blue of hyperspace into a swirl of neon color and Anakin can’t feel the Force presence of the twins anymore – a sign that he’s taken too much, probably – and Threepio steps inside.
“Master Anakin?”
Anakin doesn’t respond, and Threepio steps closer, one hand raised, saying his name again. Finally, Anakin says, “Yeah?”
“The children are awake, sir.”
“So?” Anakin can’t hear them crying, so either he’s too far away – unlikely, on this ship – or they’ve stopped for awhile.
“What should I do with them?” Threepio asks.
“I really don’t know the answer to that, Threepio,” Anakin tells him.
Threepio turns away before turning back, one of those nervous habits he has. “Would you like me to bring them to the cockpit?”
Anakin swivels the chair around, taking his feet down off the console, to look at Threepio. “Where would you put them in here?” he asks, gesturing around with a sweeping hand. This cockpit has a lot of windows, but limited seating.
Threepio does a full turn as he surveys the cockpit. “I’m not certain, sir. They’re rather small, so perhaps they would both fit on the co-pilot’s chair?”
Anakin turns to look at the chair with him. Actually they might fit. Then he tips his head back with a sigh, eyes closed, and runs a hand through his hair. “It’s fine, Threepio. I’ll go check on them.”
The twins are awake, like Threepio said, but just barely. They blink up at him, and Leia – wearing blue today – blows a spit bubble.
Anakin’s not sure what to do with the twins when they’re like this. When they cry it’s because they need something, and he can try to figure out what it is and take care of it. But when they’re just awake like this, watching him, he’s not sure how he’s supposed to handle them. Usually he leaves it to Threepio.
Anakin finally just sits down next to the bunk, propping one arm next to Luke and leaning his head against it. He watches them silently, as Leia starts chewing on her fist and Luke seems fascinated by something on the ceiling above him. There’s nothing there but smooth steel, so Anakin’s at a loss as to what it could be.
Their eyes are different actually, now that he’s looking closely. Luke’s are lighter, a clearer blue, and Leia’s are more flecked with color. They’re shaped differently too. Their noses are the same though. They’re probably too young to look like either himself or Padmé, he figures. They just look like babies.
Luke is staring at him now, barely blinking, and Anakin raises his eyebrows at him. Luke smiles, and Anakin finds himself smiling back, just a bit.
He’s not sure how long he sits there, but he starts nodding off after a while and eventually just slumps forward, head pillowed on his arm.
- - -
Anakin sets the ship down in the snow covered spaceport of the main city on Rinn, tells Threepio and Artoo to keep an eye on the twins, and is standing at the top of the loading ramp before he realizes he doesn’t have a coat. He goes back, searching around for his cloak, and throws it on over the leather spacer jacket he’s taken to wearing. It’s not nearly as warm as a real coat would be, and he makes a note to avoid ice planets for supply stops in the future.
The spaceport is more open than most, just landing platforms butting up to the edge of the forest. He tosses some credits to the maintenance droids to refuel the ship, then starts the hike into the main part of town.
By the time he makes it inside a shop he’s freezing, and he doesn’t linger, grabbing what he needs and heading back out again. There’s a bar across the street, and Anakin watches the door for a minute while he debates going in. It will take awhile to refuel, he reasons. He has time for one drink.
One drink and an update on galaxy news, not that many people this far on the edge of the galaxy pay attention to much going on in Coruscant. The bar is filled with smugglers, it looks like, and no one pays Anakin much mind. The bartender is a rodian, and asks for his order in Huttese.
There’s a pod race happening today, so every viewscreen in the bar is tuned to that and Anakin knows better than to ask them to change one of them. In this bar, where everyone probably has money riding on the race, he’d probably wind up shot at for just the suggestion. So he sips at his drink and watches for a few laps – long enough to tell that the devlikk pilot is cheating better than the others – and then leaves the credits to cover it on the bar before braving the cold again.
The loading ramp is open when he gets back; Artoo must have gone outside as part of the maintenance he’s running. Anakin can hear the twins crying from the bottom of the ramp, and winces. Great.
He climbs the ramp and drops his bag of supplies inside the galley to deal with later, heading back towards the twins’ cabin. “Threepio?” he calls. “How long have they been–”
He stops, already two steps down the hallway. Artoo is on his side, several blackened blaster bolt marks covering his body. That alone isn’t enough to take him down, so he must have been hit by an electrostatic blast. His processor display is dark.
Anakin reaches under his jacket for the lightsaber tucked into his belt at his back, and holds it loosely, unlit, as he steps around Artoo. Now that he’s paying attention, senses heightened and drawing on the Force for extra perception, he’s not actually sure the crying is coming from down here.
The door to the twins’ cabin is open, and inside he finds Threepio, also down. There’s just a pile of blankets on the bunk. The twins are gone.
Not gone, Anakin thinks, standing in the doorway and tilting his head, trying to sort out where they are. He can sense their Force presence, meshed together and so bright it feels like squinting up at the noon suns on Tatooine. He can barely stand to look for long – hasn’t been able to at all, this past month – because he’s afraid to get too close and taint that with the swirling miasma that his own sense of the Force has become.
They’re not far; to the left and up. The cockpit.
He makes his way there as quietly as he can, glancing down at the hall that leads to the crew cabins but dismissing it. He’s been sleeping down there, but it’s the opposite direction from the roomier handmaiden cabin that the twins stay in. There would have been no reason to go down there, if whoever is here already has them. Unless there’s more than one person here.
Anakin yanks open the access hatch next to the cockpit lift, and after a check over his shoulder climbs inside. It’s tight, and he has to stick his lightsaber back into his belt to climb the ladder up to the cockpit level. He spends the minute that it takes him to reach the top cursing Naboo ship designers – focussed more on aesthetic than practicality. Who the fuck put the cockpit on an entirely separete level from the rest of the ship? Fucking royalty that’s who , he snarls inside his own mind.
He waits, hands pressed to the hatch door of the upper level, and listens. He thought the twins had screamed pretty loudly this past month, but evidently not, because they’re louder than ever now. He can’t tell what else is going on in the room over them, can only take a deep breath and channel the mix of fear and anger rising like nausea in his throat out into the Force, to sense who else is in the room.
Just one person, a dull smudge of non-Force sensitive life next to the twins’ supernovas. He uses that same focus to give him the foresight of anticipating things just a second ahead of time, braces his fingers against the hatch door, and pushes.
He’s out in a motion almost too fast for the naked eye, a diving roll that brings him to his feet, lightsaber in hand but dodging the series of blaster bolts, ducking right, left, then two steps right. He can’t deflect the bolts here, not when it’s such tight quarters and he can’t control where they go. A dodged bolt will just score the durasteel floor, a deflected one might hit the twins.
The bolts stop, a stalemate, and Anakin registers who he’s facing off with for the first time: Cad Bane. He’s even wearing the stupid hat.
“Hello again, Skywalker,” Bane says, in that lazy drawl.
Bane has a blaster held loosely, finger still poised over the trigger and pointed at Anakin’s chest. More importantly, he’s holding a sack in his other hand, and Anakin can see the twins moving around inside, kicking against the sides.
“Bane,” Anakin says. He holds out the hand that grips his lightsaber hilt, finger also poised on the trigger. He could activate it with the Force if he needed to, so it’s an unnecessary move.
“Do your brats ever shut up?” Bane asks, apparently in the mood to make conversation. “Is that a human thing?”
“What, yours didn’t cry?” Anakin asks.
Bane laughs. “If I have any I certainly don’t care where they are. Children are a liability. I thought that was why Jedi didn’t have them..”
“I’m not a Jedi,” Anakin says.
Bane’s brow lifts. “Well won’t the HoloNet News be shocked to hear that, Mister Posterboy. Though I suppose the Jedi are enemy number one right now. I’ve been making a killing.” His lips spread into a slow smile. “Literally.”
Anakin eyes the bag as Bane talks. He’s not subtle enough, because Bane hefts the handle.
“The bounty on you though, that’s the biggest one out there. You must have really pissed our new Emperor off. He’s got a full Jedi’s worth of a bounty to bring in your kid alive too.”
“Just the kids?” Anakin asks. It’s worrying that Palpatine wants them alive, but Anakin’s not shocked to hear it.
“Kid,” Bane corrects. He hefts the bag again, and the crying changes pitch a bit. “He only mentioned one. Do you have a favorite? I can kill the other for you.”
Anakin’s taking a step forward before he can stop himself, lightsaber flaring to life, and he’s brought up short when Bane lets the bag drop half a foot before snatching the handle again, jerking it to a stop. The twins are screaming. “Not so fast. I can drop them before you can cross the room, and I understand human infants don’t typically survive that.”
The only emotions Anakin can feel are panic and rage. He thinks some of the panic might be coming from the twins, actually, but he can’t be sure. It’s entirely possible that all of it is his own. He needs to be two places at once, grabbing the twins and cutting Bane’s head off at the exact same moment. He can almost picture it, almost see how to do it. But he can also see how it goes wrong, and that’s what keeps him still. Keeps him standing in place and watching.
Bane laughs at the way Anakin is hesitating. “Where’s Senator Amidala?” he asks. “I was hoping to collect on her as well. Expected to find her with you.”
Before Anakin can say anything, the cockpit lift door slides open, and before the door is even fully open Anakin is spinning around, one step back and a hand out to wrap around the person’s neck – just one person, short, he compensates for that and angles down. He dodges to the left to avoid Bane’s blaster bolt, pulling his captive with him, and keeps turning, until he’s back facing Bane again. Lightsaber up and under the throat of whoever he’s grabbed. And only then does he look down and realize it’s a boy. Well, a teenager. Human. Snarling obscenities and yanking against Anakin’s hold on him. Anakin brings the lightsaber in closer, and the boy stills.
Bane’s eyes narrow. He shifts his blaster, pointing it at the twins instead of at Anakin. “Watch it,” he tells Anakin. “I’m not above killing children.”
Anakin smiles at him, but it’s more a baring of his teeth than anything. “Neither am I.”
The memory of killing the younglings at the Temple soaks into him, self-loathing, and blurs together with the rage and the panic until it fuels him. He reaches for the Force and it screams back at him, dark and twisting and full of the most power he’s ever tapped into, and the next thing he knows it clicks, he can see not just the next second, but the next ten, the next thirty. He moves the lightsaber, a clean slice across the boy’s throat, and tosses the body to the side at the same second he steps forward. Bane fires his blaster, two shots that Anakin dodges, and drops the twins. Anakin’s hand shoots out, grabbing hold of them with the Force, and takes another step, lightsaber deflecting a third bolt. He’s close enough now for a swing at Bane.
Bane ducks, leans back, and jumps toward the roof, firing blaster bolts as he goes at the transparisteel and engaging his rocket boots to launch himself upward even higher.
The window shatters. Anakin yanks the twins toward him and leans over them as it rains down over him, one shard nicking the back of his neck. His jacket is leather and protects his back and arms, but he can feel small pieces of transparisteel caught in his hair.
The twins are still screaming, but he needs to catch Bane before he comes back and tries to finish the job. Anakin reaches out, trying to ignore the twins, to search the ship for anyone else’s presence and comes up empty. He should have checked harder the first time, but the kid, whoever he was, had provided a good distraction at least.
Anakin looks up at the window. The edges are lined with spikes of sharp transparisteel, and he braces himself before he jumps. He lands on the roof with only a tear in his pants, and looks around for Bane.
Blaster fire comes from behind a tree on the edge of the landing pad, and Anakin deflects it with his saber this time, running across the top of the ship towards the source. Bane is moving, he can hear him now, crashing through the forest underbrush. Anakin chases after him – it’s easy in the snow – and doesn’t stop until the trail stops cold. He turns a circle, trying to peer behind the trees.
Then he looks up, right before Bane leaps off a tree and crashes into him, feet first. They both go down heavily. Anakin is up again first, rushing at Bane with his saber as Bane uses both hands to fire off two blasters at him. One of the shots gets through, hitting Anakin in the shoulder, but with the Force and adrenaline both coursing through him he doesn’t feel it at all. He’s on top of Bane a second later, lightsaber held forward like a spear, and it pierces through Bane’s stomach. He pulls it back out, and raises it again, ready to slice Bane’s head off.
Bane has a hand up, as though to fend off the blow. Anakin pauses. As soon as he hesitates Bane raises one of his blasters again and Anakin yanks it from his hand with Force.
“How much is the bounty?” Anakin asks.
Bane coughs, and spits out blood. It lands bright red on the snow. “On you?”
Anakin nods. “And the twins.”
Bane glares up at him. “More than you can run from.”
Anakin stabs him in the leg, and Bane grunts, hand scrambling to grasp at the wound. The snow steams as it melts next to the lightsaber. “How much?” he asks again. He needs to know what he’s running from, exactly.
“Eight mil,” Bane gasps out.
Well that’s just insane, Anakin thinks. Eight million credits. Every bounty hunter in the entire galaxy is going to be after him.
“How’d you track me?”
Bane leans back, letting go of his leg. “Just kill me, if you’re going to do it. You Jedi were always pussies about that.”
Anakin sets the heel of his boot to the gut wound and grounds down into it. The sound Bane makes is inhuman, his body spasming. “How’d you find me?” Anakin asks again, after Bane stops screaming.
Bane’s breath is ragged, and between breaths he says, “Tracked you out of Arkanis.”
“How?”
He only has to hover his foot over the wound again before Bane elaborates. “Ship’s an easy mark. Tracking fob on the hull.”
Anakin stabs him in the shoulder, just for the hell of it. “Who else knows? Besides that kid.”
Bane seems resigned at this point. “No one.”
“Who else?” Anakin asks again, lightsaber held over Bane’s chest.
Bane shakes his head, wordless.
Anakin waits another minute, then cuts his head off. He stares at the body for a minute, before turning away.
He runs back to the ship, still high on adrenaline, and this time does a thorough but quick check of the lower level, including the storage compartments. It’s clear. When he steps out of the cockpit lift he’s confronted with the teenager’s dead body, and sees his face clearly for the first time. He’s a clone. Anakin stares for a second, the surprise finally cutting through the rage he’s been running off of and leaving him staggering for the wall as the twins’ distress slams back into him. He stumbles forward, transparisteel crunching under his boots, and sinks to his knees next the bag they’re still stuck inside of.
Their little faces are bright red and tear streaked, but they’re both unharmed. He cradles them in his arms as he hunches forward, rocking a bit, and he finds that he doesn’t even mind the crying for the first time because they’re alive to cry. They can keep crying forever, he doesn’t care.
There’s blood on Leia’s forehead, and it takes Anakin a frantic few seconds before he realizes it’s his, dripping sluggishly from his shoulder wound. He wipes at it, which leaves a red smear on her skin, and finally licks his thumb to rub at it. Leia tries to hit his hand, protesting.
It’s another few minutes before he realizes how cold it is, and that the broken window is letting in the icy air from outside.
He stuffs his lightsaber hilt back into his belt and staggers to his feet, clutching the twins close, and heads for the lift. He’s going to have to get rid of the body somehow, he thinks as he steps over it. Maybe just dump it in the woods too.
Artoo is still lying in the hallway – another thing to fix later – so Anakin goes into the main cabin and paces around with the twins there, until they’ve quieted down and are no longer projecting fear and panic at him. Luke drops into an exhausted sleep, but Leia keeps fussing. He eventually collapses down onto the bed with them, Luke a warm press against his arm and Leia lying on his chest.
He stares up at the ceiling for a long time, but when he looks back down she’s still awake. “I’m sorry,” he tells her. “I won’t leave you on the ship again.”
Leia wiggles around a bit, feet kicking at him. But she’s not crying anymore, at least.
“I really suck at this, huh?” he asks her. “You can’t answer yet, but I do. I have no fucking clue what I’m doing.
“Padmé was the one who had a plan. She wanted to go to Naboo. But Naboo isn’t safe right now. Not that this planet is safe either, but Naboo’s…” He sighs, thinking of the look on Padmé’s face when they’d been trying to figure out where to go and she’d realized they probably couldn’t go back to Naboo for a very long time. “She really wanted you to grow up there. It’s a really nice planet. All green with big lakes and waterfalls. And she had a really nice house by a lake. So we could have lived there. But I fucked that up too.”
He smooths his fingers over the small amount of hair Leia has. “I keep fucking everything up,” he says, softly.
Leia seems to have fallen asleep while he was talking, so he rolls over and sets her down next to Luke, then lets his face smash into the pillow.
It smells like Padmé, still.
He’s not sure when he starts crying, but he doesn’t realize he is until the pillowcase is damp under his cheeks, and then he can’t seem to make himself stop.
- - -
It takes him the better part of the night to find the tracking fob, and instead of smashing it like he wants, he sneaks over to another landing bay and sticks it to the hull of that ship. With any luck they’ll leave soon. Dragging the body out of the cockpit is messier, but easier, since he can just walk into the woods a bit and leave it.
Then he sets to work on Artoo and Threepio. Artoo beeps in distress until Anakin shows him where the twins are sleeping, and Threepio comes awake with a sharp yell before registering that it’s Anakin he’s looking at.
“Oh, Master Anakin, there was a bounty hunter here–”
“I took care of him, Threepio.”
“I tried to stop him,” Threepio says, seeming to gear up to tell the entire story.
“I know you did,” Anakin says, patting him on the arm and trying to head him off. “You did your best. I should have been here.”
“I do hope we’re leaving this planet soon,” Threepio says.
“Soon as I get a new ship,” Anakin promises.
Once the sun is up, he keeps to his promise not to leave the twins on the ship and bundles them up in his cloak to make the hike back into town. The floating cradle finally comes in truly useful, and it floats along next to him.
There’s a ship dealer across town, and by the time he gets there both babies are fussy. The human woman manning the counter looks up as he comes inside, eyes widening a bit before she schools her face again.
“What do you have for sale?” he asks.
“Depends what you can afford,” she says. She peers at the twins. “Those are very fresh babies.”
Anakin pulls the cradle back a bit. “Fresh?”
“What are they, a week old?” she asks.
Anakin looks down at the twins. They’ve grown a lot, actually. “A month,” he says. “I’ve got a ship to trade.” He pulls out the holo he has of the ship.
He can tell she’s interested in the ship, her eyes raking over the holo. “Hyperdrive?”
“Point five.”
“Plating?”
“Chromium.”
“Fancy,” she says.
He doesn’t respond.
“I’m not gonna cut you a better deal just because you dragged your kids in here with you.”
He smiles at her.
“Or because you’re cute.”
That startles a laugh out of him.
He winds up haggling with her for the better part of thirty minutes over a trade for a freighter she has, and they finally shake on the deal with her promising to bring it down to the docking bay in the afternoon.
The new ship, when it arrives, looks like junk. Anakin’s flown worse, but it’s been awhile. He can already see five things he needs to upgrade. But it's a generic model, there are millions of other freighters just like it in the galaxy. It will be much harder to track, once he scrubs the call signs.
He holds the twins up to look at it. “What do you think?”
Luke makes a squeaking noise.
“I’m going to take that as acceptance,” Anakin says. “I’m going to remind you that you agreed to live on this ship in a few years when you complain about it.”
“You didn’t ask if I want to live on it,” Artoo beeps.
“Oh Artoo,” Threepio says, before Anakin can answer. “No one ever asks droids where they want to live. It’s our lot in life to just be dragged from place to place.”
Artoo’s beeps back at him, heading towards the loading ramp. Threepio hurries after him, still complaining.
Anakin trails after them, bouncing the twins in his arms into a better position.