darkforcerising | (no subject)

(no subject)

Who: Canon Anakin, AU Earth Anakin
What: Cross universe shenanigans continue - the two Anakins work on fixing a starfighter
When: now
Where: aboard the Resolute
Rating/Warnings: Probably low

Well it seemed as if Anakin was stuck back in this universe for the time being and he might as well use it to the fullest advantage. Being allowed to remain free, he set out wandering and quickly found the hangar bay. Listening to his music, he walked the perimeter a while, just looking at all the ships that were both so familiar and distant in memory for him. It was the weirdest form of nostalgia.

He stopped next to a currently-decommissioned fighter and rested his left hand on the metal hull. There was something about just feeling the cold metal against the palm of his hand. After a brief pause he started tracing a finger along the seam of a panel. It was so strange how a machine could feel so alive to him. And having twenty-four years of recent experience with the absence of that connection only made the feeling now so strong in contrast.

Movement out of the corner of his eye caught his attention and he noticed another familiar form working on another ship in disrepair. Without invitation, Anakin walked over.

“These were fun,” he said when he was close enough to be heard. He was referring to the Delta-7B Aethersprite-class light interceptor in front of him. “I remember them.”

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

“Okay,” Anakin conceded. “I won’t bring it up with Obi-Wan or the other Jedi unprompted if I can help it. But if I need to because of my own health needs, I won’t hide it. I don’t care what he or the Jedi think about me ‘cause it doesn’t change what I need.”

He was quiet a moment before taking a chance to say more.

“I’m... not gonna validate what we did to the Raiders or Poggle the Lesser.” Though he wasn’t going to put his twin on either of those, either. He just knew neither of those things lacked moral ambiguity.

“But the Jedi don’t own ‘the right way’ to do a lot of things. There’s more than one way to meditate- use the one that helps you. That’s not wrong.

“Calling meaningful, emotionally and mentally health connections with people ‘attachments’ is just a way to vilify an alternative but acceptable moral code. It’s a shortcut to brainwashing their members to blindly follow the Council. Being loyal to people isn’t any more or less neutral than being loyal to an ideology. Ideologies, just like people, have to be weighed on each, individual basis. They can be bad, really bad.

“The Jedi don’t own moral superiority because they say they do or because they’ve been around for a long time. That’s just arrogance.”

"I don't want you to put yourself at risk. If just like to not involve them if possible." Ideally not at all but that was not going to happen with Obi-Wan already being involved.

"I don't want validation." He washed understanding. Palpatine offered it, even if something that had learned to be very very quiet in his mind was uneasy about it.

"I just can't. Not being attached to people. My men - they are all such unique people but you have to get to know them to see it, most like to be seen as a group at first. Obi-Wan and I can almost read each other's thoughts at times." Something that drove others mad - battle planning with Kenobi-and-Skywalker often meant getting had sentences at best. "I want to do well for them. I don't see it being Dark." It had taken him to Dark places, sure. But it didn't have to.

"You don't have to justify it to me. I'm just saying, you can have emotional relationships and they aren't inherently Dark. You just... have to learn how to balance your emotions so they don't become Dark.

"I don't know how. They always feel them same in some way, like being hit with a wave and pulled under, like drowning. It's so powerful, and exciting at times. And frightening at others, like it's going to tear me apart." In that way, his emotions abd the Force felt similar.

Anakin listened, kept working on the wires.

"Humor me for a sec- they weren't always like that, were they? Not on Tatooine, living with mom?"

It's a good thing his twin is working, because he's mostly picking at bits and pieces, using the 'work' to look busy rather than being anything done. "No. I mean. Sometimes. Like when Mom found new goggle lenses after I cracked mine, even though she hated it when I raced, I was so happy and loved her so much it felt like I'd burst from it. And sometimes I'd get so angry it was like the suns were erupting from my chest and I could breath fire. But not like it is now, no." Emotions too big for his little body but they hadn't been the overwhelming presence they were now.

"Ya, I remember," Anakin added quietly. He didn't need his twin to be working so didn't comment on the lack of progress on that side of the ship.

"The thing about managing emotions is that it's a learned skill. And the younger you start doing it, the easier it is when you're older. Doesn't mean you can't learn it now, it's just a process that takes lots of practice. The Jedi- they teach you to repress emotions, which isn't the same as managing them. They kind of undid anything mom taught you before you went to the Jedi."

He paused to examine one of the wires he'd stripped.

"I think you could learn, if you wanted to try."

He'd catch up eventually. There was something satisfying about picking the burned wires apart to shreds that he was enjoying at the moment.

"I feel like they undid a lot, sometimes." Anakin drew his lower lip between his teeth, scraping over it before continuing. "I mean. I used to worry that Watto had bought some other little kid, was making them race and punching them in the head when he'd had too much to drink, and planned to go back, buy that kid and take them away. Just free one kid. I haven't thought about that in years. And I love my men but they are product for the Republic. And I tell myself it's not like that, and sometimes I can almost believe it but..." He really couldn't. They had serial numbers, not names. He knew what they were, and what that made him.

"I don't like to not be in control. I. I like how it feels, for a moment, the power in it and how I'm soaring in it, but then it sucks me under and I'm not in control. It. It frightens me." Anakin shredded that last bit more aggressively, pushing the birds into a pile. Then he reached back inside the wing, shifting the partly stripped panel into place.

"You didn't discover the existence of the clones and decide to use them to fight a war," Anakin pointed out. "But you're right about the clones. They can't say no to us, they can't chose a different life." He stopped short of explaining what the biochip in their head was capable of. That was another conversation.

"You lived the first ten years of your life as a slave, your life wasn't your own. Mom's life wasn't her own, neither were your friends' lives. The Jedi aren't much different. You can't chose even the basics like how to think and feel or where to go, the Council decides all that. You don't have many areas of your life where you are in control."

"...it's still being complicit. I give them what freedoms I can, but. It's not enough." It's why losing his men mad him so very angry. They couldn't choose this fight and where brainwashed into it. It wasn't moral.

"I chose how I feel." There's a bite to it, because no his feelings ran him. And he knew what Jedi Doctrine was, and stubbornly refused to give up what couldn't be taken from him. His name, his emotions, his thoughts. He just tried to hide them. "But I could leave. It's a little different."

Anakin didn't argue with his twin about his feelings because he suspected his twin already knew the flaws there.

"But you don't want to leave. There is something you can do to help them."

"I think about leaving. I almost have a few times. But. I just." He wasn't ready. Not yet.

"What?" Anything because he wanted to take care of them, help them.

"Help them get rid of their passivity chip," he said. "It's just another kind of slave chip, if you think about it." Plus, getting rid of them undermined that whole Order 66 thing.

"How? That's in their brains, I wouldn't be able to hide what I was doing." It's not like cooking his books, leave containers on water or a pallet of water purification tablets or rations behind. That could be easily hidden. This could not.

Anakin hesitated before saying anything more. Weighing the costs and the benefits, and deciding if this turns out to be a mistake, he was willing to pay the price of fixing it.

"Don't get mad," he started with a warning. "But talk to Rex, he's already removed his."

"He did?" His tone isn't angry, it's puzzled, even a touch whiny. He is upset, but not angry. A little hurt and betrayed that Rex would and not tell him, not talk to him. But not angry. "I would have helped him."

"After what happened to Tups and Fives, he probably didn't know who he could turn to," Anakin pointed out. "But talk to him, help him help the rest of your legion. But you're right. The Jedi can't know about whatever you do. If the Council finds out, so will Sidious. And things will go very bad if he finds out."

"That's not fair-" Anakin cut himself off, even as his cheeks burned. Losing Tup and fives as he had, seeing Fives so wreaked had hurt. It still hurt. "Of course he could-" But it is just another slave chip isn't it? And Anakin is the one in power, ultimately. It's a feeling he very much doesn't like, cold and slimy and sinking in his gut, twisting and making him feel distinctly ill.

But then his head bobs up, sharp eyed and focused. "Sidious." It's not a question, it's a demand.

Anakin couldn’t help his twin feel easier about how acknowledging the truth about the passivity chip, those feelings were necessary. But he could help him move forward. “Help them, and they’ll understand. Your clones like you, they’ll forgive you for obeying the Jedi.”

Oh, then Anakin understood he’d make a slight mistake. He wasn’t sure his twin was ready to learn the truth about Palpatine. Not with everything else they were discussing right now. But he had slipped up and brought up the Sith anyways.

“Oh... ya... Sidious. He’s very informed about everything the Jedi do, everything about the war.”

They were necessary but brutal. Which so many lessons had been. Guilt could be crushing and it could be, if there wasn't something he could do about it. "I will. I'll...make this up to them, somehow." Vows were not things to be made lightly, they were weighty, meaningful things. And this he vowed.

"How. Who is he." He knew himself too well to think his twin was being casual rather than elusive. He didn't actually think of it in terms of a different name (~~Maul was Maul, after all~~) but the name twisted his gut a little, a warning. Danger.

Anakin was being elusive on purpose.

He sighed. “If I ask you to drop it for now with the promise that I will tell you soon, will you let it go for right now?”

He was sure he knew the answer to that question, but he asked it anyways.

"And if you go back to Earth before then?" He's not, not yet, demanding answers and he's not jumping in his twin's face because twist in the gut aside he didn't feel a need to.

And Obi-Wan probably didn't need to deal with prying them apart.

Probably.

"Because it's important, right?"

His twin had a point.

“It is important. But you won’t believe me when I tell you. It’s not an easy truth to accept.”

"Do you remember asking Mom why we were treated differently from other people, why we were locked up and got to be ordered about, why other children got to play instead of work, why we got so little when the others in the household had so much?" It had been a hard, painful truth. Anakin had been just a very small boy, Shmi had been gentle and patient. But it had been many small conversations. Not one big one.

“Yes,” he said, he knew what his twin meant.

“But truths about out situation are different from truths about people we know.” He was thinking about his own feelings about Palpatine. How the man had once been someone he’d trusted, and even with years distancing him from that betrayal, it still did hurt the things Palpatine had done to him.