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

"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.

"Are they different? The people we know, they make our situations." Anakin isn't thinking of Palpatine. He's thinking of Dooku, of Sifo-Dyas, of other Jedi who have turned and who really knew when? Wasn't he proof a Jedi could take a Fall and no one know? He was thinking of there being a threat within the Jedi.

“That’s why it’s different. A person is someone you can blame or fight.”

He’d been avoiding making eye contact for a few minutes now, but he finally looked up. He knew his twin wasn’t going to give up.

“You’re going to be mad,” he said. He paused just a moment longer before finally saying, “Sidious is Palpatine. I’m sorry.”

No, he wasn't. There was something too important here, he knew that.

Of course, 'you're going to be mad' clenched it, and he was tensing already, bracing himself for a blow. And it was a blow, enough that it knocked the breath from him, or so it felt, and Anakin didn't even hear the small sound of protest he made.

No, that couldn't be right, he meant when he shook his head, but even as one part of him protested, another part screamed there had been something about the man, his attention, that had made Anakin uncomfortable. A part he'd learned to ignore until he barely heard it anymore, and his lip curled back in a snarl. "That's a serious charge to make."

"I know."

He tried to think of something that would convince Anakin. But Palpatine was good, so good, at hiding who he really was.

"Think about it. It fits with everything you know that is going wrong with the war. Who else knows everything the Jedi do? The Separatists always seem to know the Republic's next move. Who suggested to Padme to oust Chancellor Valorum? He was from a secretive mid-rim world, a senator with a bland reputation. Why would the Senate choose him to be the next Chancellor?"

And there was one more thing. "And he's just so interested in you." Why should the Chancellor had no business getting involved in the training of a Jedi Padawan.

Palpatine was so very good at hiding it, in some ways. But in others, not so much. Or perhaps he had just been used to children like Padmé rather than children like Anakin, who had to have a very keen sense of who was a predator of any type, and who wasn't, in order to have even lived to ten.

"Padmé manages to come up with things that work against them in the War." That wasn't a denial, quite the opposite in fact - they had spoken a few times, about how Palpatine had acted as a mentor to her as well, starting when she had been just three. And he'd been the Senator from Naboo when she was in the Junior Legislature, so they'd worked together then as well. If he really was calling the shots behind the scenes, it would take someone who thought like he did to out maneuver him.

"All kinds of reasons, someone to manipulate, mid-rim solidarity, I don't know, I was ten." And focused on Padmé, not the Senate or the Queen.

But there was still a refusal there, Anakin digging his heels in.

There were other things that made him suspicious, things Palpatine had always managed to explain away. The art and artifacts in his private office that felt so distinctly Dark they made Anakin feel a little ill to be around, explained at pieces of art or antiques he liked to collect - certainly not all of it was Dark after all. The mural in his office, a depiction of the last Sith-Jedi Wars.

"He said he knew what it was like to be an outsider on Coruscant." But even to Anakin's ears, his voice sounded weak. Palpatine's attention, both at Naboo's celebration ceremony and later on Coruscant had made him uneasy for reasons he'd never discussed, with anyone. Mostly due to shame, Palpatine had been so kind to him and Anakin had truly been suspect of his motives at first. After all his own experience with wealthy, powerful, older men who took an interest in children they were not at all related to was to assume abuse would happen. But it hadn't, at all. Palpatine had even figured out what Anakin was worried about an reassured him, hadn't even been angry with him and had tried not to embarrass him when he explained how much Anakin was misunderstanding and didn't know.

He'd been good. And had always supported Anakin, even with things Anakin had always known he could never talk to Obi-Wan about. Like his mother and what had happened.

“On Earth we call it grooming,” Anakin explained. “A predator picks a target and then starts by gaining the trust of the people around the target. Palpatine focused on the Jedi first, manipulated them into thinking his interest in you was genuine concern. Then a predator works on their target- if all the adults around the target trust the predator, then they must be okay, right?. They do this so you undermine your Intuition yourself before you have a chance to develop it. From their, they just have to let you logic away all the red flags they’re throwing up.

“He’s been manipulating you for years and the Jedi have made it extremely easy for him to do it.”

"But they didn't trust him. They thought he was overstepping. I think they thought I'd just want to leave and they could get rid of me." He knew they hasn't liked Palpatine's interference. "And he doesn't feel like a Force Sensitive." There was a desperate grasping in his mind anything to make this not true. That Palpatine wouldn't really be hurting him like this.

"Oh but he is definitely Force Sensitive. He just knows how to hide it." Anakin thought it was a twisted trick of the Force to give Palpatine just such a trick, but it made sense, he supposed, if the Force was striving for balance. How else to keep the Dark Side alive?

"He keeps his lightsabers hidden in one of the neuranium statutes on his desk at the Senate building."

"But he's from Naboo. Wouldn't the Jefi have found him when he was young?" He knows good and well Palpatine's clan is dead, save him. Young deaths and tragic accidents, all very sad. And Naboo didn't Leo a registry of its citizens so any who fled, who knew.

"Which one? Because if I'm there..."

Anakin shrugged. "The Jedi aren't really that great at finding Force sensitive children." Anakin looked pointedly at his twin. "Not born in the right hospital with the right tests given right away, they miss a lot of kids. His master got to him first."

He sighed, because this was why it was risky to tell his twin. "I'm not going to tell you until you have a better plan than indignation. Remember how Maul and his brother popped up on Mandelore and overthrew their government but then suddenly disappeared again? Remember how difficult it was to fight Savage?"

"We're several days from Coruscant, and I have Obi-Wan. And you, he doesn't know about you. It'll be fine." They time and a surprise. And Palpatine didn't know to be suspect of Anakin which would help. It had to help.

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holy bad themes and gaslighting batman

Re: holy bad themes and gaslighting batman

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