Chapter Text
When Anakin opened his eyes, he was back where he shouldn't have been.
The shrine of his crimes, the altar on which his old self was sacrificed. The sunset was bloody, and the shadows on the ground were long.
He had been brought on Corruscant once, when the sky was just as red and the shadows were just as deep. He was given a new life here, stripped of his old one. And that new one he shattered as well, to build from the shards something sick and twisted.
This was Coruscant, the place where Jedi Knight Anakin Skywalker was born and killed. This was Coruscant, where Jedi's Temple was erected and burnt down, and on its ashes the new world was built. And then there were no shadows, but one. The longest and the darkest, the one that stretched all around, squeezing the entire world in its grasp. The shadow of the Emperor.
Yet now it was not there. The Jedi temple stood tall and proud, the symbols of the Republic could be seen everywhere, and the city buzzed with its regular activity.
Anakin should not have been here. He shouldn't even have been thinking of himself as Anakin. Anakin Skywalker died a long time ago, although Darth Vader was dead just as well now. So who was he? A nobody? A ghost of the Force, born from it and now returned to it? Yet he had a body, he had the skin that felt the fading warmth of the setting sun, he had the nostrils to suck in the sterile filtered air of Coruscant's higher levels, and the ears to hear the beat of life in the city, and the eyes — the eyes to see.
There were two figures, walking slowly. A man and a child. Anakin's legs were limp as he walked towards them, not thinking, not breathing. He stood in front of them, not saying a word, just — trying to understand. He was not a ghost, but they were. They were: a man with short hair and dark circles under his eyes, his features smeared by grief, and a boy, small, tiny even, yet with something so grim in his expression that it made him look older somehow.
For half a minute they just stared at each other in silence. Then the boy muttered under his breath:
"I don't like him. He's bad."
"Anakin", the other one frowned. His voice was quiet, yet stern. "Don't say such things. It's not polite."
Yet his own hand moved slightly, as if reaching to take out a lightsaber.
The boy scowled, but Anakin wasn't looking at him anymore. He met the gaze of his old Master.
Anakin remembered him differently. Not that young, not that tense. Certainly, not that lost. He moved and talked with the shadow of his past confidence now, and this act couldn't fool anyone, but a blind idiot. And Anakin was a blind idiot once. He was nine and didn't know anything. And then he grew up and still didn't learn a thing.
"Who are you, stranger?" Obi-Wan asked, his tone friendly, yet cautious. "Do you need help?"
"Yes", Anakin thought. "Yes, I need help."
And:
"I killed you once."
Instead he said:
"I am a Jedi. Can you take me to the Temple?"