Anakin, after his reunion with Padme in ROTS…

He cannot fight anymore.

He is weary down to the marrow that fortifies his body, his spirit tattered enough for two torturous lifetimes.

This war has stolen so much already, he thinks, idly flexing the digits of his durasteel arm. The loss of his limb, he cannot feel anymore, but the vestige of sorrow that follows him after he leaves the paradise of her arms will bring the Hero With No Fear to his knees someday, of that he is certain.

When he lies on a makeshift bunk (if he's lucky) or the ruins of another battlefield (if he's not), sometimes he allows a small indulgence. In a crevice of his worn tabard, he carries a scrap of pristine lace, delicate and eerily beautiful, just like his bride on the sun-drenched balcony of Varykino.

They'd lingered in silken sheets the last morning of their honeymoon, languidly tangled, when she'd presented him with the little snip. It smelled of the sapflowers she'd carried in her bouquet and shuura nectar he'd tasted on her lips; its scent was unmistakably Padme, and himself, and the lingering aromas of their first hours as husband and wife.

"To remind you what you're fighting for," she'd whispered, kissing first the snippet of her wedding gown softly, then his waiting mouth with much more thoroughness.

Padme. He aches for those precious moments: Her decadent purr when his lips brush the inside of her knee, the expanding slope of her belly rippling with fledgling arms and legs. Our child, he thinks fiercely, flesh-hand clenched in a promise to his unborn.

You will know love, my daughter. You will know freedom, and peace, and unbidden joy. You will know that I am your father and that my love goes far beyond this or any other galaxy.

What you will never know, my son, is shame, fearfulness, servitude. You will not be forced in your ideals or your passions. You will not bow, nor cower, nor feel helpless before another.

Never.

You will be light. You will be accomplishment. You will be born from love and nurtured within it, and the rules of the Order be banished to the hells of Corellia.

Later, he wakes in disjointed panic and searches the cracks of moonlight for creamy skin and wayward curls.

His angel is drained from carrying their children – two Force signatures call to him now – but she slumbers comfortably by his side. He brushes her cheek with the back of his hand, rough and scarred against her smoothness, and heaves a deep sigh.

He is not naïve enough to dismiss what just occurred as a mere dream. If his mother's death did nothing else, it strengthened his resolve to trust himself more than his Jedi teachings, at least in matters of Force visions.

It still makes his mouth curl into a snarl that he doesn't temper, his master's blithe observation that "dreams fade in time."

He fervently wishes he could possess Obi-Wan's omnipresent faith. But he's experienced the living nightmares that make him fairly terrified to close his eyes. He's held his mother in his arms, willed her to fight with him, brushed that Force-forsaken sand from her cracked lips as she'd withered painfully into nothingness.

He'd killed them all, the Tusken Raiders and their kind. Butchered them mercilessly with deft, controlled strikes of his lightsaber and ignored the screams of the innocent. Until they were as gutted as he felt.

But he does not want to fight anymore; Force, he doesn't! His entire life, it seems, has been molded by the nicks and burns and bloodshed of battle.

But, as he hears the patter of Padme's slippers, senses her concern as their unborn children come awake within her warmth, he squares his shoulders, steels himself. Somehow, he must heed this vision and alter its course. At risk is everything left that he holds dear.

The Chosen One is weary, but for his family, he will fight again.

finis