Title: Long Shadows
Characters: Anakin, mentions of pretty much everyone else.
Era: Clone Wars movie missing-moment.
Length: ~ 2200 words
Disclaimer: It's all George's sandbox. (Almost literally, given the subject matter of this particular story.)
Notes: For all that I say Anakin is my favorite character, it occurred to me I hardly ever write from his POV, at least when his head's not completely filled up with some Naboo Senator. ;) This is me trying to rectify that. Plus, the image from the CW movie of Anakin alone in the desert, the root of so much of his turbulent background, just wouldn't leave me alone.

The desert demands everything, and yields nothing.

There are moisture farmers who spend their entire lives trying to disprove the latter – and even the most successful have far more taken from them than they earn. This had never been a particular problem for Anakin Skywalker in his years here. As a slave he'd owned nothing anyway, his very life owned by another.

It had never been a problem – until the first time Watto had sent him alone to barter with Jawas at the edge of the Jundland Wastes. No sooner had the departing sandcrawler vanished over the wavering horizon than his speeder shuddered and died, four hours' ride from Mos Espa, three from the last homestead he'd passed.

After so many years he no longer really feels the heat; it is as much a part of him as his blue eyes or the wire-alloy prosthetic that immortalizes his first encounter with Dooku. But he remembers that afternoon, repairing furiously in the blinding sun for as long as the heat would allow, stealing brief moments in the inadequate shade the vehicle gave, knowing he dared not stay on the open desert after dark. Even town dwellers who never ventured into the wild sands knew of Tusken Raiders. He remembers how he could feel the desert leeching the water, the life, from his tiny body into nothingness. Simply because it could – it gained nothing, and even if it took everything he had, would still reward him only with a slow death.

Just like the Tuskens had done to his mother.

The desert is merciless, he'd told Ahsoka as they'd passed the monstrous, bleached bantha skeleton. It takes everything from you.

There are many bones in the desert. Some are old beasts who simply lie down and let the sands devour the soft tissue until nothing remains but a brittle shadow of its living self. Some are locals or travelers who run afoul of Tatooine's notoriously unforgiving temperament – the sands, the heat, or venturing too far into Tusken territory.

Not that boundaries ever mattered to them.

Somewhere a couple hundred kilometers west of him lay more bones: the scattered remains of a Tusken tribe. A hundred more beyond that, those of the woman it had been their final mistake to torture.

Even if Anakin's childhood hadn't depended on navigating vast stretches of this desert without a map, he would know where he was. His own bones hum with the awareness. His one gratitude in this moment is that Jabba's palace is in the opposite direction from... there. The grave he'd single-handedly (in too many ways) dug for her. Every crunching step across the dunes is the sound of another shovelful covering her shrouded body.

I hoped I'd never have to lay eyes on this dustball again.

After he'd buried her, he'd buried Tatooine as well. Or so he'd thought, until the moment Master Yoda had told him and Ahsoka just what – who – their mission involved. No matter how deeply you buried something, you knew it was still there. Maybe two meters deep, maybe a hundred, maybe rotted or gnawed beyond recognition - but still there. Sometimes it only took one gust of wind to reveal it.

It's not just his personal grief that presses on him here. Even without meditation, Tatooine presses in on him, fills his awareness. For thousands of years misery and greed have run through her veins, through the souls of all who touch her soils, reclaimed from the bodies of those buried in them. Even now he feels her in the air, in the Force – ready to reclaim, swallow him up, her prodigal child, who'd dared to hope he could escape her bosom. Old sins cast long shadows, Master Yoda says, and Tatooine's are very long indeed. Little wonder his mother had sent him away at first opportunity. Only she had seemed untainted by that shadow, and in return for that insolence, it had taken her anyway.

And you never came back for her. Not until it was too late.

This is the world that had first brought him Qui-Gon, who was gone too. Brought him Obi-Wan, who despite the blood and laughter they shed together seems further from him with each passing day. It is the world that first brought him Padmé. That is the only memory that isn't tarnished, doesn't cut with its sharpness: she is still whole, still beautiful, still his (and I am hers). In this place where dust and misery coated the air they breathed, she'd somehow, like his mother, remained untouched. It was the first thing that had ever drawn him to her.

So many bones sacrificed to this desert. His childhood. His mother. More than a hundred of his men in that monastery saving the Huttlet. The Jedi apparently have the time and resources to send him, his Padawan, dozens of his men, even two frontline warships to some forgotten world to curry the good will of one of the most notorious slavers in the galaxy, but apparently not to take him down.

Nor to free a single innocent woman from his grasp.

He tries to shove the old anger down, but on this world, the soil is much too shallow. He'd realized long ago that the Jedi Order he'd dreamed of serving in his boyhood had died with Qui-Gon Jinn, if indeed it had ever existed. The best he can hope for now is to someday end up on the Council himself, finally be in a position to change things from within... or, if it came to it, resign from the Order completely and go live the life with Padmé he's been dreaming of for nearly as long as he'd dreamed of the Jedi.

The Huttlet is an innocent, Anakin tries to remind himself when Rotta's stench - so much like the one Anakin remembers from dank chambers covered in not-so-mysterious stains - draws the bile into his throat, draws forth the memory-sense of Gardulla's jerkin cord biting into his shoulders. (Just as cutting is the memory of when Padmé first saw the thin, nearly invisible lines; the ache in her eyes even as she pressed her lips to each of them. She's never completely come to terms with the revelation that slavery was indeed alive and well in this galaxy, much less a specter in her marriage bed.) Rotta doesn't know what his father is, and has likely never offended anything but the occasional olfactory sense. But he'll still grow up under the influence of Jabba, and Anakin finds it unlikely this baby won't grow up just as abhorrent as his father, to perpetuate his atrocities on new generations of this world's inhabitants.

Anakin's mother's innocence hadn't mattered a whit to her murderers. He'd been an innocent too, and that hadn't mattered to the Hutts...

Could he claim that innocence? The boy who'd endured the punishment of Hutt slavers and the one who'd emerged from that camp with his mother's beaten body both bore the name and blood of Anakin Skywalker, but he knew the one who'd come back from that camp was not the same person.

There is a part of him that wants to tell Ahsoka. That thinks that if she's going to risk her life at his side, trust her life and training to him - and despite her cracks about his flying, he believes she is coming to accept him - then she deserves to know what she's getting into. Perhaps she deserves the chance to decide for herself whether he's really the sort of person she wants as a moral guardian. There's a part of him that wonders if she'd still look at him with the burgeoning admiration she hides behind her teasing. And perhaps there's another part that just wants to see if she'd run.

Sometimes, in his dreams, Padmé runs, and those are the nights he wakes up drowning in the stench of cold sweat, blindly reaching out for her even if he knows she's a thousand parsecs away. He never tells her of these, but suspects she knows something.

He recalls the look on her face in that garage, the slack horror she did her best to hide for his sake - he never again wants to see that look on the face of someone he cares about. To be the cause of that look. Nor, he thinks, does he want to place the burden of such a secret on one as young as Ahsoka. It's enough that she's been forced on a too-young, reluctant Master (not for the first time since Ahsoka's arrival he wonders whether this was how Obi-Wan had felt the first days he'd trained Anakin). He suspects that, as with his own Knighting, the urgency of war more than any real assessment of his skills spurred Yoda into assigning him an apprentice. Like him, Ahsoka will be inaugurated into adulthood prematurely by the front lines of war. And as quickly as he and Ahsoka seem to have bonded, there's still so much he doesn't know about her.

Of course, all this is moot if neither of them gets off this planet alive.

He encoded a quick message to Padmé inside Artoo, while Ahsoka wrestled the Huttlet into their makeshift sling, to be delivered in the event he - like his mother - is doomed to lie (never rest) eternally here. The prospect of his own death does not terrify him. But the idea of never seeing his wife again - of leaving her behind, that his death would cause her pain - that is too great, too terrible, to consider. He needs every ounce of his faculties now.

Dooku doesn't bother to camouflage his approach. He's still some distance away, but his presence, the Dark Side of the Force radiating from it, vibrates ever stronger inside Anakin's skull. Even a mere Padawan like Ahsoka could sense the Dark Side uncloaked like this, but Anakin can pinpoint it in a way he prays his Padawan never learns. Ever since that night in the camp there is something in his mind, in his flesh, that remembers when it senses that energy nearby. The same part of him that told him where exactly on Tatooine he was.

Old sins cast long shadows... do you know what he means by that?

His right hand is impervious to pain but throbs anyway, twitches for the lightsaber on his opposite hip. And yet he is relieved. The closer Dooku gets to him, the further the Sith is from Snips, Artoo, and the Huttlet. He apparently does not sense Rotta is not with Anakin, or wants the bigger target out of the way so he can go after the Huttlet unhindered. Maybe he wants to finish what he started on Geonosis with Anakin's arm. (Or he's already - no, Anakin refuses to consider that possibility. He'd have felt it.) Whichever it is, Anakin is not going to give him the chance. If he succeeds in absolutely nothing else in his possibly record-short stint as Ahsoka's Master, he will see to it that she succeeds in this mission and gets off this world alive.

The boy - and he was a boy then - who faced Dooku on Geonosis believed he had no limits – or at that time, more accurately, wouldn't have known or cared if he did. He was blind and burning with the image of his love tumbling, broken, away from his side and onto sand indistinguishable from what still clung under his fingernails, the same soil that would forever cover his mother's body. Burning with the thought of another failure so soon, potentially costing him the one person who now meant more than anything in his universe.

We can end this war right now! We have a job to do!

I DON'T CARE!

The man meeting Dooku now knows better, that superior youth and agility – and fury – may not be enough. Dooku might not possess the sheer raw ability Anakin does, but he is more experienced. He trained Qui-Gon, who trained Obi-Wan, who trained Anakin. Many of Anakin's skills Dooku was adept in decades before Anakin's birth.

Anakin has seen the costs of charging into situations unprepared - seen his men suffer losses greater than just an arm. He knows his limits, even if he refuses to see them as static, still redefining them at every opportunity. Including now.

The desert has seen too many failures for Anakin Skywalker.

This time, it will yield to him.

-

[end]