That's the first conscious thought he can remember forming.
Darkness lies ahead of him, behind him, around him; he can't see, hear, feel a single thing.
He can't feel the Force.
He's never not been able to feel the Force. Maybe there is no Force, where he is. Maybe the Force has simply… ceased to exist.
Or maybe he has.
It's hard to tell if he's awake or dreaming. He settles on awake, eventually, because he can't usually feel pain in dreams, but the darkness confuses everything. He squints at it—so he's probably awake, because he can feel physical sensations just fine—and it makes his head hurt. It looks like a solid mass, almost, but that can't be right. He'd feel if it was pressing in on him. Wouldn't he?
Something rattles, and he startles, stumbling backwards into empty air. There's a heaviness around his wrists and he scrabbles at it with clumsy fingers—chains. Durasteel chains.
How cheery.
He aches, he thinks. Dull pain all along his limbs. There's a gnawing hunger growing in the pit of stomach, and his throat is so dry he thinks it might tear into pieces. He wracks his brain trying to remember how he got here—
Naboo.
Dooku.
Lightning?
Padmé's voice, soft and hazy as if through a dream—
Then nothing.
So he's either in a Separatist prison or dead.
(But he can't feel the Force. If he were alive, wouldn't he be able to feel the Force?)
(And yet dead people can't feel hunger. Or pain. Or chains wrapped around their wrists. Can they?)
He lifts his arms experimentally. The clink of the metal echoes in the stale, empty air. He pulls, trying to see if he can find their source—there's an awful, grating screech, and he quickly drops his arms with a wince. Somewhere ahead of him. Or above him. Or behind him. He can't tell.
His head hurts. There's a jagged pain in the back of his skull—it could be from the lightning. Or from the empty space in his consciousness where the Force should be.
What does that do to a person, he wonders, to be cut off from their lifeblood? What will it do to him?
Nobody goes back for dead men.
Anakin is alone.
~
Padmé is still poring over the records that the Jedi provided hours after the sun has set. What she's found is not much more than what she's already been told. Bolla Ropal had been killed months ago on a mission by notorious bounty hunter Cad Bane, and yet, in the Jedi's records, had not been reported as dead. Or perhaps he had been reported as dead, but the records had been tampered with after the fact. Either way, a few days ago, when the Council had received the request for a capable Knight to guard Grievous, Bolla Ropal had shown up in their databases as both alive and free to take the mission.
And so he had been 'sent'. But the identity of whoever had authorized him, as well as the file containing the approval report, had been erased. And whoever had originally tampered with Ropal's file had left no trace of their identity—or so it seemed.
Perhaps a high-ranking Jedi with access to the databases had had their credentials stolen. Or perhaps they had a traitor in their ranks.
Or perhaps it wasn't a Jedi at all, but a slicer from outside; a turncoat in the Senate, or some Separatist from afar.
The possibilities make her head spin. Versé will know what to make of this better than Padmé; she's the one who'd chosen to specialize in slicing, after all. But it all depends on what information the Jedi will be willing to part with during the course of this investigation.
There's a knock at her door and Padmé startles.
It's only Dormé.
"My lady," Dormé says softly, leaning against the doorway of Padmé's Senate offices. "You need rest. It's the middle of the night—we really should escort you back to your rooms."
Padmé narrows her eyes, sighs, and puts down the datapad to lock eyes with her handmaiden. "I won't get any rest there either, Dormé. It'll hardly make a difference."
"It'll be safer," Dormé says, straightening her spine. "Isn't that all the difference that matters?"
Padmé picks the datapad back up, squinting at the screen. The letters blur before her eyes, and she curses her own two eyes' betrayal.
She can't tell Dormé the real reason she doesn't want to go back. It sounds foolish even to her own ears.
Her rooms are haunted by the echoes of the empty space that will now stay forever hollow. She can't turn a corner without seeing the ghost of a grin or the echo of a sharp laugh. In the daylight it's different; it was under the cover of the night that she and Anakin secreted away and spent the most of their time together. And now, knowing that he should be on Coruscant but isn't, knowing that he'll never be again—
Knowing that she wouldn't be feeling this pain today if she had never given into her heart to begin with—
"You and Versé should go back," she says. "I'll be working for a while, but you two deserve your rest."
Dormé raises an eyebrow. "And you don't, my lady? Do you even know what you're 'working' on?"
Padmé fights the urge to drop her head into her hands. "I need Versé's help with this," she admits reluctantly. "But I won't keep you both up late for it."
"Don't be a hypocrite, then," Dormé says as if it's the simplest thing in the world. "Leave your work for the morning, and at least try to get some rest."
"It's not that simple, Dormé, I have to—"
"Have to what?"
"Have to get this done, can't go back to the apartment just yet, there's still work—"
"Do you think we're stupid, Padmé?" Dormé says sharply, tossing all pretense of professionalism aside. It's jarring, but so is the artificial distance of the veneer the handmaidens maintain. These women have put their lives on the line for her, kept her secrets, eaten with her, gossiped with her. It's refreshing when they act like it. "We know you miss him. We're the only ones who know what you're grieving. But avoiding your own rooms is not going to help you. I won't stand for you sleeping in your office. Neither will Versé."
Dormé is right, of course. She has to face the music eventually. And her aversion is hardly rational.
Still—
"I don't want to be alone, Dormé," she says, voice breaking, and she doesn't just mean in her room, but in her life—a hopeless idealist of a Senator on a Republic rapidly crumbling on its foundations, in the midst of galactic war, no friends but those who are either sworn to die for her or reliant on tenuous political alliances, no family but those across the galaxy that she hasn't seen in years, that she likely won't see for years—
And those who are now dead.
Her sister Sola was right, so many years ago, when she told Padmé, What could you possibly be thinking, choosing this life? You'll never know peace.
Don't be morbid, Padmé had said. Now she only wonders at how she had brushed the words off so easily.
But there's no time for regret. Certainly not now of all times.
She cannot let herself fall apart.
"I know, my lady," Dormé says quietly, moving forward and placing a gentle hand on Padmé's shoulder. Padmé inhales sharply and thinks of everything Dormé has left behind back on Naboo, to serve as the shadow of a woman who can never truly return her unquestioning loyalty. She thinks of how Cordé's loss still reverberates, years later.
A bit of context: In an attempt to bring Shadow back, the Colors ventured into the Dark World where they get trapped and corrupted. As the Colors lost themselves to the Darkness, Shadow grew in strength from it. Until eventually, a new, young hero arrives to find four Dark Links who have been corrupted beyond repair.
This is called the Shadowed AU. In this story, when Legend clears the Foursword Palace, Shadow (who was not corrupted by the Dark World) helps him out and follows Legend around after his adventure!
