There's been a darkness inside him from the beginning, that he is certain. Palpatine had seen it immediately and tugged at its core. Fed the flames of Anakin's anxieties when he was young and malleable. Pretended to be a friend, a mentor, a father figure. And Anakin, feeling strange and unwelcome in the Jedi Temple, easily fell into Palpatine's kindly embrace. Why wouldn't he? Here was a man who he thought far removed from the strange philosophies of the Jedi. He was normal, like his mother was normal, and Anakin felt calm and comfortable in a way that he didn't with anyone else.
At least not until Padme years later, but even she did not ground him the way Palpatine seemed to do.
He knows the truth of it all, now. The conflicting feelings he would sometimes get as he got older. The dark thoughts that felt like an oil spill in his mind. Whispering constantly in the back of his mind when he let his guard down. They quieted as his life on Coruscant continued. He became less foreign in the Temple. He became closer with Obi-Wan as the Qui-Gon shaped hole between them filled. He would never be perfect, he would never truly fit in, but he gained his confidence, found his footing.
Then his mother died, the war began, and every brick he'd built between himself and the darkness deep in his core began to crack. He didn't realize it until the end, but the voice he always heard was every bit Palpatine. An insidious whisper pretending to be the soothing tones of a long time friend.
In the end, the cracks had become wide fissures, and the whisper a siren song that Anakin couldn't resist. I could give you everything you ever wanted or I can take it all away. It's your choice, Anakin.
The dust settled. It felt like waking up from a night terror and he couldn't stop screaming. He remembered the horrific future The Father had blocked in his mind and knew it could have been worse. He had killed innocent people, young Jedi who had once looked up to him. If not for the quick actions of the Council, Anakin doesn't want to consider what would have happened.
He doesn't know or remember who advocates for him. He can't advocate for himself. He doesn't remember the time between seeing the young padawan dead in front of him, and his not-quite-jail-cell in the hall of healing. Underneath all the well-practiced calm, they're afraid. They're angry. Anakin lays in bed and barely moves. He wishes he could bring Palpatine back from the dead to kill him all over again. He'd lost everything, anyway and now Master Yoda could nod gravely as he touts his usual teachings. They can all say how they knew he was a failure all along.
He's made himself sick by the time Obi-Wan is forced to see him. They told him he was coming. He thinks-- no, I don't want to see him, and he's the last person who should want to see me. But the words don't make it past his lips. He resigns himself to the fact that Obi-Wan is coming. So he forces himself to at least sit up. To be more than a lump of flesh that lashes out when they least expect it. It's all he can do even when Obi-Wan finally does enter. A slow blink, tracking the figure that feels--wary, concerned, disturbed--and nothing else.
He owes it to his former master to say something, to try. He should have been trying this whole time. The sight of him brings the surge of guilt back unbidden through the layers of apathy, and along with it the striking pain in his head. The spike that had been there since Palpatine's death.
"Yes," Anakin croaks, the sound weak and raspy. "Why now?"
If he wanted to say more, it was lost to a sudden round of coughing that left him breathless.
