The Wrong Skywalker

Anakin Skywalker hated sand.

It was coarse and rough and irritating, and it got everywhere. The feeling was just like his mood at this moment: a restless irritation, wrapped in a vast and suffocating unknown.

Minutes ago, he and Obi-Wan had been on a forgotten moon in the Outer Rim, investigating a ruin connected to the ancient Sith. The energy field there was extremely unstable. When he reached out with the Force to touch a black pyramid that radiated an eerie chill, the entire world shattered before his eyes.

It wasn't a physical shattering, but a deeper, terrifying experience, as if the very fabric of spacetime had been torn apart. He felt his body being pulled and twisted by an irresistible force, dragged through a bizarre tunnel of light and shadow. Countless voices, familiar and strange, echoed in his ears—Padmé's soft laugh, Obi-Wan's lectures, the bells of the Jedi Temple, and… a pained, desperate, mechanical breathing he had never heard before.

Then, there was silence.

He landed hard on a vast, yellow desert, scorched by the heat of two suns.

"Kriff."

Anakin pushed himself up, spat out a mouthful of sand, and swore under his breath.

He looked around. Nothing but endless dunes and the two blazing suns in the sky. This was Tatooine. The place where all his nightmares began.

Why was he here? Where was Obi-Wan? What the hell was that Sith artifact?

He tried to reach out with the Force to sense Obi-Wan's location, or to contact the Jedi Temple, but his senses were plunged into a thick, static-filled fog. He couldn't feel anything. His connection to the rest of the galaxy felt as if it had been severed.

The familiar emotion called "fear" began to quietly fester in his heart.

He thought of Padmé.

They had just been in the lake country of Naboo, where they had made their eternal vows before the sacred lake. She had worn a beautiful white wedding dress, her smile more gentle than the waters of Lake Paonga. He had placed the Japor snippet necklace around her neck again, promising to protect her forever. It was the happiest moment of his life.

He couldn't die here. He had to get back.

Anakin forced himself to calm down. He stood up and brushed the sand from his clothes. As a hero of the Republic, a battle-hardened Jedi Knight, he knew that in such unknown circumstances, composure was paramount.

He chose a direction and began the arduous trek through the endless desert. He needed to find a settlement, a ship that could get him off this rock.

After walking for what felt like an eternity, just as his throat was about to go up in smoke under the twin suns, he saw the familiar outline of a moisture farm on the horizon.

And outside the farm, he saw a young man.

A blond boy, about nineteen or twenty, was bent over a battered landspeeder, tinkering with something and muttering complaints to himself.

The moment he saw the boy, Anakin froze.

A powerful, unprecedented, yet strangely familiar tremor in the Force emanated from the boy. The Force flowed from him, pure as an uncut crystal, full of life and hope, like a small, warm sun.

Anakin felt the Force within himself resonate strongly with that power.

It was a feeling of… a connection of blood.

Absurd.

Anakin shook his head, trying to banish the ridiculous thought. He was an orphan, a Jedi who had been brought out of slavery by Qui-Gon Jinn, a man with no past. He couldn't possibly have any blood relatives here.

But the inexplicable sense of kinship, coming from deep within the Force, drew him involuntarily towards the boy.