albaparthenicevelut:

resistancepilots:

mace windu and anakin skywalker: lessons, in trust and other things

In
another world, Obi Wan has to leave for a mission after Naboo. He agrees to go
only after the council promises to let him train Anakin, and only because he
sees that a battlefield—another one, at least—is no place for a young boy to
start his training. He tells Anakin before leaving, and Anakin waits.

In
another world, Mace sees Anakin sitting on the steps that line one of the
larger training rooms. The boy is quiet, intensely focused on the training
droid ten feet away, eyes not even glancing down as his fingers fly over the
programming tablet. The droid is holding a staff, like the one Obi Wan
described to the council when he came home without a master. The sabers are
blue, but the movements make it obvious whose technique Anakin is so determined
to learn and defeat.

Mace
shifts and Anakin looks up, fingers already stuttering to a hesitant standstill
over the pad, mouth already opening on unsure words: to apologize, to explain.
To defend before attacked.

In
another world, Mace sees a young boy spending the few moments he has to himself
selflessly, for a man he’s known for a handful of days at best, and only after
he has completed what is expected of him. Mace sees an initiate who will need
to forge a unique path among the jedi, and he remembers the way he too, in a sense, had made his own way in the Order. In another world, Mace senses this boy’s
tumultuous fear, and remembers how hard, how differently, he’d worked to get
through his own.

He steps
inside, closes the door behind him, and tells Anakin to add another lunge at
end of the program’s third attack. This is how they start: small steps, and
smaller words. It’s enough.

Mace does
not train Anakin, but he helps.

In
another world, when Mace Windu sees inside the heart of a newly freed slave
child who has suffered too much, he breathes in and thinks, shatterpoint. Mace, who has seen the ugly scars left by slavery and
imprisonment in the outer rim, knows Anakin needs more than what the old set ways of
the jedi will give him. His
compassion outweighs his caution, and he teaches Anakin how to work with the
things inside him that the jedi warn against.

In another world, Mace Windu does not give into the council’s
fear.

He
remembers that sometimes hatred, too, is a right, one they cannot thoughtlessly
strip from a boy who grew up with the threat of a chip ready to explode inside
him. He teaches Anakin how to channel the fear and anger and cracked bits of
hate, how to use their own energy to loop them away, and eventually, how to
catch and direct that darkness in a fight.

It’s like
winding up thread, Anakin
says once. You have to wrap it so
it doesn’t tangle when you pull it out again. I used to do that for my mom,
sometimes. Mace blinks. It is not
inaccurate, and Mace tells him so. Anakin smiles, carefully proud. He doesn’t
hold his mother’s memories territorially close to his chest yet, and in another
world, it isn’t Mace who makes him start.​

He feels
Anakin’s attachments, sees Yoda’s narrowed eyes, and decides there are enough
masters to tell the boy to let go. He focuses on teaching Anakin what he knows
best. Anakin still trains in Shien So, but in another world, he has more than a working
knowledge of Vaapad, too.

In
another world, Mace’s soft spot for younglings and new padawans is not lost to
the war.

Mace Windu’s guidance is not that of master over apprentice,
but it is enough. It is enough to loosen the knot of mistrust choking young
Anakin’s every thought in front of the council, and it is enough to slacken Obi
Wan’s mercilessly demanding standards for himself in front of Anakin. Anakin
finds someone to remind him that his master is young and new and imperfect and
will not begrudge Anakin his weaknesses or differences, and Obi Wan finds someone
to remind him that his apprentice is young and new and imperfect and will only
find comfort in Obi Wan’s own uncertainty.

Mace and Anakin. In another world, theirs is a relationship
of distant, reluctant affection. There’s a genuine bond between them, but it’s
quiet, left unsaid. Mace leaves the voicing of such things to Obi Wan. Obi Wan,
no longer solely responsible for teaching Anakin Skywalker, finds it much
easier to voice them.

Small
things change. During the Clone Wars, when Mace thanks Artoo, Anakin still has
something to say. But instead of that’s
more than I ever got, it’s a thank you and a smile? That means
he really likes you. Mace still shakes his head and looks away. But this time there’s
amusement in the tension at the corner of his mouth, and Anakin knows how to
read it. Small things change, and those changes add up.

In another world, Mace Windu trusts Anakin. He talks with
Anakin about seeing further than most, and being unsure what to do, which path
to take. Anakin still dreams of his mother, still returns fissured and aching
from Geonosis and Tatooine. Mace does not understand completely, but he
listens. He respects Anakin’s loss—his sacrifice—and he trusts Anakin’s grief. It is enough.

In another world, Anakin trusts Mace. That trust means Anakin isn’t afraid to
talk to Obi Wan, even when it seems there isn’t enough time, about his past and
his mother and his weaknesses, about Padme and Dooku and all those moments
when something terrible tried to unfurl in his chest. In another world, one day
Anakin trusts Mace with these things too.

In another world, Anakin Skywalker and Mace Windu know that
they will never agree completely, but they do not arrange these differences
into a minefield between them.

Mace sees the more shadowed parts of the Force become still
with anticipation when Anakin and the Chancellor meet. In another world, he
lays out his fears in front of Anakin, discusses them with Anakin as equals.
Mace acknowledges his own attachment to the republic, how his faith is
breaking, how he houses a weaker echo of the same monstrous fear as Anakin.
Anakin, already intimately familiar with the tangled threads of Force visions
and shatterpoints and gifted sight, listens. He listens, and because he is
trusted, he doesn’t need to stay.

In another world, Anakin still grabs Mace’s hand, desperate
for a right answer in this maelstrom of wrong wrong wrong—

Mace still asks where Anakin has been injured, still asks
what’s wrong, still puts an arm around his shoulders and helps him sit. But the
concern runs deeper this time around. Anakin still falls apart in front of
Mace, still shakes with the burden of too many stars and people, still
struggles to articulate his discovery of the sith when all his voice wants to
do is scream and scream and scream.

But this time: when Anakin Skywalker begs for answers, Mace
pauses to give them. It is a handful of moments, it is years of trust, of
respect. It is hours and days and months spent together in the training rooms,
it is instance after instance of their pain and anger and attachment, all
spoken out loud and addressed and smoothed. It is enough.

It is not Obi Wan’s presence, but it is enough to hold the
tide.

In another world, in an office with huge windows and too high
a fall, Mace tells Anakin not to listen, and Anakin doesn’t. Anakin tells Mace
to have faith, and Mace does. It is enough. It is more than enough.

Mace
Windu brings change to the Jedi Council, in another world. He learns from Anakin, in this; tradition will only carry them so far, will only tide them over so long, will not do what open arms can do. Mace learns to let go. He relaxes his too-tight grip on the past, and
the Force breathes easier for it. He argues with old friends, pushes for new
thought, for revision, for softer judgement. The Order, too,
breathes easier. It becomes a different kind of home for its newest
members, who were raised in a war-torn world, whose lives and families are
already too full of sacrifice to ask for more.

In
another world, when a boy with burning dreams and too much in his heart puts
his trust in the jedi, they do what they were always meant to do: they make him
family.

Anakin
Skywalker passes on Mace’s lessons to countless others. And his own lessons,
too. It’s about time someone
started a new form, Mace tells
Obi Wan as they watch Anakin smile and adjust a young padawan’s stance. I was getting bored.

In another world, Mace Windu sees a scared, hurting child
unsure of his place, and he does what the jedi were always meant to do: he
brings him peace.

*incoherent wibbling*