THE ABSENCE

There was no pain.

No machine-clad limbs. 

No wheezing breath drawn through a mask that had become more prison than armor. 

No Palpatine. No Empire. 

Only silence.

Anakin Skywalker opened his eyes to a dull gray sky, the kind of overcast that smothered light, color, and hope in equal measure. He lay sprawled on a cracked asphalt rooftop, muscles raw and unfamiliar, as if they had just been remade. 

A thought that seemed less of a bad premise to a holodrama and more of a reality as he slowly, disbelievingly, raised his hands. Flesh and blood. 

For a moment, he could only stare at them. Real. Warm. Trembling. Just as he was before Mustafar. Before Obi-Wan’s betrayal.

Yet, he remembered.

He remembered dying.

He remembered Luke—his son, his redemption and salvation—dragging him away after the Emperor’s final attack. His final words. Hearing Padmé’s voice calling out to him as he reached out towards that light. 

And then he awoke… here..

Alive. Whole.

And utterly, horrifyingly blind.

Not in the literal sense because his vision was clear. But as he sat up too fast, vertigo tilting the world beneath him, he reached out instinctively. Not with his hands, but with his will, desperate for the comforting touch of that presence.

The Force. 

The living energy that had flowed through all things, binding galaxy to galaxy, and life to life. For so long, it had been his constant companion, whether as his guide during his time as a Jedi or the dark, suffocating current he drowned in as Vader.

But now…

Nothing.

No whispers. No presence. Not even the faint echo of his own soul’s connection to everything.

The Force was gone.

He could feel its absence, like a phantom limb he’d lost all over again. And worse, there was something wrong with this world, and not just because of its sky or the strange architecture stretching in brutal angles around him. The very air felt off. Unbalanced. As though existence here was a mere afterthought in the grand cosmos.

And something watched from beneath it all. Something vast, patient, and alien.

He staggered to his feet. A distant siren wailed in the city below, joined by the rhythmic bark of gunfire. Though not the familiar sounds of blaster bolts. And, even if it was a new weapon, it definitely lacked the militaristic rhythm of the stormtroopers shooting. Or the mechanical whir that accompanied the droids’. It was something decidedly primitive. 

But still, no ripple in the Force.

He wasn’t in the galaxy anymore. This was elsewhere: Chaos, maybe. 

And for the first time in decades, Anakin Skywalker—no longer Vader, no longer bound to the Sith—felt fear. But he also felt something else. Beneath the unease and the dread, there was a hint of purpose. Of a duty he thought long buried.

If the Force truly didn’t exist here, if this world was adrift in the dark with no light to guide it… then maybe he was brought here for a reason.

In a world without the Force, stripped of prophecy and galactic war, this was a chance not to reclaim the title of Jedi, but to redefine it. Not in the way he once was. Not bound by the strict dogma that failed to prevent his fall. But to be a guardian of peace, a protector, not because of a Council’s mandate, but because he chose to be. Because he remembered what his son believed he could be, even after everything.

And maybe—just maybe—this was a chance to atone for his many, many sins.