#winter soldier au ft ghost padme

[sonoftatooine]

ooh can I ask about any "Sith Anakin" of your choice and Winter Soldier AU for the ask game?

Hi, thanks for the ask! :D

SITH ANAKIN

My Raised as a Sith Anakin AU is pretty much what the name suggests - instead of becoming a Jedi at the end of TPM, Yoda senses too much danger in Anakin's training and refuses to admit him into the order, and because of this he's sent back to Tatooine and snatched up by Palpatine. The AU itself is made up of a series of fics which - very loosely - follow along the lines of various events of TCW. This particular extract is from 'The Clone Trooper', which is one of the very early fics in the series, and is one of the first things I wrote for SW:

The planet was nothing but dust and storms and death, and would have been noted as little more than an uninteresting blip on a starpilot's navigation computer if not for the raging battle that had just been waged on its surface several standard hours ago. Now, all was quiet—or it would have been, if not for the frequent winds that roared endlessly across the plains, and the crackling of bright, hungry flames in the distance. But beneath it, there was no shouting of soldiers, no screams of civilians—not even the inexorable clanking march of a battalion of droids carried through the air. All was silent. All was still.

Into this silence came two figures, one organic, one droid. The first was tall, cloaked in black with a deep hood pulled low over his head and his face covered up to the eyes. The second was a B1 series battle droid, painted with stark black stripes and clutching a blaster in one hand, and a hand-held scanner in the other. Despite one's expression being hidden, and the other incapable of forming an expression in the first place, neither seemed happy to be there.

With a sigh, Vader adjusted the cloth he had tied over his nose and mouth back on board the Twilight, his airways raw and his eyes stinging. It was a rather feeble barrier against the conditions of the planet, but the best he had had on hand. Really, it had been just his luck to arrive on this Force-damned little backwater just as a ferocious dust storm was kicking up. The stuff was whirling in the air so thick it was as if a muddy shroud had settled about them, absolute and impenetrable—he could barely have seen his own hand stretched out before him even if his eyes weren't being relentlessly assaulted with grit. It wouldn't have surprised him if he completed his mission only to find his ship half-buried under it once he returned. And that was to say nothing of Bee-One and himself in the long trek across the plain ahead of them. And that, that would not do.

The wind was howling all around him like the wailing of the dead, but Vader did not need an overactive imagination to hear the echoes of the battle reverberating in the Force. So little time had passed since the desolate plain had been full of living beings, bleeding out their suffering into the atmosphere around them, saturated thick with their fear, their anger and pain and hatred. It rushed in on him like the tides at Kamino as he opened himself up to the Force, so sudden and intense that it might have bowled him over had it not been for his years of training. He winced at the sensation—the Force was always so very loud, too loud and too bright, and now it burnt as if he were filled from crown to toe with too-hot lava—and his first instinct, as always, was to recoil. He forced himself to endure, pulling and pulling at each sensation until they lit the furnace of his own fury, and he felt his power uncoil like a dragon in his chest. The dust halted in its tracks.

“Thanks!,” came Bee-One's chipper voice over the roar of the wind. His attention was no longer on the scanner, but on the dust around them. The storm raged around them as fiercely as ever, but before the dust could reach them, it was pushed away, like filings repelled from a magnet. “That's a pretty handy trick!”

“My master has taught me a great deal,” Vader replied, his voice muffled by the cloth covering his face. He tried not to think about the one time he had seen Sidious do this, on another planet, with the sands that should have kept the Outlanders at bay parting before his new owner and closing about him like a cage, the blazing wreck of Watto's shop a faint orange glow in the distance, and his mother's screams drowned out by the shrieking of the winds— “Come on, we had better get moving.”

“Roger, roger!” It was the way Bee-One always said it—ever so slightly wry for all his chirpiness—and Vader clung to the familiarity of it, pushing the memories away. This was not Tatooine. No matter how much it may remind him— This was not Tatooine.

WINTER SOLDIER AU

So, I've managed to end up with two separate Winter Soldier AUs, so hopefully this is the one you wanted! This one is based on the premise that Anakin didn't turn to the Dark Side during ROTS and manages to escape Order 66 with a pregnant Padme. Later, the whole Skywalker family is captured by the Empire and Anakin has his memory wiped by Palpatine. It features sort of ghost Padme communicating with her family through dreams and Luke and Leia as Palpatine's adopted wards. This is a little snippet of a scene between Anakin and Leia that I'm writing (just for context, Leia knows that he's her father at this point but he doesn't remember):

"Lord Vader!" she exclaimed eyes wide as her bright little Force presence flared up in surprise. He raised his eyebrows at her expectantly, refusing to show any sign of being abashed at being caught unmasked and wandering through the halls of his master's private collection in the middle of the night. The little princess may be one of his master's heirs, but she was still a child - one who should have been asleep and safely tucked away in bed hours ago.

"Your Highness," he said. "What are you doing up at this hour?"

Leia, unsurprisingly, did not have the grace to look even remotely sheepish at having been caught so flagrantly flouting her father's rules and escaping both her nanny and her guards to boot. Instead, small arms crossed in a mimicry of his own pose, she simply stared up at him, unblinking and defiant, bestowing upon him the fiercest pout she could muster.

"I couldn't sleep," she said ever so slightly petulant. "What are you doing up?"

Vader frowned down at her, unimpressed.

"Thinking."

"About what?"

"About things not for the ears of princesses who should be in bed" he retorted sternly. Apparently, the girl was no more impressed by his evasiveness as he was by her antics, but that didn't mean she was going to get the answers she wanted. The gaze he levelled her with would have been enough to make one of his officers quake in their boots had they known to recognise him without his mask, but the unruly child did not so much as twitch under his firm stare. She glared right back at him, unrepentant.

"I don't want to go to bed," she snapped. "I'm not sleepy!"

Vader sighed. Clearly the hard line was not the right approach, but really, he should have expected that. Little Princess Leia had never been one to be cowed by disapproving words.

"You will be in the morning," he explained, with a patience that he suspected would earn him a few raised eyebrows from his men had they been here. "And then your father will be cross with you for wandering about the Palace on your own."

Mentioning his master was the wrong thing to say. All of a sudden, Leia's eyes filled with tears.

"He's not my father!," she cried stamping her foot on the ground with all the force she could muster. "He's horrible and I hate him! He punishes me no matter what I do so I might as well do something to get in trouble for."

ASK ME ABOUT MY WIPS