Anakin Skywalker

Once a slave boy on Tatooine, Qui-gon Jinn has found Anakin to be very strong in the Force. He freed him from his slavery to be trained as a Jedi against the warnings of The Jedi Council.

The Council believed that Anakin was too old to be trained as a Jedi. He has already formed too much attachments to the world around him.

But Qui-gon believed that Anakin was the One in the prophecies. He believed that Anakin will be the one to bring balance back to the Force.

Anakin was indeed strong in the Force. In his short years of training he rose to be the best Jedi the Republic has ever seen. Some believed that he surpasses any other Jedi in the Council. Qui-gon believed. Palpatine believed. Anakin believed it too.

This is Anakin Skywalker:

The most powerful Jedi of his generation. Perhaps of any generation. The fastest. The strongest. An unbeatable pilot. An unstoppable warrior. On the ground, in the air or sea or space, there is no one even close. He has not just power, not just skill, but dash; that rare, invaluable combination of boldness and grace.

He is the best there is at what he does. The best there has ever been. And he knows it.

HoloNet features call him the hero with no fear. And why not? What should he be afraid of?

Except –

Fear lives inside him anyway, chewing away the firewalls around his heart.

Anakin sometimes thinks of the dread that eats at his heart as a dragon. Children on Tatooine tell each other of the dragon that live inside the suns; smaller cousins of the sun dragons that are supposed to live inside the fusion furnaces that power everything from starships to podracers.

But Anakin’s fear is another kind of dragon. A cold kind. A dead kind.

Not nearly dead enough.

Not long after he became Obi-wan’s Padawn, all those years ago, a minor mission had brought them to a dead system: one so immeasurably old that its star had long ago turned to a frigid dwarf of hyper-compacted trace metals, hovering a quantum fraction of a degree above absolute zero. Anakin couldn’t even remember what the mission might have been, but he’d never forgotten that dead star.

It had scared him.

“Stars can die -?”

“It is the way of the universe, which is another manner of saying that it is the will of the force,” obi-wan had told him. “Everything dies. In time, even stars burn out. That is why Jedi form no attachments: all things pass. To hold on to something - or someone - beyond its time is to set your selfish desires against the force. That is a path of misery, Anakin; the Jedi do not walk it.”

That is the kind of fear that lives inside Anakin Skywalker: the dragon of that dead star. It is an ancient, cold dead voice within his heart that whisper all things die …

In bright day he can’t hear it; battle, mission, even reports before the Jedi council can make him forget it’s even there. But at night-

At night, the walls he has built sometimes start to frost over. Sometimes they start to crack. At night, the dead-star dragon sometimes sneaks through the cracks and crawls up into his brains and chews at the inside of his skull. The dragon whispers of what Anakin has lost. And what he will lose.

The dragon reminds him, every night, of how he held his dying mother in his arms, of how she had spent her last strength to say I knew you would come for me Anakin …

The dragon reminds him, every night, that someday he will lose Obi-wan. He will lose Padme. Or they will lose him.

But the man he flies to rescue is a closer friend then he’d ever hoped to have.

The Supreme chancellor has been family to Anakin: always there, always caring, always free with advice and unstinting aid. A sympathetic ear and a kindly, loving, unconditional acceptance Anakin could never get from other Jedi. Not even form obi-wan. He can tell Palpatine things he could never share with his master. He can tell Palpatine things he can’t even tell Padme.

Now the supreme Chancellor is in the worst kind of danger. And Anakin in on his way despite the dread boiling through his blood. That’s what makes him a real hero. Not the way the HoloNet labels him; not without fear, but stronger than fear.

He looks the dragon in the eye and doesn’t even slow down. Locked away behind the walls of his heart, the dragon that is his fear coils and squirms and hisses.

Because his real fear, in a universe where even stars can die, is that being the best will never be quite good enough.

For all his powers, Anakin could not save his dying mother.
For all his powers, Anakin could not save everyone.
For all his powers, Anakin sometimes could not even save anyone.
For all his powers, Anakin will always feel that it is never quite good enough.
For all his powers, he could not change the fact that all things die -