#(blind) rage

He felt his pulse pound against his skin. Felt a chill sink down into his core, burrow into his bones, and come out a fine, misty fog when he finally exhaled. Felt the static buzz of Power dance just out of reach, teasing at his fingertips and daring him to seize it. To dip in a hand. To dive headlong into the depths. To embrace what he was. What he could be if he only let go of that last length of his leash.

Time stretched and shrunk. Blasterbolts singed his robes. His men screamed, dying and surviving and falling and rising — each a little pinpoint of light so far on the edge of his senses that they might as well not have existed at all. Some part of him, distant and outraged at his paralysis, railed against that, beating against the slowly swelling storm surging outward from within. But all he did was stare.

At his Captain.

At his Padawan.

At his Master.

At the people he loved, still and silent on the sun-baked ground, tossed like dolls and left to the wastes to rot among the corpses of his fallen men.

He blinked once, his eyes dry and aching, and slowly pried his flesh hand open from the white-knuckled fist he didn’t remember making. The wind picked up, gently at first and then stronger, wilder, until it howled across the canyon and kicked up thick, choking clouds of dust. He heard his men shout, pulling back and ducking for cover as rocks pelted the battlefield and the droids pressed on, unseen and undeterred by the weather’s sudden turn. It was little more than white noise to him.

Anakin lifted his hand, still open, and let go of his leash.

The Force was an ocean, murky and deep, and he the storm that would pull it to shore. One and apart. Feeding each other until it was impossible to tell where one ended and the other began, light and warmth giving way to frigid violence. They were the wind ripping through the ranks, the dust in the air, the earth cracked and splitting underfoot. They were the churning, fiery flows feeding into dormant bluffs and peaks, and the thrum of fear coursing through the veins of the thousands of unfortunate sentients bleeding pain-loss-fight-survive into the air. Into them.

They were all and they were none and they howled the pain of their loss and their gain into the skies and the stars. All and none were with them, lost and found in the tides they loosed upon the soulless heaps of metal that had dared to steal what was theirs. The echoes lingered and soothed and bent to their rage, ghosts of lives lost, forgotten, mourned, loved, and missed. Tangible in a way they hadn’t been when they had been only finite flesh and not the cosmos condensed.

Their Master.

Their Padawan.

Their Captain.

Always there. Always gone. Spurring on the destruction they wreaked and pulling them back. They snarled, wind whipping and cutting more fiercely than before against crumbling, centuries-old stone and quickly accumulating metallic debris. Who were they to command them to stop? To pry at their anger to the fraying edges of peace slumbering beneath?

They were Nothing.

They were Everything.

They were his.

They— Anakin gasped, wet and ragged, as the world condensed back down to a single point. A single body, kneeling on the ground amidst the husks of thousands of battered, broken droids. Feeling came back slowly: electric fire in his limbs, the buzzing malfunction of his prosthetic against healed flesh, and hands. On his arms, his shoulders, pulling on his tunics.

His men, he realized through the receding fog that had clouded him to his dull, human senses, each of them a tiny star unto themselves so much like the supernovas he’d danced among in the Force when he was them rather than just himself. The members of Torrent he could see looked battered, wide eyed and shaken badly enough that he almost didn’t recognize the terror bleeding off of them for how rarely he’d seen it so potent and widespread.

He reached out to the man closest to him — Kix, wide eyed and pale even as he set about checking Anakin over — and flinched when the medic startled. Afraid of him. He let his arm fall back to his side, noting how the others had tensed when he’d moved, and pressed his lips into a thin, unhappy line.

“Sir,” Kix started but trailed off, an obvious question in his eyes nestled close to poorly hidden fear.

“What was that?” The question came from someone behind him, sharp and demanding with only the slightest tremor snaking through the words. He wondered who it might have been, still too shaken and his senses too muddled to parse out anything more specific than one-of-his-men and not-Kix.

Anakin hesitated. Unsure if he could explain. Unsure if he even understood, let alone so something so complicated as talk. He was sure just moving, being, was a miracle. Talking, and words at all really, seemed … beyond him. He shook his head in lieu of an answer and hoped they understood. The sudden spike in anger told him they didn’t — or just didn’t like that he couldn’t — but that was fine.

They deserved a little anger for how badly he’d scared them, no matter how he couldn’t remember much beyond the anger and the connection to something more. They deserved more than anger for how badly he’d let them down.

Rex.

Ahsoka.

Obi-Wan.

If he didn’t feel quite so tied up in knots, Anakin thought he might have started bawling now that the anger had been fed and stripped away, leaving behind only raw grief underneath the mess he’d made of his mind and connection to the Force.

A hand on the back of his neck startled him, snapping his head to the side to see Jesse, grim and unhappy — grieving, his mind supplied — but not backing down when their eyes met. The men seemed to hold their collective breath, waiting, and only relaxed when Jesse nodded, one short, sharp jerk of his head. He squeezed the nape of Anakin’s neck once, an offer of comfort he wasn’t quite equipped to process yet, and didn’t pull away when Kix shuffled forward again to reach for Anakin’s hand.

He watched Kix clean and treat the worst of his wounds in a daze, most of his attention split between the men around him and the bulk of his forces further back, helping each other. They’d lost more men than he liked, and he wasn’t sure how many were his fault. He Didn’t know how to ask how many lights he’d personally snuffed out, so he didn’t. Not yet.