How to Disappear (Anakin Skywalker x Reader)

Anakin never thought he would have to bury another body.

Yet here he was, on Naboo, staring at the foot of a white marble statue beside the lake where he had found you. It was of a woman posing with her hands laced at her stomach, gazing mournfully in the distance. She stood at least a few feet taller than him and didn't seem bothered by his presence. He wondered how long she stood there. By the discoloration, cracks, and vines that snaked around her body, he assumed a while.

Anakin liked that about statues; they never died. They remained frozen in time, unable to leave, unable to understand, and immortalized into precious stone. Maybe that was what charmed him about Naboo. Life is vividly captured in its foundations, unlike Tatooine, where it drained like grains of sand down the dunes, or Coruscant, where the sun only reached the towering skyscrapers.

Green fields speckled with unusually colorful flowers painted the hills of Naboo. Not one leaf, twig, or rock felt out of place. The warmth on his skin is welcomed, and the dark robe he usually wore is forgotten in the cockpit of the small ship he had stolen on that fateful night.

The halls of the Imperial Palace follow him in his dreams. Marble pillars line that never-ending rug, which reached in either direction with no end in sight. This dream isn't like any other he had. No amount of pinching or prodding is enough to keep them at bay. The bloody shoe prints return, staining the never-ending rug, and the hairs on Anakin's neck shiver violently. The sharp tug of a taut string vibrates in his ear; it's the blood rushing to his face. You call his name from somewhere far away. And then, and only then, will he wake up in a sweat.

In a strange way, he haunted that place as much as you did.

But here, on Naboo, there was life. Life lived on, and so he would too, even if you weren't here to experience it with him. Which is why he chose to bury you here, at the foot of a Nabooian statue, to protect you wherever you were. It helped that the statue looked somewhat like you. If he really wanted to, he could close his eyes and imagine that the shadow cast on his face was you. Maybe he would fall for the ruse, but ultimately, no matter how hard he tried, he would open his eyes, and the stone-cold woman would still be staring off into the distance.

His shoulders fall.

Anakin never found your body. After Palpatine's death, he left half alive, stumbling through the halls of Coruscant, shivering with a throbbing headache and a gaping hole in his stomach. The only evidence he had been there were the bloody footprints after he limped through the pool of Palpatine's blood and down the never-ending rug that he sees in his dreams. He stole a small ship to escape—the smallest one he could find—while bleeding out in order to make his departure as discreet as possible. The next days were a fever dream, where he relied on his botched memory of Obi-Wan teaching him how to administer first aid to himself. He had only been a Padawan then, and he thought Obi-Wan was only trying to waste his time because why would Anakin need to learn something so trivial when there were always medical droids and ships nearby?

Weeks passed until Anakin could stand without the feeling of fainting or the urge to vomit. He had been extremely lucky to survive the attack and have half a mind to set his new cramped ship to autopilot before he lost too much blood. It was when he was starting to come around that he grabbed his dark robe, which had been tossed aside carelessly, and found your lightsaber buried in the pocket. He cried that night and popped a few stitches from his effort.

Anakin returned to the Imperial Palace when his wound was healed enough. He planned to recover your body so he could bury it on Naboo with your mother. But when his small ship rattled into the Coruscanti atmosphere, all that was left of the Imperial Palace were ashes. Rioters and rebels alike mobbed the place, trashing the ancient marble foundations and setting fire to the remains of the Empire, taking what was left of you with it.