Star Wars fic: "Wake the Storm" (10/10) - COMPLETE

[bedlamsbard]

Wake the Storm (75475 words) by bedlamsbard
Chapters: 10/10
Fandom: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars Original Trilogy, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Author Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Characters: Anakin Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Palpatine | Darth Sidious, Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker, Leia Organa, Chewbacca, Lando Calrissian, Yoda, Padmé Amidala
Additional Tags: Time Travel, Crossover
Summary:

Considering that he had picked up what was probably a Sith artifact, promptly passed out in the middle of a war zone, and apparently woken up twenty years in the future with Obi-Wan having taken up residence in his head, Anakin thought he was entitled to have a few questions.

*

Luke twisted the towel between his hands and said, “Leia, can I ask you a weird question?”

She looked at him in surprise. “Of course.”

“Do you love your father?”

Leia’s eyes went wide with surprise. Luke got a distant impression of pain and regret in the Force, but it vanished as Leia said, “Yes, of course.”

“What if you found out – I’m sorry, you can tell me to stop if you want – what if you found out that he had done something really bad?”

“Like what?”

“Like killing a lot of people,” Luke said.

Comments

[sacredpools]

I, uh, wasn't sure if you wanted this here or on lj or on ao3, so I decided to just put it here. I want to say first that I love this story. Seriously, I love it so much (I kept on intending to comment on each chapter and then getting scared to because I'm really bad with commenting, but I told myself I'd at least comment for the last chapter!). You're actually pretty much the only reason that I read Star Wars fic at all -- one day I was rereading Dust and going through the Warsverse masterpost and I thought to myself, hmm, I really like this author, maybe I should look at other stuff they've done, and then I read all your Star Wars fic. And then I got hooked, and especially on the Anakin/Obi-Wan friendship/relationship/profound bond/whatever. And I tore through everything on them I could find, so now Anakin/Obi-Wan is one of my favorite things to read (although it unfortunately doesn't seem to have been as prevalent as Qui-Gon/Obi-Wan, which I don't really care for as much).
Anyway, I was talking about how much I love your story. Time travel and alternate universes are basically my most favorite things ever, but besides the plot, I love how you wrote and treated the characters, how (future) Obi-Wan spends most of the first part lying through his teeth (from a certain point of view) to Anakin and that Anakin gets to meet and talk to Luke and Leia without any of them having any idea who they all are, and Anakin's reaction to what Vader did, and everything about Yoda, and the way you make all these little references to things that have happened (okay, when Luke gets nervous because Anakin is going to tell him "the truth" and last time that didn't go so well for him that just made me really happy) and these well known lines get said in slightly different contexts and how we know all these things that the characters don't that kind of changes the meaning of things that they say and Anakin confronting Palpatine and Vader and command word Retribution and then they end up in a *completely different* universe in the end -- I'll stop now. But seriously, this was a *really* amazing story to read, and every time I got a notification for a new chapter it just made me incredibly happy. 
I don't know if you plan on ever writing some sort of sequel or elaborating on The Further Adventures of Anakin, Obi-Wan, Padmé and Rex as they travel through Time and Space, but I'm kind of curious about what happens after that (and the fate of Anakin in the new universe! I figure if the turning point was the blockade of Naboo, then he's probably still on Tatooine? And I further assume that Palpatine is still controlling everything (I think he'd already recruited Dooku by then? I'm not sure, timelines aren't my strongest point). Does he get involved, does he spend the rest of his life as a slave somewhere, what happens?). Also, (how) do you think that the resurrection of young Obi-Wan in the future changes the timeline? Or Anakin and Obi-Wan and Padmé disappearing from the past. I mean, that's a pretty significant change right there even without Palpatine destroying everything. I assume that they just kind of travel around various universes without going back. Sorry in advance if people asking you about the future of your stories bothers you or anything. Regardless, thank you so much for writing this. It was an absolute pleasure to read, and I will read anything you write (does that sound stalkerish? It's not supposed to sound stalkerish), and you're a really great writer. 

[bedlamsbard]

This is the best kind of comment to get, thank you so much! It made me so happy that I had to sit on it a few days before replying. I'm so glad that you enjoyed the fic.

One of my favorite things about Star Wars is that you have these repetitive moments -- either because of the dialogue, or the lighting, or the blocking, or the setting, or any of those tiny things that pop up occasionally -- that occur over and over again, and that was really something that I wanted to do in Wake with a lot of the scenes, interactions, and conversations that get recontextualized and swapped around from character to character. (The scene I always think of, and probably one of the most conspicuous examples, is the last scene of Chapter 5 when Anakin watches the security holos; which is blocked out to exactly mirror the same scene from RotS, with Anakin speaking Obi-Wan's lines and Obi-Wan Yoda's, and then slides into the Obi-Wan and Luke conversation from RotJ. The other big one is the Mustafar duel. Uh, I really like talking about my own writing, even when it's probably not appropriate, so sorry?) Basically, any time there was a chance to put in a parallel or a nod to something in the canon, I took it. I'm really glad to hear that it worked for you!

I love talking about my stories -- I actually talk pretty much constantly on Twitter about what I'm writing, because I can't shut up even when I probably should, so no, I don't mind being asked at all. I talked about the backstory for the new universe in this post -- I've been calling it the Queen's Knight universe, for Obi-Wan and Padme there.

I balked at the last minute from making this explicit, which I regret in retrospect, but resurrected!Obi-Wan actually goes back into the Force; the OT timeline in Wake is theoretically supposed to proceed as in canon, which is why Luke's last line is the same as Padme's in RotS. I was trying to justify Luke trying to redeem Vader in RotJ, which never made quite as much sense to me as it probably should have.

Since Obi-Wan, Anakin, and Padme would have died in the destruction of the Senate Building anyway, their disappearance from their original timeline (which is not the same as the OT timeline for reasons that precede Anakin's original disappearance -- the Ouroboros is damaged in one and not in the other -- which I possibly didn't make clear enough in the text) doesn't have any effect on the past. I've always been of the opinion that some things in the Star Wars timeline are fixed points (thus the epilogue title, although at one point it was called "Some Things are Certain", a title that was also briefly considered for the preceding chapter), so no matter how the details differ, the Republic will always fall and the Jedi will always die. From the moment I came up with the Ouroboros, though, there was about a 95% chance that the trio would end up in another timeline (because I love AUs. I really love AUs. If I hadn't known how Wake was going to end when I started it, there would probably be ten chapters in the middle where Anakin just bops around different universes trying to get back to his home universe); the other 5% was for the possibility they'd end up on the run in their own universe.

Thank you again for reading!