Tumblr crosspost (29 December 2019)
Aug. 4th, 2021 03:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anghraineI reblogged a nice comment on my elaborate Avatar/Star Wars plotbunny + the original (May 2013) post, which is:
I’ve written Avatar in the Star Wars ‘verse in varying ways, but what I really want is Star Wars in the Avatar verse. I mentioned some vague ideas before, but what I’d really to either see or get around to writing someday is this:
Air
- The Order of the White Lotus is highly visible and active as a body of warriors. Originally, they were neutral peacekeepers from all four nations, and guardians of the Avatar. Now they’ve largely evolved into defenders/diplomats for the Fire Nation. They also take command of all benders they find as young children and train them in the bending arts and traditions of the Order, but plenty are never found and have to make their own way.
- Qui-Gon Jinn is an earthbender and unorthodox Lotus warrior. Through some various adventures involving his apprentice Obi-Wan (an airbender) and the (disguised, non-bender) Southern Water Tribe chieftainess Padmé, he discovers that the Avatar, believed to be vanished from the earth for generations, has reincarnated as a young boy named Anakin Skywalker. Anakin is a suspiciously golden-eyed slave in the Earth Kingdom.
- Anakin’s mother, Shmi, explains that she’s from the Fire Nation and was sold into slavery as a girl (something to do with sandbenders? idk). Anakin’s father was a fellow firebender who got killed shortly before his birth. Anakin started firebending very early and she’s 99% sure she’s seen him airbending when he tries to help other slaves; she knows he’s the Avatar and has been desperately trying to hide it from their masters.
- Assorted happenings per the Phantom Menace, but as a result of Anakin’s heroics in defense of the Southern Water Tribe, he and Shmi are escorted in honour to the Fire Nation, where the newly made Fire Lord, Palpatine, himself greets them, publicly restoring Shmi’s (now sadly dead) father’s lands to her, and acknowledging Anakin as the Avatar and their people’s greatest treasure etc etc.
- Obi-Wan, raised from apprentice to an OWL whatever, convinces Grand Lotus Yoda to let him train Anakin, as Qui-Gon wished. Yoda is a rather grumpy, very spiritual, very very old waterbender who was strongly influenced by the airbenders who founded the Order in his youth (there are hardly any waterbenders in the OWL anyway—they rarely fit well temperamentally, and the Water Tribes depend heavily on their benders). He looks disapprovingly on attachments, but he agrees and trains Obi-Wan into airbending mastery.
Water
- Padmé resigns as chieftainess or w/e and is appointed to a diplomatic post, the Southern Water Tribe’s representative in the Fire Lord’s court. (Unless RC is a thing, in which case she’s the SWT councilwoman.) Political shenanigans!
- Shmi falls for a very nice Earth Kingdom guy and they get married. They split their time between her Fire Nation property and his home not far from the desert. Anakin doesn’t like her being so close to the sandbenders, but it’s her own choice so w/e.
- He only visits when they’re in the Fire Nation; he knows his stepfather and stepbrother and eventually Beru, too, and is on pretty good terms with them, esp his parents and Beru. There’s a personality clash with Owen (“you should stay with Mother and Father and care for them in their twilight years, not fly in a few times a year for a week, wtf, and then only in the Skywalker house” “I come as often as I can, I have other duties” “o rly? what’s so important that it’s worth neglecting your family???" "um Owen did you forget that I'm the Avatar? I am literally the incarnation of THE PLANET, I have a lot on my plate.” “how could I forget??”). But they still care about each other.
- Padmé ends up taking refuge back in the SWT. Anakin, having now completely mastered firebending and airbending within the Order (where there are a ton of both), gets sent with Padmé to the SWT to (1) protect her and (2) train in waterbending with Jobal, Padmé’s great-aunt and a really kickass master waterbender who lives there. Anakin and Padmé end up falling in love.
- Jobal is not affiliated with the OWL, unlike every bender Anakin knows but the Fire Lord (who is not officially a firebender, but confessed to Anakin that he actually is one, but keeps it quiet for vague political reasons that Anakin neither understands nor cares about). She totally ships Anakin and Padmé.
- Anakin is frustrated because of one, the whole thing with Padmé, but even more because bending has been the one thing in his life that he always had control over and it just came easily to him and he’s been this prodigy. With fire and air, both the physical and spiritual sides just clicked with him - I mean, power and freedom? Right up his alley. And water is just - it’s not that he can’t bend it at all, but it's hard and he struggles and his master keeps saying he’s just moving it around, it’s never been like this, and all this nonsense about change and adapting, he hates change and he struggles to adapt and suddenly he can’t just control it or just shrug and let himself be carried by it.
- I bet there’s a hilarious story about the time he thought maybe he’d try to incorporate air more than fire and nearly drowned.
- Solstice! The previous, earthbending Avatar, who lived in secret her entire life (…not sure who this would be) talks to him about unlocking his chakras and cosmic power sounds pretty appealing WHOOPS HIS MOTHER.
- Anakin and Padmé take his … zeppelin? wait no his DRAGON HE HAS A DRAGON, and fly as fast as she can take them to the desert; his family tells him the sandbenders took her, Anakin goes looking for her and finds her. She’s bleeding, terribly injured; his waterbending isn’t good enough for him to have learned healing, and after a few words she dies. Then the sandbenders attack and he completely loses his shit BOOM AVATAR STATE.
- It’s not deliberate - completely uncontrolled, and he wreaks total havoc with all four elements. When he comes to himself, he finds himself surrounded by a wreck, people are dead, he has to search for his mother’s body everything is terrible and if only he’d mastered waterbending faster none of it would have happened.
- AOTC continues per the original pretty much, only the armies are made up of actual human beings. Anakin returns to the SWT determined to completely master every possible form of bending ever, and he and Padmé are secretly married.
Earth
- ROTS. Whoever the war is actually with fights on. (Water Tribe pirates?) Anakin is mastering earth between battles; much to his relief, it goes much more smoothly than waterbending did. The Fire Lord, who he regards both as a kindly personal mentor and his liege lord, encourages him.
- Obi-Wan has previously tried to restrain his pride and the later years of Anakin’s training within the OWL were rough, especially since he was more focused on his responsibilities (and status) as Avatar. They’re on better terms now that Anakin is no longer an apprentice (he still regards Obi-Wan as his master, but that’s mostly because it’s how he sees the world). They’re bffs! They fight valiantly together! They’re world famous heroes.
- After a particularly adrenaline-raising battle - which, as always, Anakin and Obi-Wan (and the rest of the OWL/the Fire Nation forces) win gloriously - Anakin returns “home” to the Fire Lord’s palace (aka inner city). Padmé meets him there; she’s pregnant. She’s nervous, he’s thrilled. Baby! Baby = family = things right happy yes??? She wants to talk about the ramifications, esp as they’re targeted enough separately as Southern Water Tribe representative Amidala and Avatar Skywalker, much less as a married couple, much less as a married couple with a baby. He’s LALALALA about it. (Clearly pretty disturbed.)
- Anakin slips into the Spirit World. He sees a bunch of confusing visions. (He thankfully does not see Koh, but Koh sees him. He’s doing his duties and then some, however, so Koh decides not to steal his face yay.) The only vision he remembers is of Padmé dying and thegalaxy world falling into bloody chaos.
- Padmé is uncomfortable with the more spiritual side of bending and shrugs it off, despite the history with Shmi. Before Anakin can consult with Obi-Wan, he’s sent to a different front. They bid affectionate farewells.
- In desperation, Anakin turns to Yoda. He doesn’t admit his marriage or his one use of the Avatar State, which he is determined never to repeat in any form. Yoda vaguely tells him that the future is like water, always changing. Although he has mastered water, he still doesn’t seem to understand it. How is earthbending going? wtf he went into the spirit world, he could have lost his face etc etc. Generally unhelpful.
- Tension between the OWL and the Fire Nation. Firebenders within the OWL tend to side with them, as they were raised from infancy within it. Anakin’s relationships with (1) the Fire Nation, (2) being the Avatar, and (3) the OWL are … complex. He simplifies it down to “save Padmé and the baby then things will be okay”
- Padmé sees the writing on the walls. The OWL is increasingly alienating the Fire Nation forces. The Fire Nation forces are becoming increasingly arrogant and powerful, and resent the authority of the benders. Neither group is friendly to the Water Tribes. Her early friendship with the Fire Lord has faded.
- She suspects that her value to the notoriously short-tempered (and politically valuable) Avatar is the only reason she hasn’t been quietly poisoned. He’s clearly beginning to snap under the strain, especially without Obi-Wan’s calming influence, and doesn’t realize it himself. She’s worried about him, her own welfare, their child, her people; she wants to return to the Southern Water Tribe and at the very least, have the baby there.
- Anakin is torn between wanting her and the baby safe and an inability to leave his homeland or his place in the war or what he feels are his responsibilities to the world as the Avatar, and fearing what’ll happen to her without him there. He threw himself into waterbending after his mother’s death and is now one of the greatest healers in the world. Padmé points out that people don’t die in childbirth in the Water Tribes, there are healers everywhere. He’s still torn and haunted by his vision.
- Anakin passes his earthbending test with flying colours; he’s clearly accomplished physically and attuned spiritually to the nature of the element. Mastering all the elements should make him a fully-realized Avatar, but the OWL won’t acknowledge that he is as he still has not (deliberately) accessed the Avatar State. They say he has to master spirit now, which was never brought up before beyond some vague bridging the two worlds stuff.
- Anakin is pissed, especially since they’ve refused to make him an OWL master until he’s fully realized and he wants access to their waterbending scrolls for obscure healing techniques that might save Padmé. They think he’s alarmingly hungry for power and status (especially given that he wasn’t raised within the Order with their values blah blah blah, and after all, it’s a problem they have with firebenders sometimes).
- He finally admits some of his problems to the Fire Lord, now the only person he really trusts. Palpatine studied all the elite forms of bending when he was training as a master firebender, and offers to teach them all to him.
- There’s the one Palpatine himself has mastered from their shared element (lightningbending). Then there are the ones that only Anakin himself can learn. Metalbending (depends on the era). Healing, Anakin already knows, but there’s an even higher form of waterbending, which Palpatine himself doesn’t know but his master, the greatest waterbender ever to live, did: bloodbending. Anakin has heard Yoda’s opinion on it, in a vague way (eeeeevil, also it opens your mind to homicidal madness nopenopenope) and immediately sees the, ah, medical potential.
- He’s nevertheless freaked out, and tells Mace Windu, a master in the OWL and earthbender and swordmaster who’s always disliked him that he’s like 99% sure the Fire Lord himself is the shadowy figure behind everything. He realizes Windu is planning on actually killing the Fire Lord and everything comes together to NOPE.
- Anakin in a panic jumps on his dragon and heads to the palace to find Windu and Palpatine fighting; Windu seems to have won and immobilized Palpatine, and is now about to stab him through the heart. Anakin uses the water from a nearby fountain to slice Windu’s sword arm off and releases Palpatine, who promptly lightningbends Windu through the nearest window. Anakin is horrified and guilt-stricken.
- Anakin’s fall. He swears allegiance (which, in his mind, he already kinda owes - but he also knows this is much much deeper) to Palpatine. Palpatine turns out to only know a few vague things about bloodbending, but it’s enough. Palpatine sends Anakin after the Separatists (whoever they are). He bloodbends them to death and promptly (if unobtrusively) goes over the deep end.
- Palpatine declares the OWL enemies of the Fire Nation. The firebenders in the Order are traitors, the rest are unwelcome within Fire Nation borders, and will be executed if they remain beyond one day. The borders are simultaneously closed. The Fire Nation armies are sent after any members of the OWL within the borders. A few balk at killing people they’ve worked with, especially firebenders, and help them escape (they’re executed themselves, or flee with them). Most fall in line.
- Anakin is made supreme admiral or some such thing and sent to attack the main OWL compound, which is on the Boiling Rock for maximum security. Not much good against an Avatar whose animal companion is a dragon however. He obeys and flies straight there; the last vestiges of good will lead him to use bloodbending rather than burning/crushing/suffocating/slicing them to death - he instantly stops their hearts. (On the downside, this only cements his downwards spiral, whoops.)
- Obi-Wan tells Padmé what has happened. He senses that she’s carrying an overpoweringly strong bender - stronger even than Anakin, which should be impossible - and stows away on her … zeppelin when she goes after Anakin. Anakin is horrified that she’s even there and trying to convince her that it was all to save her and their baby he did all these terrible things for her and she doesn’t even appreciate it???? And then Obi-Wan shows up and he assumes she betrayed him and bloodbends her (not fatally, in the usual writhing puppet way).
- Showdown between Obi-Wan and Anakin! Obi-Wan only has his one element, but air is a super useful element to have in this particular location, and he’s less powerful but supremely skilled. He’s also very strong minded and able to throw off Anakin’s now-wild bloodbending, which enrages Anakin to the point that he can’t really muster the presence of mind for any of the elite forms; he’s down to the basic four elements and can’t seem to pin Obi-Wan down.
- Obi-Wan evades, airbender-style (and breathes yay air); he doesn’t want to hurt him and tries to talk him out of it. Evading waves of fire, boiling water, blasts of air, and rocks is still taking some doing, and would likely be impossible if not for Anakin’s evident irrationality.
- Anakin doesn’t even consider that he won’t win and makes a stupid mistake - he uses air (it’s hot enough without more fire/the water and earth are pretty unfriendly) to launch himself up in the air, intending to jump over Obi-Wan and slice him with the lake, but he’s too low to make it and completely shield himself. Obi-Wan even tells him this. Anakin does it anyway and Obi-Wan airbends him straight into the boiling waters.
- While Anakin screams in agony, too anguished to think of bending himself away, cooling the water down, earthbending himself out, etc etc, Obi-Wan looks at him sadly and then heads out, grabs Padmé’s body (probably poisoned from the fumes - she's not an airbender) and takes the zeppelin away. Anakin’s dragon comes for him and carries him away, to the Fire Lord’s palace, where Palpatine cares for him and Anakin, belatedly, is able to slightly heal himself. (Enough to survive anyway.)
- Padmé gives birth to twins, Luke and Leia, and dies from the poison fumes. They’re both going to be powerful firebenders. An ally of Padmé’s, Bail Organa, agrees to adopt Leia and hide her in the heart of the Fire Nation, hiding her firebending whenever it develops and then teaching her to hide it herself. She’ll be raised in politics, like her mother. (The Water Tribes sealed their borders, so there’s no taking her to their actual relatives.)
- Obi-Wan takes Luke in his zeppelin, escapes the blockade with some creative airbending, and flies to a little Earth Kingdom village on the edge of the desert. Anakin’s stepfather died in the search for Shmi, before Anakin arrived, but his brother and sister-in-law still live there. They consider Anakin’s son their responsibility and dutifully accept him in their household. Obi-Wan heads out to the desert.
- With him, he has Anakin’s katana: it was given to him by Jobal when he finished his training, and he always carried it, in memory of overcoming his greatest obstacle (and because it made his bending 1000% more awesome). Before his fall, he’d talked about wanting it given to Padmé if anything happened to him, with the clearly false excuse that it was originally a Water Tribe artifact from a relation of hers. Now knowing she was pregnant at the time, Obi-Wan realizes Anakin had actually wanted it to go to his child.
Fire
18 years later
- Luke Skywalker is raised by his uncle and aunt. He hates the desert and he hates their dinky little village and he hates living in a Fire Nation colony and he hates that his uncle and aunt are lying to him all the time and looking at him like he’s a bag of blasting powder that might go off at any moment and he hates that he’s stuck in the middle of nowhere and he hates that his best friend has gone and joined the Fire Nation navy wtf and he hates that he always feels weirdly empty and he really, really hates that he can start fires with his mind and he’s not allowed to do it and his family tries to pretend it’s a stupid trick UM NO THIS IS ACTUALLY A BIG DEAL?????
- the Lady Leia is raised in the heart of the Fire Nation. Her father, an important Fire Nation governor and sometime advisor to the Fire Lord, is secretly a member of the Rebellion to Restore the Fire Nation’s Honour. She insists upon joining. Unlike Luke, she hasn’t been breathing flames since she could talk. Well, not literally. She doesn’t even know she’s a firebender, though I’m sure there have been clues.
- When Lord Vader, the last known firebender, discovers her true allegiances, she’s taken prisoner by the notoriously sadistic Admiral Tarkin. He massacres her entire city to get information out of her, including her father, and still fails.
- Han is a pirate in the Earth Kingdom (non-bending obvs)
- the OT happens
- I’m tired now, but Luke and Leia become master firebenders and it’s awesome
- and Anakin goes into the Avatar State to save Luke, takes control of it halfway through, and once he’s saved Luke and is in danger of dying himself, deliberately leaves the Avatar State so that the cycle will be certain to continue, even though it means his death will also be certain
- his dragon curls up with him and dies, and Luke and Leia burn them together
- hmm okay
I’ve written Avatar in the Star Wars ‘verse in varying ways, but what I really want is Star Wars in the Avatar verse. I mentioned some vague ideas before, but what I’d really to either see or get around to writing someday is this:
Air
- The Order of the White Lotus is highly visible and active as a body of warriors. Originally, they were neutral peacekeepers from all four nations, and guardians of the Avatar. Now they’ve largely evolved into defenders/diplomats for the Fire Nation. They also take command of all benders they find as young children and train them in the bending arts and traditions of the Order, but plenty are never found and have to make their own way.
- Qui-Gon Jinn is an earthbender and unorthodox Lotus warrior. Through some various adventures involving his apprentice Obi-Wan (an airbender) and the (disguised, non-bender) Southern Water Tribe chieftainess Padmé, he discovers that the Avatar, believed to be vanished from the earth for generations, has reincarnated as a young boy named Anakin Skywalker. Anakin is a suspiciously golden-eyed slave in the Earth Kingdom.
- Anakin’s mother, Shmi, explains that she’s from the Fire Nation and was sold into slavery as a girl (something to do with sandbenders? idk). Anakin’s father was a fellow firebender who got killed shortly before his birth. Anakin started firebending very early and she’s 99% sure she’s seen him airbending when he tries to help other slaves; she knows he’s the Avatar and has been desperately trying to hide it from their masters.
- Assorted happenings per the Phantom Menace, but as a result of Anakin’s heroics in defense of the Southern Water Tribe, he and Shmi are escorted in honour to the Fire Nation, where the newly made Fire Lord, Palpatine, himself greets them, publicly restoring Shmi’s (now sadly dead) father’s lands to her, and acknowledging Anakin as the Avatar and their people’s greatest treasure etc etc.
- Obi-Wan, raised from apprentice to an OWL whatever, convinces Grand Lotus Yoda to let him train Anakin, as Qui-Gon wished. Yoda is a rather grumpy, very spiritual, very very old waterbender who was strongly influenced by the airbenders who founded the Order in his youth (there are hardly any waterbenders in the OWL anyway—they rarely fit well temperamentally, and the Water Tribes depend heavily on their benders). He looks disapprovingly on attachments, but he agrees and trains Obi-Wan into airbending mastery.
Water
- Padmé resigns as chieftainess or w/e and is appointed to a diplomatic post, the Southern Water Tribe’s representative in the Fire Lord’s court. (Unless RC is a thing, in which case she’s the SWT councilwoman.) Political shenanigans!
- Shmi falls for a very nice Earth Kingdom guy and they get married. They split their time between her Fire Nation property and his home not far from the desert. Anakin doesn’t like her being so close to the sandbenders, but it’s her own choice so w/e.
- He only visits when they’re in the Fire Nation; he knows his stepfather and stepbrother and eventually Beru, too, and is on pretty good terms with them, esp his parents and Beru. There’s a personality clash with Owen (“you should stay with Mother and Father and care for them in their twilight years, not fly in a few times a year for a week, wtf, and then only in the Skywalker house” “I come as often as I can, I have other duties” “o rly? what’s so important that it’s worth neglecting your family???" "um Owen did you forget that I'm the Avatar? I am literally the incarnation of THE PLANET, I have a lot on my plate.” “how could I forget??”). But they still care about each other.
- Padmé ends up taking refuge back in the SWT. Anakin, having now completely mastered firebending and airbending within the Order (where there are a ton of both), gets sent with Padmé to the SWT to (1) protect her and (2) train in waterbending with Jobal, Padmé’s great-aunt and a really kickass master waterbender who lives there. Anakin and Padmé end up falling in love.
- Jobal is not affiliated with the OWL, unlike every bender Anakin knows but the Fire Lord (who is not officially a firebender, but confessed to Anakin that he actually is one, but keeps it quiet for vague political reasons that Anakin neither understands nor cares about). She totally ships Anakin and Padmé.
- Anakin is frustrated because of one, the whole thing with Padmé, but even more because bending has been the one thing in his life that he always had control over and it just came easily to him and he’s been this prodigy. With fire and air, both the physical and spiritual sides just clicked with him - I mean, power and freedom? Right up his alley. And water is just - it’s not that he can’t bend it at all, but it's hard and he struggles and his master keeps saying he’s just moving it around, it’s never been like this, and all this nonsense about change and adapting, he hates change and he struggles to adapt and suddenly he can’t just control it or just shrug and let himself be carried by it.
- I bet there’s a hilarious story about the time he thought maybe he’d try to incorporate air more than fire and nearly drowned.
- Solstice! The previous, earthbending Avatar, who lived in secret her entire life (…not sure who this would be) talks to him about unlocking his chakras and cosmic power sounds pretty appealing WHOOPS HIS MOTHER.
- Anakin and Padmé take his … zeppelin? wait no his DRAGON HE HAS A DRAGON, and fly as fast as she can take them to the desert; his family tells him the sandbenders took her, Anakin goes looking for her and finds her. She’s bleeding, terribly injured; his waterbending isn’t good enough for him to have learned healing, and after a few words she dies. Then the sandbenders attack and he completely loses his shit BOOM AVATAR STATE.
- It’s not deliberate - completely uncontrolled, and he wreaks total havoc with all four elements. When he comes to himself, he finds himself surrounded by a wreck, people are dead, he has to search for his mother’s body everything is terrible and if only he’d mastered waterbending faster none of it would have happened.
- AOTC continues per the original pretty much, only the armies are made up of actual human beings. Anakin returns to the SWT determined to completely master every possible form of bending ever, and he and Padmé are secretly married.
Earth
- ROTS. Whoever the war is actually with fights on. (Water Tribe pirates?) Anakin is mastering earth between battles; much to his relief, it goes much more smoothly than waterbending did. The Fire Lord, who he regards both as a kindly personal mentor and his liege lord, encourages him.
- Obi-Wan has previously tried to restrain his pride and the later years of Anakin’s training within the OWL were rough, especially since he was more focused on his responsibilities (and status) as Avatar. They’re on better terms now that Anakin is no longer an apprentice (he still regards Obi-Wan as his master, but that’s mostly because it’s how he sees the world). They’re bffs! They fight valiantly together! They’re world famous heroes.
- After a particularly adrenaline-raising battle - which, as always, Anakin and Obi-Wan (and the rest of the OWL/the Fire Nation forces) win gloriously - Anakin returns “home” to the Fire Lord’s palace (aka inner city). Padmé meets him there; she’s pregnant. She’s nervous, he’s thrilled. Baby! Baby = family = things right happy yes??? She wants to talk about the ramifications, esp as they’re targeted enough separately as Southern Water Tribe representative Amidala and Avatar Skywalker, much less as a married couple, much less as a married couple with a baby. He’s LALALALA about it. (Clearly pretty disturbed.)
- Anakin slips into the Spirit World. He sees a bunch of confusing visions. (He thankfully does not see Koh, but Koh sees him. He’s doing his duties and then some, however, so Koh decides not to steal his face yay.) The only vision he remembers is of Padmé dying and the
- Padmé is uncomfortable with the more spiritual side of bending and shrugs it off, despite the history with Shmi. Before Anakin can consult with Obi-Wan, he’s sent to a different front. They bid affectionate farewells.
- In desperation, Anakin turns to Yoda. He doesn’t admit his marriage or his one use of the Avatar State, which he is determined never to repeat in any form. Yoda vaguely tells him that the future is like water, always changing. Although he has mastered water, he still doesn’t seem to understand it. How is earthbending going? wtf he went into the spirit world, he could have lost his face etc etc. Generally unhelpful.
- Tension between the OWL and the Fire Nation. Firebenders within the OWL tend to side with them, as they were raised from infancy within it. Anakin’s relationships with (1) the Fire Nation, (2) being the Avatar, and (3) the OWL are … complex. He simplifies it down to “save Padmé and the baby then things will be okay”
- Padmé sees the writing on the walls. The OWL is increasingly alienating the Fire Nation forces. The Fire Nation forces are becoming increasingly arrogant and powerful, and resent the authority of the benders. Neither group is friendly to the Water Tribes. Her early friendship with the Fire Lord has faded.
- She suspects that her value to the notoriously short-tempered (and politically valuable) Avatar is the only reason she hasn’t been quietly poisoned. He’s clearly beginning to snap under the strain, especially without Obi-Wan’s calming influence, and doesn’t realize it himself. She’s worried about him, her own welfare, their child, her people; she wants to return to the Southern Water Tribe and at the very least, have the baby there.
- Anakin is torn between wanting her and the baby safe and an inability to leave his homeland or his place in the war or what he feels are his responsibilities to the world as the Avatar, and fearing what’ll happen to her without him there. He threw himself into waterbending after his mother’s death and is now one of the greatest healers in the world. Padmé points out that people don’t die in childbirth in the Water Tribes, there are healers everywhere. He’s still torn and haunted by his vision.
- Anakin passes his earthbending test with flying colours; he’s clearly accomplished physically and attuned spiritually to the nature of the element. Mastering all the elements should make him a fully-realized Avatar, but the OWL won’t acknowledge that he is as he still has not (deliberately) accessed the Avatar State. They say he has to master spirit now, which was never brought up before beyond some vague bridging the two worlds stuff.
- Anakin is pissed, especially since they’ve refused to make him an OWL master until he’s fully realized and he wants access to their waterbending scrolls for obscure healing techniques that might save Padmé. They think he’s alarmingly hungry for power and status (especially given that he wasn’t raised within the Order with their values blah blah blah, and after all, it’s a problem they have with firebenders sometimes).
- He finally admits some of his problems to the Fire Lord, now the only person he really trusts. Palpatine studied all the elite forms of bending when he was training as a master firebender, and offers to teach them all to him.
- There’s the one Palpatine himself has mastered from their shared element (lightningbending). Then there are the ones that only Anakin himself can learn. Metalbending (depends on the era). Healing, Anakin already knows, but there’s an even higher form of waterbending, which Palpatine himself doesn’t know but his master, the greatest waterbender ever to live, did: bloodbending. Anakin has heard Yoda’s opinion on it, in a vague way (eeeeevil, also it opens your mind to homicidal madness nopenopenope) and immediately sees the, ah, medical potential.
- He’s nevertheless freaked out, and tells Mace Windu, a master in the OWL and earthbender and swordmaster who’s always disliked him that he’s like 99% sure the Fire Lord himself is the shadowy figure behind everything. He realizes Windu is planning on actually killing the Fire Lord and everything comes together to NOPE.
- Anakin in a panic jumps on his dragon and heads to the palace to find Windu and Palpatine fighting; Windu seems to have won and immobilized Palpatine, and is now about to stab him through the heart. Anakin uses the water from a nearby fountain to slice Windu’s sword arm off and releases Palpatine, who promptly lightningbends Windu through the nearest window. Anakin is horrified and guilt-stricken.
- Anakin’s fall. He swears allegiance (which, in his mind, he already kinda owes - but he also knows this is much much deeper) to Palpatine. Palpatine turns out to only know a few vague things about bloodbending, but it’s enough. Palpatine sends Anakin after the Separatists (whoever they are). He bloodbends them to death and promptly (if unobtrusively) goes over the deep end.
- Palpatine declares the OWL enemies of the Fire Nation. The firebenders in the Order are traitors, the rest are unwelcome within Fire Nation borders, and will be executed if they remain beyond one day. The borders are simultaneously closed. The Fire Nation armies are sent after any members of the OWL within the borders. A few balk at killing people they’ve worked with, especially firebenders, and help them escape (they’re executed themselves, or flee with them). Most fall in line.
- Anakin is made supreme admiral or some such thing and sent to attack the main OWL compound, which is on the Boiling Rock for maximum security. Not much good against an Avatar whose animal companion is a dragon however. He obeys and flies straight there; the last vestiges of good will lead him to use bloodbending rather than burning/crushing/suffocating/slicing them to death - he instantly stops their hearts. (On the downside, this only cements his downwards spiral, whoops.)
- Obi-Wan tells Padmé what has happened. He senses that she’s carrying an overpoweringly strong bender - stronger even than Anakin, which should be impossible - and stows away on her … zeppelin when she goes after Anakin. Anakin is horrified that she’s even there and trying to convince her that it was all to save her and their baby he did all these terrible things for her and she doesn’t even appreciate it???? And then Obi-Wan shows up and he assumes she betrayed him and bloodbends her (not fatally, in the usual writhing puppet way).
- Showdown between Obi-Wan and Anakin! Obi-Wan only has his one element, but air is a super useful element to have in this particular location, and he’s less powerful but supremely skilled. He’s also very strong minded and able to throw off Anakin’s now-wild bloodbending, which enrages Anakin to the point that he can’t really muster the presence of mind for any of the elite forms; he’s down to the basic four elements and can’t seem to pin Obi-Wan down.
- Obi-Wan evades, airbender-style (and breathes yay air); he doesn’t want to hurt him and tries to talk him out of it. Evading waves of fire, boiling water, blasts of air, and rocks is still taking some doing, and would likely be impossible if not for Anakin’s evident irrationality.
- Anakin doesn’t even consider that he won’t win and makes a stupid mistake - he uses air (it’s hot enough without more fire/the water and earth are pretty unfriendly) to launch himself up in the air, intending to jump over Obi-Wan and slice him with the lake, but he’s too low to make it and completely shield himself. Obi-Wan even tells him this. Anakin does it anyway and Obi-Wan airbends him straight into the boiling waters.
- While Anakin screams in agony, too anguished to think of bending himself away, cooling the water down, earthbending himself out, etc etc, Obi-Wan looks at him sadly and then heads out, grabs Padmé’s body (probably poisoned from the fumes - she's not an airbender) and takes the zeppelin away. Anakin’s dragon comes for him and carries him away, to the Fire Lord’s palace, where Palpatine cares for him and Anakin, belatedly, is able to slightly heal himself. (Enough to survive anyway.)
- Padmé gives birth to twins, Luke and Leia, and dies from the poison fumes. They’re both going to be powerful firebenders. An ally of Padmé’s, Bail Organa, agrees to adopt Leia and hide her in the heart of the Fire Nation, hiding her firebending whenever it develops and then teaching her to hide it herself. She’ll be raised in politics, like her mother. (The Water Tribes sealed their borders, so there’s no taking her to their actual relatives.)
- Obi-Wan takes Luke in his zeppelin, escapes the blockade with some creative airbending, and flies to a little Earth Kingdom village on the edge of the desert. Anakin’s stepfather died in the search for Shmi, before Anakin arrived, but his brother and sister-in-law still live there. They consider Anakin’s son their responsibility and dutifully accept him in their household. Obi-Wan heads out to the desert.
- With him, he has Anakin’s katana: it was given to him by Jobal when he finished his training, and he always carried it, in memory of overcoming his greatest obstacle (and because it made his bending 1000% more awesome). Before his fall, he’d talked about wanting it given to Padmé if anything happened to him, with the clearly false excuse that it was originally a Water Tribe artifact from a relation of hers. Now knowing she was pregnant at the time, Obi-Wan realizes Anakin had actually wanted it to go to his child.
Fire
18 years later
- Luke Skywalker is raised by his uncle and aunt. He hates the desert and he hates their dinky little village and he hates living in a Fire Nation colony and he hates that his uncle and aunt are lying to him all the time and looking at him like he’s a bag of blasting powder that might go off at any moment and he hates that he’s stuck in the middle of nowhere and he hates that his best friend has gone and joined the Fire Nation navy wtf and he hates that he always feels weirdly empty and he really, really hates that he can start fires with his mind and he’s not allowed to do it and his family tries to pretend it’s a stupid trick UM NO THIS IS ACTUALLY A BIG DEAL?????
- the Lady Leia is raised in the heart of the Fire Nation. Her father, an important Fire Nation governor and sometime advisor to the Fire Lord, is secretly a member of the Rebellion to Restore the Fire Nation’s Honour. She insists upon joining. Unlike Luke, she hasn’t been breathing flames since she could talk. Well, not literally. She doesn’t even know she’s a firebender, though I’m sure there have been clues.
- When Lord Vader, the last known firebender, discovers her true allegiances, she’s taken prisoner by the notoriously sadistic Admiral Tarkin. He massacres her entire city to get information out of her, including her father, and still fails.
- Han is a pirate in the Earth Kingdom (non-bending obvs)
- the OT happens
- I’m tired now, but Luke and Leia become master firebenders and it’s awesome
- and Anakin goes into the Avatar State to save Luke, takes control of it halfway through, and once he’s saved Luke and is in danger of dying himself, deliberately leaves the Avatar State so that the cycle will be certain to continue, even though it means his death will also be certain
- his dragon curls up with him and dies, and Luke and Leia burn them together
- hmm okay