"I can't believe they let you teach."

The sun was beginning to go down and Anakin was finished with his office hours. It was time for a friendly spar with his alternate-universe son.

You know, as so many families do.

Ben had found a rock to sit on and observe, looking faintly embarrassed by the entire proceeding.

The Second Annual Skywalker Family Lightsaber Duel and Sulking Contest was about to begin.

Come on down.

It wasn't that Anakin was hiding from anyone so much as he hadn't gone back to the house since class yesterday.

Folded up in his robe and staring out at the ocean, he concentrated on breathing and just getting through one of the worst days on the calendar for him.

Which meant that he wouldn't notice anyone coming up behind him, poor bastard.

[OOC: Locked for Skywalker Family Drama. Conversation topic NFB, who was there, as always, open for the squirrels.]

First there was only light: bright, beautiful, incandescent light. It surrounded him, and bound him, and held the universe together.

I am.

Then there was awareness. He was everywhere and everything--he was grains of sand on Tatooine and drops of water in a lake on Naboo, he was the trees on Endor and the metal sneer on the Emperor's mouth as his statue crashed to the ground on Imperial Center.

...But that wasn't entirely right.

I am...Anakin Skywalker.

He reached out, trying to see his son's face, to hear his daughter's laughter more clearly...and touched glass. And Force knew Obi-Wan's ghost had been fastidious about sitting down when he'd visited, but Anakin was fairly certain that he wasn't supposed to be able to feel things quite this obviously.

He opened his eyes.

And found himself floating in a Spaarti cloning cylinder. There was only one place in the galaxy where there had been a clone left of his old body.

Byss.

One of the most intensely Dark Side planets in the galaxy.

I am Anakin Skywalker...and I am so, so screwed.

( Did you really think he was gone? )