let's be protective with mama
...which will have consequences...

Sometimes the muse is 9 hours of a space opera that’s bad but good but also a meme all at once.
yeah he bites
Rating: Mature Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: CT-7567 | Rex/Anakin Skywalker, Padmé Amidala/Anakin Skywalker (background) Additional Tags: Unrequited Love, One-Sided Attraction, Pining, this is sad im sorry, Angst No Happy Ending, Rex is supportive of Anakin/Padmé hes just gay and depressed, Clone Centric (Star Wars), no sex but sex is discussed Summary:
Rex’s armor was too thick and his blacks too insulating, he was never able to feel the heat of Skywalker’s palm when he touched him, just the pressure.
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Short and sad one-sided Rexwalker
always funny to remember darth vader is anakin skywalker. the adrenaline junkie chucklefuck who used to dive head first out of speeders and built a pod racer in his yard when he was like six is now upper-middle management for the evil empire. half of his appearances in the original trilogy are Meetings. vader spends like 80% of his time dealing with bureaucratic bullshit. status updates. team meetings. holo-Zooms. budget rundowns. anakin betrayed the jedi and caused the fall of the republic and his punishment is being CC'd on every email forever. and you know what. he would hate that. the punishment fits the criminal
I HC that Sidious put him in upper management specifically to make that hate flow. He looked at Jedi Anakin and thought to himself: what does this guy like? Jumping out of moving vehicles at 30,000 feet? Well, we won’t be doing *gestures at all of Anakin* that. Put this guy in an office.

also really funny, and by funny i mean maddening that, despite the fact that star wars fandom largely agrees palpatine groomed anakin, and thusly a lot of debates fly back and forth about the blame game of that particular happenstance, but i'm not convinced a lot of people in those discussions are aware either of how grooming generally works or what ways it benefits palpatine to manipulate anakin the most. which is the part i actually care about, from my consistent and totally academic interest in whatever the fuck is wrong with anakin skywalker's brain. the most anyone can ever say is, well, palpatine was very nice and he flattered anakin's ego - but that's only part of what a guy with access to a vulnerable child is going to be toying with, and that's only a fraction of what he can do. this is an underestimation of what emotional manipulation can do.
we have to remember, palpatine's end goal with anakin, what he wants from anakin and why he engages with anakin at all, isn't to get a spoiled egomaniac with god powers. what palpatine wants is a perpetually terrifying second-in-command, a butcher on tap, a guy who listens to palpatine and only to palpatine and will do explicitly and only palpatine's will. spoiled egomaniac is the neophyte stage of the personality palpatine is invested in installing his sith apprentice project with. palpatine's self-appointed job probably imcludes shit like:
TL;DR a looooooot of palpatine's theoretical gambit is intensely controlling anakin's worldview, and leveraging the emotional validation anakin actually wants out of the relationship to get it done. palpatine wants anakin to vent his problems, and then palpatine wants to re-interpret those problems so that the reality is essentially overwritten by what palpatine wants anakin to believe is true. it goes from anakin wanting to prove himself to obi-wan at Age Baby, and then palpatine says how sweet :) do you think it will help him be less callous towards you? i've noticed that he is. and when anakin's a little older, he's frustrated that he doesn't feel like he ever impresses obi-wan, the chancellor is right, his master is very callous, and palpatine says :) you may never impress him. and it just goes like that, an incessant cycle of "this thing didn't happen the way you think it did" and if anakin doesn't take palpatine at his word, he loses palpatine, and the validation he craves. horrible! but this is what this shit might have actually looked like.