oh my god I just read a post that was like “fuck this nonsense send MACE WINDU back in time to unfuck the prequels!!” and now I will never, ever be satisfied until I find the 300k version of that fic, ever. I NEED THIS FIC LIKE I NEED AIR. WHY IS THIS FIC NOT ALREADY IN MY HANDS??

Padme lives. She runs. -- Leia is growing in fits and spurts, eating greedily and crying loudly. She stays in a sling on Padme’s chest when they move, Luke held snug in a sling around Obi Wan’s. Luke gets a whole head of thick brown hair while Leia’s is still patchy and bald, but he never matches his sister’s powerful lungs. When Padme had been sitting in her high senatorial apartment on Corsucant, holding Anakin’s sweaty hand, she had never imagined she’d be murmuring desperately soothing noises to her fussy daughter while she shot around a corner at stormtroopers, while R2D2 meddles with a ship’s blast doors behind her. Luke starts teething on a hot jungle planet where they hunker down for three weeks, sleeping in an abandoned old temple and catching the local wildlife for dinner. Leia takes her first steps in the belly of a Corellian freighter they’ve stowed away on. She wobbles between Padme’s outstretched hands and Obi Wan’s knees and boxes of smuggled luxuries. When she falls down, Obi Wan surges forward, heart in his throat, but Leia laughs.

Commander Ponds whirls around at the sound of Mace’s step and bolts up to his feet. He begs Mace not to take Boba back to Kamino. He says that he’ll look after him. He’ll take responsibility. With hands pressed together, he pleads for mercy for his brother. Mace tells him not to be ridiculous. Of course he isn’t taking Boba back to Kamino. He’s waiting, that’s all. It is only fair to give everyone a second chance. Even Jango Fett. (An AU where Mace Windu acquires and shares custody over a six-year-old Boba with Jango.)

Ponds is wandering the halls of the Jedi Temple on Coruscant, on his way to a meeting with his general, when he finds a crying youngling. He’s clutching his hands close to himself and Ponds abruptly remembers a mission with General Vos, who had an eerily similar reaction to a set of manacles. Ponds can’t help but kneel in front of the kid and offer him his pair of brand new gloves.

Later, he will say it was a calculated choice, that he looked at the odds and looked at the clones and decided that better the Jedi he didn't know than the Sith he did. This is, as it happens, a bare faced lie. (or: A Sith Lord realises, abruptly and rather late, that war means casualties, and decides that the great Jedi genocide plan can go fuck itself.)

When Obi-Wan Kenobi closes his eyes and lets himself fade into the force, he thinks he'll finally rejoin his fellow Jedi. Instead he wakes up on Stewjon, barely a Padawan's age. Certain he's been sent back to end Sidious, he steals a ship and begins his journey towards becoming capable of killing a Sith Master. It just so happens the ship he steals is Jango's. (Or: Obi-Wan would like to kill the sith and save his people. The Mandalorians are just trying to keep up.)

Obi-Wan stared at the newcomer standing tense in the corner. Dark smoke curled around the other padawan’s boot like the tail of a lothcat. With a huff, Obi-Wan disengaged his own lightsaber and clipped it to his belt, bowing in greeting. “Hello, Padawan Antilles.” OR Padawan Obi-Wan Kenobi makes a friend and the universe changes for the better.

“How’d you get stuck with babysitting duty anyway?” Boba asked one day during dinner. “Oh, I volunteered for this,” Fox told him. “Why the kark would you do that?” “Language,” Fox admonished. “Well, I was just living my normal boring life and I thought to myself, ‘I don’t get called an ugly piece of banthashit often enough.’ So I decided to adopt you.” Boba snorted. “You’re a psychopath,” he told Fox. “I’ve been called worse,” Fox replied breezily.

The door slams closed again the second Fox clears the threshold. The street crowd has largely fallen back into its normal rhythm, everyone moved on from the disruption. Which just leaves Fox, and the kid. Great.