Dead Peanut Gallery

by tanarill

Summary:

Turn left. In one universe, Obi-wan stayed away. In another, he gambled on Sidious' unwillingness to even admit that something like a Force spirit could exist.

He won.

Chapter 1

Summary:

Luke Skywalker decides that twenty years of hell is enough for anyone. Darth Vader allows himself to be persuaded.

Notes:

May the Fourth be with you!

This one is another one from my 'works no longer in progress' folder. Enjoy!

His son is terrible at using a lightsaber.

His son is also terrible at using the Force. It's not just that the boy isn't subtle; he didn't learn subtlety until not learning it hadn't been an option anymore, and so he knows that is a correctable flaw. Nor is it that he's shaky, because he seems to have the rock-solid underlying faith in the Force that's a prerequisite to proper use. It's more that he doesn't seem to understand that the Force isn't made of glass, won't shatter the moment he asks it for more than a moment of insight. Enough to make an impossible shot, perhaps, but not enough to do much more than survive anybody who actually knows what it can do.

He's angry about this, but also very confused. Obi-wan wouldn't have neglected to teach this even to his worst enemy. (He knows this to be strictly and literally true). Logically, it means that Obi-wan hadn't taught him at all. And, okay, being honest, those stances are Shii-cho and Ataru, pure Yoda, which is going to be a headache all its own later. He's also terrible at them, and a twenty-three year old should be better than half-assed stances no matter what the form. Worse, these stances are half-assed not because the boy isn't trying, but because he doesn't know them. Ergo, Yoda hadn't taught him for long.

They'd had him for twenty-three years.

"You destiny lies with me, Skywalker," he says, imagining the hours of future training it would take to get his son up to anything other than terrible. Hours and hours. "Obi-wan knew this to be true."

His son is going to deny it. He can see the word forming, but then his eyes slide off to the side. Without moving his saber at all, he pivots so he can see the new threat.

"Yes," says his personal hell, tiredly pinching the bridge of his semitransparent blue nose.

"What, really?" says the boy. "And you couldn't have told me this earlier?"

He blinks in shock, although of course neither of them can see that.

"I was really hoping to avoid a direct confrontation until la - "

"You can see him?" he demands.

The boy turns to focus on him again, which is a travesty. You do not take your attention off of your opponent in a lightsaber duel. At least, not if you expect to survive. "Yeah?" he says, mildly. "I mean. Why wouldn't I?"

"He thinks I'm a hallucination," says Obi-wan, in the background. "I keep telling him I'm not, but does he listen?"

"To be fair," says the boy, while around him the last four years rearrange themselves to start looking very different, even if only in hindsight, "so did I."

Obi-wan raises an expressive eyebrow.

"Mostly," amends the boy.

He is sure he's missing something, and it is possibly something important. He'll have to ask, later. "See, Skywalker? He admits it! Come to me, and fulfil your destiny."

Obi-wan rolls his eyes. "Seriously, who talks like that? Not even Palpatine talks like that." His son stifles a laugh, but not enough. "Luke, you're free to do whatever you damned well please, just like you always do. Destiny can get fucked."

Luke - his son's name is Luke, which is the name he and Padmé had picked out for a boy - looks at him, then Obi-wan, then him again. The silence stretches. "I have a question."

"Ask," he intones.

"You kill Jedi. You're famous for killing Jedi. But you're . . . trying to recruit me?"

It is Obi-wan's turn to fail to stifle a laugh. He glares at the Jedi, which would probably be more effective if Obi-wan could see more than a blank mask. Obi-wan picks up on it enough, because he makes shoeing hands. In their own private language, which apparently still works even though one of the two of them is actually dead, this means, 'Yes fine I'll explain later,' and also 'Go on, Luke deserves an answer.'

He's pretty sure that just telling his son isn't going to work. It took him weeks to get over it, and they don't have weeks. Also, Luke has to be at least as stubborn as Yoda if he got the old troll to actually teach him, which means if he decides not to believe something . . .

Obi-wan is still standing over by the carbonite pit, no longer even trying to hide how hard he's laughing.

"Darth Vader is not the name I was born with," is how he starts. "I had another, once."

"O-kay," says Luke.

"Part of that name was Skywalker," he says.

Luke's jaw falls open, and he immediately looks over to Obi-wan for confirmation.

Obi-wan rolls his eyes and says, "You're his damned son. Biologically. And he's always thought that blood means something."

"Blood is important!" protests Luke, but the look he's giving Obi-wan is basically the same as his own, under the mask.

"Oh, Force, now they do it in stereo," says Obi-wan, as in the background an evacuation alert starts up. Obi-wan flickers for a moment and adds, "That was Calrissian turning off the lower candle; if you want to get off this city before it hits the turbulent layer of the atmosphere, you should do it now."

"He did what?" he asks in horror, shutting off his 'saber. "Luke, come on. We have a sinking city to escape."

" . . . no," says Luke.

"What?"

"No. I'm not going with you."

"That was a not a question - "

"But if you want, I think you can come with me."

He looks over again, because Kenobi deserves to die on a lightsaber for this, only Kenobi is looking at him with the exact same expression. "Oh, no," he says. "You do not get to blame this on me. This is one hundred percent Skywalker drama."

Luke is tinkering with the door. Without someone menacing him with a lightsaber, it takes him about twelve seconds to hotwire it to open.

"Luke - "

Luke looks over his shoulder at him. "The thing is, I'm pretty sure, the emperor does not actually approve of you making an exception for your son."

"Oh, he doesn't even know Vader has," says Obi-wan, the complete opposite of helpfully. "But given the track record, no, it doesn't seem likely."

"Obi-wan - "

"I'm not special," says Luke, rocking back onto his feet. "I don't deserve to be an exception, when you went ahead and killed all those other people's daughters and sons. So. Either you go back to your emperor, and when we meet again we're nothing to each other at all, or you don't go back to the usurper, and we both get to have some family again."

He folds his arms. "And when I just knock you out and take you - "

"You can't. I mean, you're strong, but you aren't stronger than me, and you're not going to hurt me by blunt trauma."

He's not wrong.

"So are you coming with me, or not?"

"Will you please shut up?" he snaps at Obi-wan, who still is laughing his ass off.

"Oh, just go with him already," says Obi-wan. "If you weren't going to, you'd have just killed him instead of this whole - " he waves an arm to indicate the carbon-freezing room, the city, and the entire planet of Bespin - "production."

He, also, is not wrong.

"Fine!" he bites out.

He feels a brief bloom of surprise from Luke, quickly captured. Luke nods, just the once, and sets off across the city.

It's . . . interesting. He's never met anyone else who can navigate the same way he does, by just opening up and listening to the echoes of the world. Just about no one is paying attention to them: the civilians are evacuating in a surprisingly orderly way, and that has apparently convinced his men that this is not a drill, because they're also evacuating. A few of them look to him when he walks by, but a quick nod of confirmation is all it takes for them to go back to what they were doing.

They don't encounter many of those anyway. Luke is heading for the docking platforms, but avoiding imperial troops as much as possible. He's just following along, bemused, except for when he says things like, "No, we can't go that way, there's no gravitational support," and Luke nods and reroutes them.

The get to the docking platform not too much later. Solo's ship, a YT-1300 light freighter, is still sitting exactly where it'd been when he landed. Calrissian and Organa were on board, and the wookie. As far as he can tell, it is ready to take off and hasn't done so only because someone of board is waiting for Luke. The boarding ramp drops as they approach.

"What the hell," says Leia Organa, leveling a blaster, one of the good solid ones, the kind that can do very bad things to his suit, "is he doing here?"

"Would you rather he be going to playing personal murderer for the emperor?" asks Luke, ignoring the blaster and walking up the ramp so they could close the hatch. "Also hi, good to see you again. Where's Han?"

"Ask him," she spits at him.

"On the Slave II, as far as I'm aware," he answers. "That was Fett's price in helping track you down: he gets Solo. Relax. It's not like Jabba is going to do anything with him."

Luke looks between the two of them, and says, "Right, we'll talk about that, and what we're going to do about it, aft - "

Which is as far as his son gets before a droid comes screaming down the hallway. He dodges by taking a step sideways, and it crashes into the wall. It's an astromech, he can see now. It ricochets, then turns and continues swearing. He stares. That's R2-D2, all right. No other droid has ever managed to figure out biologics' insults enough to properly use the word 'fuck.'

"Wow," says Luke.

"So are we lifting?" asks Calrissian, through a comm someplace.

"Yes," says Luke.

"Er, with - "

"Yes," says Luke again.

"Are we going to get an explanation?" asks Leia.

"Sure," says Luke, over R2's continued swearing. "Later. I need a shower and then about fifty naps."

"Luke!"

"Leia. I damned near blew out my motivator getting here in time, and that was with all of Han's shortcuts. Then I got to have the galaxy's most terrible lightsaber battle ever. I am exhausted. We can start on the disaster that is my life later. It's not like there's anywhere that isn't days away. I'm going to sleep. Please don't kill Vader in the meantime."

Leia studies him, looking for the lie. She can't find it because it isn't there. Once she is assured of this, and he is busy wondering to the Force how he ever missed the fact that she's Force-sensitive, she lowers the blaster. Then, unexpectedly, she leans in and hugs Luke. "It had better be a good story," she said. "I'm glad you're alright, flyboy."

Notes:

Almost, but not quite, at the point of having a doctorate; but now it is crunch time. CRUNCH!

As always, posting unbeta'd. Please let me know about spelling or grammar errors, and feel free to suggest other tags.

Chapter 2

Summary:

When Vader decides to turn traitor, he does not fuck around.

Notes:

I meant to post this yesterday, but then life happened. Oh well. Happy May the Fourth (be with you)/Revenge of the Sixth.

Luke goes to get his sleep. He is seated at the tiny common room couch, guarded by the wookie or Leia or Calrissian. It takes him the whole first day to notice they're guarding him in shifts. Calrissian, he suspects, is smart enough to know that if he decided to escape this would do shit, but he's not sure about the wookie, and he knows that if Leia decides to start something, she's going to get remarkably far on the basis of the Force alone.

That probably explains a lot.

At about an hour and a half in he asks, "Are you going to shoot me if I also take a nap?"

"You didn't even do anything."

"It was still an emotionally exhausting day," he says. "I can meditate if sleep bothers you. And you won't shoot me for meditating."

Leia rolls her eyes and gestures with the muzzle of the blaster, so he stretches out on the (surprisingly comfortable) couch and starts pattern-breathing himself to sleep.

Padmé is there. Usually he shields before sleeping, which blocks her. Even when he's so tired that falling asleep is more like a swan dive, she doesn't come often. She has, in the past, always been looking at him, expression neutral but presence accusing in the worst way. This time, the accusation has faded to a background, and she's smiling.

Knowing it's a dream and more than a dream, knowing that she's there and will hear him, he says, "I'm so sorry."

Even this isn't enough for her to speak. He'd wondered, through the early years; she wasn't one to keep quiet, but she could hold a grudge. This, however, is conclusive. She isn't talking because she can't. It makes him feel a bit better, quixotically, to know that she'd have been bitching him out for the last twenty-three years if at all possible.

"And I'm glad you went with Luke."

Her smiled turns darker, somehow more secretive, and he aches down to his bones to be able to touch her. But he can't, which is his own damned fault. He has to be content sitting here with her, in this half-real place between the waking world and the deeper reality that is the Force.

It never lasts long enough, and this time is no exception. As he feels the edges of this place beginning to break up around him, he says, "I love you."

He opens his eyes to find that his neck has cramped, and also it's the wookie pointing a bowcaster at him. This is less worrying than Leia: if a wookie really wanted someone dead, he'd just kill them. He's not dead, ergo, this particular wookie does not wish to kill him.

He sits up, checks the suit clock. He was out for four hours, which is about as long as he ever stays unconscious at once anymore. "I don't suppose," he says out loud, "that there's tea."

He'd prefer kaff, but kaff does unpleasant things to his gut. He's stuck with tea, the more caffeinated the better.

«There's wookie tea,» says the wookie.

Given that wookie tea is spices and the endocarp of certain plants, and tastes terrible to humans when it isn't outright toxic, this is at best a morbid joke. Then again, there is a lot that wookies in general have a right to hate him for.

He sighs. "Will apologizing help any?"

« . . . I will forgive you,» says the wookie, «when my son is free to play amongst the leaves with no fear of being carted away to do the work of a droid. Then, and no sooner.»

He shrugs. This is at least an actual condition, one he might manage. "Fair enough. How about soup?"

«No.»

"That's going to be a problem. I am physically incapable of digesting anything that isn't liquid, or at best very mushy solids. Are there supplies I could use for soup?"

«I have no idea,» replies the wookie, but then does allow him to root around in the tiny galley. The answer is yes, although someone is probably going to be irritated with him for taking a very nice cut of meat and dissecting it for the bones. Too bad; they can survive on other things, and he can't. He's cutting vegetables when Leia reappears.

"What are you doing?"

"You don't have IV nutrient fluid," he replies. "So I'm making soup."

She looks at the piles of meat and bones, and then back up. "There is a medical reason for this?"

"Yes."

"Great. Get out of the way, I need kaff."

He steps aside so she can get to the little brewer and turn it on and set it. He asks, "Is Luke alright?"

"Still asleep. I don't think he's waking up anytime soon." She says this belligerently, almost like a challenge, but he isn't surprised: his son had gone into that confrontation after having been awake however many hours, pushing his hyperdrive. It will take more than four hours. "Why do you care?"

He considers and discards several responses before settling on, "He successfully stole me from Sidious. I have questions." They had to have noticed he was missing by now. Whether anyone was going to be able to track him - and of course, they won't even have a starting point unless someone had gotten the lower candle lit again. Otherwise, the computer banks with the city's security footage are lost. With the entire city simultaneously leaving, it is as perfect a disappearance as any he'd ever planned.

"Stole you." But she settles, backing off on the bristling and posturing, and sitting down to wait for the kaff.

"Does he . . . steal people much?"

"I don't think he's ever stolen an Imperial grand enforcer before," she says, which is not a 'no.'

"It was impressive," he agrees, because it had been. Luke is almost totally untrained, and if he'd really wanted to he is sure he could have gotten in, knocked his son out, and taken him away. "You have a 'pad?"

"Why?"

"I don't know all of the current Imperial deployments or encryption keys," he says. "But I have - had - Red-level clearance. It's time sensitive."

That, at last, finally manages to crack Leia's calm exterior. Physically, it's a flash so brief he wouldn't have noticed if he hadn't been watching for it. In the Force, it's a bright splash of oceanic-blue surprise, and then she shuts that down too. "I'll get a 'pad," she says.

He finishes putting the soup together, and then while it cooks and while he consumes as much of it as his stomach can be persuaded to accept, he writes out things he knows about the Imperial side of things. It's a lot, and he goes into a light trance tracking down everything he knows from the recalcitrant crannies of his memory. When he blinks up, it's Calrissian sitting there with a sheathed blaster. The chrono says it's been more than five hours since he last checked.

"Calrissian," he says.

"Vader," says Calrissian, who is reading a different 'pad. "When you decide to turn traitor, you do not fuck around."

I never have, he thinks, and the thought is so funny that he ends up having to do pattern breathing to avoid laughing. The moment has passed by the time he's done, so instead he says, "I don't hate you."

"Uh," says Calrissian. "Thanks?"

He sighs impatiently. "No, I mean. The Empire had no interest in Bespin, and I don't have any particularly negative emotions towards you. It was just business. Unpleasant business, but not because I personally dislike you."

Calrissian keeps looking at him for a long moment, and then, once certain he's stopped, asks, "I think there was meant to be an apology somewhere in there, but man that was a shit apology."

He looks, waiting. It didn't really take him very long to learn that the mask's unblinking gaze worked better than any amount of questions.

"You take over my city, threaten my citizens, capture my best brother, beat him up for no damned reason, and freeze him in carbonite so you can sell him to Jabba the Hutt! If that is what you do to people you don't hate I would not like to see what you do to people you do."

Destroy a twenty-five thousand year old Republic. " . . . the terrorizing your citizens was uncalled-for," he allows.

Calrissian snorts. "Still not hearing an apology."

"I am not actually sorry," he says. "I meant what I said. Nothing more. Nothing less."

Calrissian looks at him again, and longer, searching gaze. It doesn't have nearly the power of Leia's, so he ignores it. Finally Calrissian says, "I'll keep that in mind. The princess said to tell you that Luke is still sleeping, and she put the soup in the chiller. And she won't shoot if you want to meditate."

He says, "Actually, right now I just really want a sonic."

"Can't," says Calrissian. "There's a shower, but the sonic is completely fubar. We weren't able to figure out why, but Han said not to worry, water showers are fine."

"Water showers are not fine," he says. "Not with my prosthetics."

That makes Calrissian stop and stare again, and when he finally does speak, it's to say, "So the armor is not just an intimidation thing?"

"Its primary function is life support," he says.

"You are messed up in there, aren't you?"

There doesn't seem to be much reason to hide it. "Yes. I might be able to repair the sonic, if you can dig it out."

He has the sonic out of the 'fresher and laid out on the table when Leia shows back up.

"Oh, good," she says, picking up the first 'pad. "You're done. This is all accurate?"

"To the best of my knowledge," he says.

Leia's eyes flick over him, the sonic, and him again. She's quick, dismissive; and then she says, "It's time to eat."

"I had soup - "

"Six hours ago. And then it's time to sleep."

He wants to argue, but doesn't. She's right: he shouldn't forget to eat or sleep, because he no longer has a droid to stab him with sedative and dose him with IV nutrient if he doesn't. So he sighs, sits back, and says, "Why do you care?"

"I don't," she says, "about you. But if Luke did manage to properly steal you, then you're a resource and letting you work yourself into a tank is counter-productive."

Which is a lot more like the Leia he's met. "Oh. Thank you."

That startles her, enough to actually get a sense of her colors - bright, nuclear yellows and oranges - before she pulls it back and shields everything again. "What for?"

"Not lying to me," he says. Not pretending anything you do is for my benefit, he means.

"I will, if I think it's necessary."

He nodded, accepting this truth. "Although I feel I should mention that I'm supposed to go into a tank not less than once every six days anyway."

That earns another startle. Calrissian says, "The suit is not just for armor: it's life support. I'd ask how messed up you are, but I don't think I want to know the answer."

"You don't," he says.

"That doesn't make any sense, though," said Leia. "Bacta only works topically, and it's not like your skin is getting more healed for staying inside longer."

"It is, though. I had third-degree burns over upwards of ninety percent of my skin."

"Oh. Yes, that's - bacta would help. At that point, though, I have to wonder: why not just go full cyber?"

He considers not telling her, but only for an instant. "If a Force-sensitive goes full-cyber, we will first go insane from the sensory deprivation, and then commit suicide. No exceptions. Even like this, I prefer life."

She doesn't reply at all as he takes the soup out, pours some into a smaller pot, and reheats that. Once he's sitting down and sipping the soup from a straw, she asks, "I'm not sure you're sane as it is."

"I know I'm not," he says. "But I'm functional. That's going to have to be enough."

She grimaces, but only says, "I'll pass this on to Intelligence."

He finishes his soup, and then lays down and relaxes and does pattern breathing. He's almost, almost asleep when he hears the wookie ask a question.

"Sleeping," replies Calrissian. "I think. It's kind of creepy, how he just - stops. Like turning himself off."

«Like a soldier,» says the wookie. «Don't read more into than someone who's seen too many battles.»

Which is an oddly comforting thought. The wookie, he thinks, might cautiously be an ally. Then he doesn't think at all, because he's asleep.

 

A dead man is talking over his head when he wakes up.

If he'd given it any thought, which he hasn't, he'd have been wondering where Obi-wan is. He hasn't because Obi-wan has no kind of schedule, showing up to torment him on an irregular basis. Seeing him to the Rebels and then vanishing for five or six months is exactly the kind of behavior he expects from the old Jedi. It's a little disconcerting to realize that at least part of it is because he was somewhere else, some fraction of that time.

" - ing to repeat myself," Obi-wan is saying. "We wait until he wakes up, get the princess in here, and then talk about things someone should have told you years ago."

"Why didn't you?" asks Luke.

"When I agreed to hand you over to your family, I also agreed not to . . . "

"To?" asks Luke, when he trails off. "And I can tell you're awake, Father."

"I was just getting my bearings," he says, without opening his eyes. "Usually if I'm not waking up in a bed I'm waking up in a tank. And it's going to take some time getting used to hearing dead people, anyway."

"You could have gotten over it two years ago, but no, you were so attached to me being a hallucination - " begins Obi-wan.

"Shut up," he says. Remarkably, Obi-wan does.

"You should eat again," says Luke.

"I'm not hungry," he says.

"You are," says Luke, frowning.

" . . . I'm not capable of digesting anything else right now," he says.

Luke frowns more. "Chewbacca told me, but I didn't realize it was that bad. What happened to you?"

"A Jedi," he says. "You may have heard of him; he went by Obi-wan Kenobi."

" - oh," says Leia, from behind him. He hadn't even felt her approach, and he should have. He can feel everyone, even the emperor, even when he's trying to hide. "Well. That's at least a better reason, I think."

"Then what?" he asks.

"Killing him because he was a Jedi," says Leia, walking past him so she can take a cup of kaff, and then coming to sit down on the free stool. It's not actually free, since that's where Obi-wan is sitting. But he stands, politely ceding the seat.

"Why is that better?" he asks in astonishment.

"I'm not sure it would be, for anyone else," says Leia. "But you're a shell of a person, and the only thing that can fill you up again is passion." She blinks, then adds, "Not that murder is a particularly good method."

He turns to Obi-wan, who holds out his hands. 'Not my fault,' he means, and in this case he has to cede the point. The fact that Princess Leia Organa of Alderaan is a seer, and possibly - probably - one strong enough to give Windu a run for his credit, is certainly not Obi-wan's fault.

"You could have warned me," he says anyway, grumbling.

"I what?" asks Organa.

"No, not - okay," says Luke. "So this is going to sound a little crazy, sorry. Obi-wan Kenobi's ghost occasionally follows me around."

Leia doesn't snort and dismiss this statement like he half-expected. She turns to look at Kenobi, dead-on, no hesitation at all. "And?" she asks. She's very clearly asking the ghost.

Kenobi winces. "I wasn't entirely sure you could see me. You tracked me well enough, but plenty of people can tell when I'm around. You don't feel strong enough to, er. Before the dark times, you have been a Jedi."

Leia rolls her eyes, says, "No, I wouldn't have."

"Um," says Obi-wan, too polite to argue but also too honest to allow that lie.

"Because Jedi were neutral," says Leia, like Obi-wan is an idiot. "They were allowed to uphold the laws, but not disobey the bad ones, and certainly not to participate in politics. So. No, Obi-wan Kenobi, or whoever the fuck you are, I would not have been a Jedi. You could not pay me enough to stand aside and let happen the injustices that the former Jedi ignored." She accompanies this by deliberately lowering the outermost layers of her shields. He is treated to the wonderful sense-memory of the lava fields of Mustafar, fierce and uncontrollable heat. After a moment she raises them again.

" - I see," said Obi-wan. Inasmuch as his faint presence has any associated emotions, they seem mostly to be regret and grief and intense worry.

"Anyway," says Leia. "We were not talking about me and my goals. We were talking about why Luke felt it was a good idea to steal a grand imperial enforcer, and why said enforcer allowed himself to be stolen."

" - Tatooine stuff, I think," says Luke. "You remember how I kept saying that GalBasic doesn't have enough words for family?"

"Yes," says Leia, guarded.

"It still doesn't," says Luke. "Darth Vader, at least according to Obi-wan, is in my ammu. Blood-kin group, except that doesn't really get the concept across. He's probably the only kin I have left anywhere."

"That is extremely untrue," says Obi-wan, "but at this point, telling you who they are would put them in too much danger."

Luke nods, accepting this, and continues his explanation. "It's always a priority to rescue kin, even if - especially if - that kin have become entrapped in the Hutt lie." Luke tilts his head. "Well, not the Hutt lie, in this case, but you know what I mean."

He did.

"And also," says Luke, still looking at him with his own sky-blue eyes, "he didn't really believe the lie anymore anyway. He just didn't see a way out."

He closes his eyes. The tears come anyway.

"Hm," says Leia, sounding surprised. "And now that you are out?"

"I'm not out," he says, grateful that the vocoder corrects the wobble in his voice. "I switched sides. If you will have me."

" . . . I'm not sure about that," says Leia. "I know you believe it, but belief and truth aren't always the same thing." She says it offhand, a casual comment on the nature of reality, but it hits him like a hammer-blow. "What is it that you want? Be honest."

Revenge, he wants to say and doesn't. That's part of the lie, too. Leia is more than powerful enough a seer to know if he tells a lie. Force, she can probably compel the truth when she wants to. "My wife back alive." Is, possibly, right now. "To not have killed her in the first place."

Leia and Luke and Obi-wan all look at him with varying degrees of incredulous. It's Leia who says, "I hope you know we can't fix that."

"You asked what I wanted," he says.

"That's true," says Leia. "Force, what a mess. And we haven't even talked about how we're going to rescue Han."

"I told you already, that isn't urgent. Jabba has a room full of people in carbonite."

"That's just a rumor," says Luke. "Jabba would just kill people."

"I've seen it myself," he says. "He keeps people he needs for leverage. Solo is almost certainly a kind of insurance: something to offer whoever turns out to be the winner."

"Someone," corrects Luke softly. "Don't fall back into bad habits."

" - someone," he agrees. "Who is not, at present, in any danger."

Leia sighs and stands up. "I'm going to go spend about sixteen hours on a conference comm. You should - say whatever it is that Obi-wan is afraid you're going to say, or listen to whatever you're afraid he's going to say. I honestly do not care which, as long as you work it out." She leaves.

Luke says, "My original question stands."

Obi-wan pinches his nose, and gestures to him. "My one and only attempt at raising a child was a rather spectacular failure. I agreed to stay out of your life, and not risk rolling that die again. I honestly didn't think Owen was going to not tell you these things, at least after you came of age."

"Oh," says Luke. "So that's why he was so against me leaving!"

"Darth Vader is a pretty big that, yes," says Obi-wan.

"I am right here," he says.

"And you wouldn't have hesitated to murder anyone who wasn't your son instead of defecting, so you don't really have the moral high ground," says Obi-wan. "Luke wasn't raised to fight. He was raised to be free, and be happy."

He'd figured that. He's also figured out that Luke actually is from Tatooine and why Obi-wan had chosen to take him there. He can even accept why Obi-wan hadn't taught him pretty much anything, at all, although he doesn't like it. The thing he doesn't understand is: "Why did you change your mind?"

"What?" asks Obi-wan, clearly not understanding the question.

"If you weren't going to teach him," he begins.

"Oh, that," says Luke. "I asked. I don't think it's - he couldn't fail to raise me at that point. I was nineteen already, my own adult self, and I could make my own choices. Although he didn't tell me about you either. Just that Darth Vader had killed Anakin Skywalker."

" . . . that's not really untrue," he says.

"Yes, it is," says Luke. "The truth would have been to say 'Palpatine enslaved him with lies and his slave name is Darth Vader,' and then I'd have known what do immediately. Instead I got all this cryptic prophetic bantha dung until I was actually in the room with you. Are Jedi allergic to telling the truth, or something?"

"Jedi are allergic to admitting that they're people, and can make mistakes," he says. "Or have opinions about things, since that would involve having emotions. For Obi-wan, the truth has probably always been that Darth Vader killed Anakin Skywalker." He's speaking to Luke, but looking at Obi-wan.

"I wanted it to be," says Obi-wan simply. "I didn't know it wasn't until Luke spoke the actual truth just now."

"Huh," said Luke. "For a bunch of people who supposedly spent their whole lives contemplating the truth, you're kind of terrible at it, you know?"

"I know," says Obi-wan. "I'll . . . let you get acquainted."

"No you won't," said Luke. "You haven't finished. You haven't even started."

"What?"

"Like Leia said. Say the things you're afraid of saying to each other."

He frowns. "That isn't what she said."

"Are you two psychic?" demands Luke. "Because if not, then you really only have control over what you are going to say. What's the thing you're afraid of saying?"

" . . . you were right. About pretty much everything, but especially about the march on the Temple."

"Good," says Luke, turning to Obi-wan. "Now you."

"You were right," says Obi-wan, wryly. "About the Council, and about the Code, and what it was doing to us."

"And now go wherever it is you go, and think about it for a while," says Luke.

"No, wait - " he says, but Obi-wan is already gone. He turns to Luke instead. "I wanted to talk."

"Yes, but it's not what you need. Either of you."

"Are you a seer too, then?"

"Is that what it's called? I thought it was called listening," says Luke.

He winces, and is very grateful that Luke can't see. "Perhaps it is. I'd like to - I need to - meditate."

"Okay?"

"I want to fix the sonic, too. Where did it go?" It wasn't here.

"Engineering," said Luke. "I disassembled it, but then Obi-wan came back, so." He held out his hands.

"Why?"

Luke tilted his head. "Why what?"

"Why try working on the sonic?" It wasn't as though he'd be able to fix it.

He feels his son's understanding before Luke says, "Oh," and Luke keeps on understanding past the point where there is anything left to understand. Then he moves on to pity, and when Luke feels how he feels about that, says, "Father. Whatever lies he told you - whatever lies he trapped you with - you aren't going to be able to get clean if you can't listen to the wind."

Now it is his turn to understand, decades late and far too deeply. 'Listening to the wind,' is a thing slaves do, on Tatooine, with one ear out for the slave masters and one ear on the sky. He'd been good at it; and, in hindsight, that was why he'd been so utterly shit at Jedi meditation. Slaves can't, as a matter of life-and-death, ignore their physical surroundings. They learn to listen despite that. By contrast, Jedi meditation, with its schedules and quiet gardens, had been anemic at best. There is no time to listen to the Force that isn't 'always,' and no way to do it other than, 'what works best for you.'

"Show me," he says, but he is pretty sure Luke can feel him being sad and angry and sorrowful.

The sonic is a reasonably fancy model, and to the naked eye none of the components have failed. The thing to do would have been replace the unit entirely, but Solo had (rightfully) been in a hurry. Anyway, he's going to have to trance to fix this the other way. He begins by floating all of the pieces. He hadn't really been allowed to get good at this while he was a Jedi; they thought it was wasteful, or something, as though the Force is a limited resource. Palpatine hadn't cared, so he'd learned to do it this way, holding all the parts together in orientation like an exploded blueprint while he assembled things.

Luke . . . squeaks.

He looks over, but nothing seems to be wrong. He tilts his head, a question.

"I - can just about get things to reliably hover, now," says Luke. "But I can't - that's the sonic, right? Everything is where it's going to be, just further from one another. You don't even need a casing, you build from the center out."

Oh. This. "When I was your age, I couldn't reliably get things to hover," he says. "The key is that the Force is all about relationships: past, present . . . and future."

"Hm," says Luke. "Well. Can I help?"

"I thought you were a pilot," he says.

"I was a farmer," says Luke, dryly. What he means is: I was a moisture farmer on Tatooine. I know my way around a vaporator, plus every type of mechanical device that can be either used or salvaged for parts. I've fixed sonics before. I won't be a dead weight, or a distraction, if you want the company.

Do you want company?

"Only watch the top level," he requests. "What I'm doing with the Force. The lower levels are going to be me dumping a couple decades' worth of repressed tears into the Force, and it's - I'd rather not have an audience."

"I can go away," begins Luke.

"No. You'll have to learn this anyway. I might as well start teaching you now."

"Oh! Then - "

"Yes?"

"You are going to teach me? Only Master Yoda was extremely against - "

"I'm sure," he says, dryly.

"No," says Luke. "He isn't - he doesn't hate you. Mostly he's just sad. Anyway, he said that parents don't teach their children strongly enough."

"Depends on the parent. I, for example, know that you will eventually have to face Palpatine; and because I do not desire your death then, I will not go easy on you now."

" - oh," says Luke, and then, "That's what he meant? He could have just said."

"Yoda does not ever 'just say.' Nor does he ever mean only one thing."

He can feel Luke's curiosity, and his . . . He'd thought it hypocritical, that the Jedi went on and on about 'proper use of the Force,' whatever that was, and then used it to nonconsensually read the minds of sapient beings. It turns out that it had really been just him, because the vast majority of Jedi didn't have the raw power to do what he did. Anyway, it's almost always much easier to follow someone's thoughts by reading their emotions and expressions. It just takes a couple of decades of practice to get right.

Luke's train of thought is a series of questions, answered internally almost as soon as they've been asked. How do you two know each other; you were a Jedi first. Why did you expect him to hate you; whatever it is you did, when you turned. Why did you turn back; because I asked. Why did you turn to start with - ? That's the one he can see, hovering on the tip of Luke's tongue, and he has no idea how he can answer that. He never has, really.

Luke says, "We should fix the sonic."

He's left with intense mood whiplash, and a sudden pang of sympathy for Leia Organa. No wonder Luke can just show up with an imperial grand enforcer in tow, and have her accept it with a shrug. Luke is like this all the time.

"Yes," he says, glad that it's probably going to take at least a few days for it to occur to Luke to try looking under the helm.

There is nothing actually wrong with any of the sonic components. Luke's already cleaned them, carefully brushing down the connections to get rid of any hint of corrosion before oiling them up again. He settles in and lets himself trance out while he takes a look. The central acoustic crystal isn't so much cracked as broken in two. He carefully pries the two halves out of the casing, holding them up to the light to see if it's a clean break. It is, which means it's reparable.

This is what he and Padmé had been, at the end: two halves of something, repairable but not yet repaired. If someone gentle had been helping - but of course, Sidious was only ever good at seeming gentle. Just thinking the thought causes something else in him to break, and then it's a flood, ten thousand thoughts he hasn't allowed himself to think. At first he hadn't wanted to, and then he hadn't been stupid enough to. Not around a coercive telepath like Sidious.

He takes a moment to set the pattern around him more stably, holds the shards together, and goes a little deeper. It's meant to be a monocrystal, and those can't fracture on grain boundaries because they don't have them. But the whole thing is weird, clusters where the atoms are stressed too close together and others where they're too far apart. It looks almost like there was feedback, which is ridiculous. Sonics are one-way.

Some of his thoughts are about how much he hates Sidious. The depth and vehemence of the emotion are - shocking, honestly. Ending the war, fine, ending the Jedi, good, but what he'd done to the clones to do it. What he'd done to Kashyyyk, and convinced him to do. The lies he'd been able to stop telling, because Vader was telling them to himself. The lives he ended for being in a bad mood, or because the person on the other end wasn't human enough. The sheer banality of his spreading evil, this is why Tatooine is not free -

He uses the desperate rage to shove, and keeps shoving the stress lines out of the crystal. Part of the way through, Luke figures out what he's doing and joins him. Together, they work until the whole thing is evenly spaced atoms packed in neat hexagons. Then he pulls back and taps the single crystal he's now holding. It goes ting, perfect pitch, and he nods. That's the hard part done.

Some of his thoughts are about the fact that this suit is the most stupidly designed piece of garbage he's ever seen in a life-support system. He could build something better in his sleep. Now that he's free of Sidious, he probably will. He'd been on an operating table for fifty-six hours while they put him in it. If Sidious had actually wanted Padmé to survive -

But of course, he hadn't. If there had been even one person left worth fighting for . . .

Luke catches the last part of that thought. He didn't mean to and is immediately embarrassed by it, but he's also shyly happy. He understands: there is someone left worth fighting for, and he'll burn the galaxy to ashes, again, if anyone tries pulling shit on Luke. Then again, Luke is Tatooine-bred and a raised, desert-tough. Things that had worked on Padmé won't ever come close to working on him.

He has a lot of grieving left to do, still, but it's nice to have that one thing settled.

Reassembling the sonic takes about half an hour. Luke is very helpful, picking the right pieces out of the floating pattern and slotting them into place in the device. They don't even need to talk, really. When they finish, he turns it on and enjoys the buzz along his prosthetics that tells him it's in working order. He says, "I call first sonic."

"You have to work it out with Chewie," says Luke. "I prefer water showers."

He would. "I'm going to go get this mounted."

"Yeah," says Luke. "Have fun with that."

He gets it remounted without any trouble, and then takes the time to get really clean, the way he doesn't usually have time for. Hadn't. His time is now all his own. He feels much better after a shower, almost like a human again, and is ravenous. His gut has stopped aching, so eating is probably even a good idea. He goes back to the common room with its tiny galley to find that Chewbacca has prepared some kind of broth that makes even the ruined remains of his olfactory system sit up and pay attention.

He stands there, and tilts his head.

«You fixed the sonic,» says Chewbacca.

"For purely selfish reasons," he says.

A shrug, on a wookie, is impressive. «A fire kindled to warm only one may equally light the way for thousands. Everything in this has already been digested, sometimes multiple times, by human-biosphere bacteria.» The wookie stands up and leaves him with a dilemma. On the one hand, he's not really a cook. On the other, wookies in general have good reason to hate him.

He finally just takes a cup of the soup, and extends the mask proboscis so he can drink. It's good. Well, no, it's not, but he doesn't quite have a word for what it is. He drinks the whole mug, and waits patiently for an hour to see how it settles before drinking a second.

In the meantime, he goes and finds Leia, who is sitting in the cockpit and talking to someone. As soon as he feels his approach, Leia says, "Oh, gotta go. Someone is being rude and trying to read my thoughts."

He is, he realizes, because Leia doesn't have expression to read, and also doesn't spill her emotions into the Force. He hastily stops.

The person on the other end of the comm lets out a cackle of noise. He'd suspect a bad connection, but it's hyperspace. Distance doesn't mean a thing. The mystery is solved when an obviously vocoded voice says, "Have fun with that."

"Right," says Leia. "Fun. Go be someone else for awhile. I'll comm you again later."

"Will do," says the other person, and disconnects.

"A friend of yours," he says.

"Operative," corrects Leia, spinning the chair to look at him and folding her arms.

"And friend," he insists.

She rolls her eyes.

"I didn't come here to antagonize you."

She raises her eyebrows.

"You are force-sensitive," he says. "Defeating Palpatine isn't going to be easy. Luke will need every ally he can get. I'll be training him anyway, so I might as well tr - "

"Pass," says Organa.

He is left, for a moment, totally nonplussed.

Organa continues. "I'm already as trained as you can be, with a gift like mine. The only other thing left to learn would be lightsabers, but . . . " She turns to look out of the window, at the brilliant light of the stars streaming by. "'Not by might and not by power,' Vader. By the love in our hearts and the work of our hands, or never at all."

For a moment, he's reminded of Padmé; but then, by all accounts, Leia Organa is the protégé Padmé never lived to see. It's not so surprising, he thinks, that she managed to teach all the important lessons even from beyond the pyre. It doesn't help the ache, exactly, but he resolves to get to know her anyway. She knows things about Padmé that he never wanted to see when she was alive. "I hope you don't think the love in your heart is going to be able to stop Palpatine."

"No," says Leia. "But I won't be a weapon. That's not what I'm for." She is a seer; if anyone knows, it's her. Then she startles him yet again when she says, "It's not really what you're for either. I'm having a hard time seeing what you are for, but it has something to do with babies."

"Babies," he says flatly. He knows that seers don't, in general, have any control over what they see. He knows it's nevertheless always true. He knows, but he still says, "What fool thinks that's a good idea?"

Leia favors him with a small half-smile. "Ah. So there are some things you and I can agree on. Was that all?"

"For the moment," he says, because decision to be friendly or not, he doesn't have any other excuse to stay and talk to her, and she's probably still busy. " - did it help?"

" . . . it's helping," allows Leia.

He leaves.

Notes:

As usual, posted without beta. Please poke me if you spot weird things.

Chapter 3

Summary:

Vader is fundamentally okay, as long as he has someone to protect.

The thing is, there really isn't that much to do on a ship the size of the Falcon, and there is even less its erstwhile crew trusts him with. Luke has gone back to sleep, which, good. If he's still sleeping, he needs it. Chewbacca is in the sonic, and is probably going to still be there for hours, enough time for him to work all the dirt out of his fur. Leia's gone back to having marathon comms with whoever runs the Rebellion, which he is very studiously avoiding knowing. That leaves Calrissian, who seems to have accepted that they're not enemies but isn't anywhere close to trusting him. He can't say he really blames the man.

He sits down across from him, though. "I'm bored," he announces.

Calrissian looks up. "Bored."

"I'm used to doing a lot more than this," he waves an arm to indicate the Falcon.

"There's a joke in there somewhere," says Calrissian,"But I am not going to risk your sense of humor. What do you want me to do about it?"

He says, "I need a pad. It doesn't have to be connected to the 'net, but I've decided I need to not be easily identifiable as Lord Vader. Also, this life-support system is shit."

" . . . yeah, okay. Give me minute to gut a pad."

It takes more like an hour, and when Calrissian says he's going to gut a pad he means he's literally going to open it up and pry out the earfish chip out of it so it can't connect to anything. But it's a pad, and it has a functional drafting program, so he sits down and begins working on life support that'll let him take the shiny black target off his ass. Of course then he won't have any damned armor either, it's not like the Rebels wear anything approaching functional armor, but that's a different problem to be tackled at a later time.

He does that, on and off, for the next few days. He doesn't ask where they are going, and no one volunteers the information. Chewbacca makes tea, both the horrible wookie kind and the kind he can drink, and cleans his bowcaster. It isn't exactly at him, but it isn't exactly not at him, either. Luke sleeps and naps and dozes, but in between long periods of unconsciousness he always comes and sits in the common room and with his presence encourages him to meditate. It's . . . well, it isn't pleasant, but he sees or smells Padmé almost every time he does, so it's definitely having an effect. Leia comes in and watches him for a while, and possibly sees a lot more than he'd like. Calrissian wants to know why he keeps asking about Rebel production capabilities, and then clones his pad so he can go look at the plans, and then four hours later comes back and says, "Why the hell didn't they have you build the Death Star?"

"Because then I'd know exactly how it worked," says Vader. "And probably, I'd have built in one or more kill-switches under my personal command."

"Great," says Calrissian, and goes off to talk to Leia. Leia gets back on the comm.

He ignores this for two more days, during which Luke finally stops spending more time horizontal than not. He starts making a new list, lightsaber parts so that Luke can stop using his, that's just creepy, and then Leia stomps in and sits down across from him and says, "If you'd had kill switches, when Tarkin ordered them to fire on Alderaan - "

He closes his eyes. "I don't know."

"You - you can't say that!"

"I can," he says. "I don't know if the billions of people on Alderaan would have had the same worth, to me, as a single living son. Yes, Luke, I know that you don't think you are, but I have never claimed to think very rationally. I don't know if it would have been enough to push me over that line. I was . . . very close to it as it was. Possibly close enough, if I'd had any ability to stop it. I didn't. I can't speak to what I 'would have done,' not without lying to you." That is one thing she will never accept; therefore, she must accept this truth now.

Leia looks . . . thoughtful. "Well. Thanks for your honesty. Excuse me, I think I have to go shout at some more people about your future." She leaves again.

He looks at Luke.

"You really need to get over that," says Luke.

"Absolutely not," he says immediately.

" . . . or at least adjust how you value other people," says Luke. "I don't mind if you value me more, as long as you value everyone enough to - try saving their lives, when you can."

"Hm," he says. It's not unreasonable. He used to know how: it used to be the only thing he did. "And I should use utilitarian ethics for everything else?"

"You should do what everyone does, which is on a case-by-case basis." The 'as you well know' remains unsaid. Instead, Luke takes pity on him and changes the subject. "You've been working on a new suit? Let me see."

 

They work on it together. Luke at least knows about what the Rebellion can or can't procure. On top of that he has processed what they did to the acoustic quartz and then sat down and tried a couple of times with his kyber, what the fuck, has no one ever explained to him that you do not mess with your own weapons as an experiment, and decided that they can make most things as needed.

"Yes," he says. "Or we can buy them. It's not cost-effective for you and I to spend twelve days in a trance making a microchip that's only worth ten credits."

Luke says, "Oh, sure, if it's a part we can buy. I was talking about this." He taps the screen, his plans for a new left arm, one with an integrated lightsaber. "We can't buy kybers, can we?"

" . . . the Jedi vastly prefer natural kybers."

"Is there an actual difference?" asks Luke. "Or is it just traditional?"

He's struck by the fact that his son is not, when it comes down to it, very much like the Jedi were; and is, at the same time, the Jedi he'd been trying all those years to be. "There are trade-offs," he says. "You can build a synthetic crystal so it only has one band gap, which narrows the plasma wavelength so you spend less energy on it; but it also means you lose resonances, so it won't sing in more than one voice."

"Once you pick up the knack of hearing dead people, they don't ever really shut up," says Luke, which is ominous. "Show me how to make a synthetic one."

He nods. "But we buy the rest of the supplies."

"I mean," says Luke. "Aren't they supposed to be made of garbage you just picked up in places?"

"If the Alliance is that hard up for funds," he says.

"Father."

"You're supposed to use supplies the Force nudges you to use." That is fine. "Some dogmatic idiots decided that meant the Force must nudge you about every single component, because apparently the Force has nothing better to do."

"Well, no," says Luke. "But I get it. Er. Did you want it back?"

His lightsaber, he means. "Keep it," he says.

"It's yours."

"It belonged to someone I used to be, but I seriously doubt it wouldn't explode in my face if I tried to use it now." He makes a face, which of course Luke can't see. "I don't much like who I used to be."

"Then, or now?"

"Yes," he says.

"Well, who do you want to be?"

He stares back, astonished and then chagrined. None of his past masters cared, except inasmuch as he could be useful to them. But he is free now, and he's being asked a question that would have gotten a beating from Watto, and a "psychological readjustment" from Palpatine. The Jedi, of course, would never even have considered it a question worth consideration. His son is not, and will not ever be, his master. Luke will drag him up from that pit of thought, hand-over-hand if he has to.

"You know," he said. "I've never been asked that before?"

Luke nods seriously. "Think about it now." He turns back to the schematics, clearly ready to drop the issue. It's beautiful and it hurts, but it's a healing hurt: a clean excision of something rotten, which can now heal.

"You were on the Freedom Trail," he says, wondering.

"Yeah," says Luke. "I mean, mostly it was Aunt Beru and sometimes Uncle Owen. They tried to keep me out of it, I think because I was terrible at secrets. But sometimes they needed small hands, so - " he shrugs. "And later, when my hands weren't so small, I asked to help."

"Did you?"

"Sort of? I was mostly just good for alibis. Everyone knew I couldn't keep secrets, and I'm not good at lying. So I . . . told an obvious lie, which was covering something harmless, and no one really looked deeper than that."

It's almost exactly how he lied to Palpatine, actually. He couldn't lie and he'd never been any good at it either, so instead he'd learned to use truth and omissions like a weapon. He doesn't want Luke to have had cause to learn that skill, and at the same time he is intensely grateful that there is a use for it that isn't pure poison. "Keep that; Sidious doesn't look beyond the obvious lie, so the habit will serve you well when you have to face him."

"Okay," said Luke. Then, "Who's Sidious?"

"Palpatine has always been a mask. Sidious is the person."

"Oh," said Luke. "Pretty rotten person, huh?"

"Mm." Then, "Show me what you know. I can't teach you anything complicated until you make your own blade, but it's always better to have solid footwork."

"Yoda said that too. And then whacked me with - "

" - his cane. And knocked you over just by pushing in the right place. I remember. He was right, though. You aren't going to win if you can't keep yourself centered. Show me."

Luke is actually pretty solidly centered. He can't do anything active without losing it, though. On the other hand, he seems to really love Ataru. He can see that it's not really Luke's form, any more than it was his, but just because he is good at Shien - just because it fit his body and abilities like a glove - doesn't mean that he has the most fun doing it. If nothing else, Ataru will help Luke build the kind of stamina he'll need to go up against Sidious.

Luke is still terrible with a lightsaber, though. He's just disarmed his son for the twelvth consecutive time when Leia walks in, takes one look, and pulls a blaster. "Put. The lightsaber down."

"Princess - "

"Down!" She gestures with the tip of the blaster.

He sighs, and drops it.

"Now step away."

"Princess - "

"Leia," says Luke, and steps between them. "It's fine. We were training: he was training me."

"He was - what?"

"Training me. So I'll be able to fight Palpatine. I'm . . . really bad at this. Like. Terrible."

There's another very long moment, and he realizes that Leia is looking - for the lie. It's not working because Luke hadn't told one. Finally she flips the safety catch and holsters the blaster. "Flyboy, you really have to stop doing this. If you're going to let Vader use a lightsaber on you, at least tell someone first!"

"He can't use this one," says Luke, clipping it to his belt.

"Why not?"

She clearly wasn't asking him, but he answers anyway. "Eggs and eggshells. I can't stuff myself back into the person I used to be, and pretend nothing happened. That particular lightsaber, if I try to do anything other than turn it off, will almost certainly explode."

She checks the truth again, eyes going a bit distant for a moment, and whatever she finds there makes her smile. "You still need to warn someone. Or someone else might get twitchy blaster fingers. I came to tell you we're going to rendezvous with the Home One in about twenty minutes. Congratulations, Vader: your intel was good, enough that you get a stay of execution until after Palpatine is dead. In the meantime, there are some people who want to meet you."

"Meet me," he says, fatalistically. That sounds about right.

He's not really surprised when one of the people who wants to meet him is Mon Mothma. She'd vanished right ahead of ImpSec years ago, and he hasn't heard an official word about her since. He did read Rebel polemics, and the rhetoric was familiar enough to place. With her are a mon cala he really hopes is not actually Admiral Ackbar, two human men he doesn't recognize who were probably grunts during the Clone Wars, and a twi'lek that he is pretty sure he does.

"Syndulla?" he asks. She has a toddler balanced on one hip. The child is . . . maybe going to be Force-sensitive, when he gets enough body mass to support the midichlorians.

"Vader," says Syndulla, absolutely level. "I hear you've turned traitor on the usurper, and now you want to join the Alliance."

" . . . not really," he says. "But this is where Luke is, so I'll stay anyway. Unless someone thinks it's a better idea to throw him in the pit with Sidious without any training?"

Syndulla turns to Mothma. "It's him, all right. And I am out." She turns and leaves.

Vader turns back to Mothma, who is smiling a little around her eyes. "What does she think she's doing?"

"Really? That's what you ask?" asks one of the human men.

"She can take care of herself, but the child is in danger just being here. What is she doing?"

Everyone stares at him.

"Because of you, that child was born with only one parent," says Mothma, sharply. "Where else would he be?"

"With relatives," he says, ignoring the accusation. "Away from an active-duty battlecruiser. Safe."

"He is half twi'lek, Vader, and you brought slavery back to this galaxy. Between that, and the thing Palpatine likes to do to children like him, there is nowhere safe for him. He's in the least danger on this ship." She pauses, then adds, "And I don't believe for a hot second you actually care about a child you've never met. You certainly tried to kill his family enough times."

"I have been told," he says, "that I should try to care more for other people. It's not unreasonable, but I'm never going to like you much. Children are . . . "

"And I suppose you felt that way when you were leading the attack on Kashyyyk, too?"

"Mostly I was thinking that if I didn't, Sidious was going to glass the whole planet from orbit. At least slaves are alive. Dead is just dead."

One of the human males, and the mon cala who probably is Ackbar, both nod. They'd probably already known, and he was just confirming it. "And that's how you justify most things you did?"

"No," he says. "Most of the time I was trying to do as much harm as possible, to as many people as possible."

At that, one of the human men snickers. "Sounds accurate."

"And now . . . you aren't?" asks the other.

"Now I have someone to protect," he says, and immediately realizes that was the problem, all these long years. He's fine - well, no, he's still completely fucked-up over losing Padmé - but he is basically fine as long as he's got someone to protect. So of course Palpatine had made him go murder everyone he might get attached to enough that he'd want to protect them, and made him do atrocities to just about everyone else. Almost offhand, he adds, "Also I've decided that Sidious needs to be murdered, and there aren't many people who can."

Mon Mothma blinks. Ackbar says, "Sidious?"

"Palpatine," he says, with a sneer.

"Murdered," says Mon Mothma, carefully.

"Yes . . . ?" They still seem to be waiting for an answer. "An execution would imply a trial, but there's no way to keep him imprisoned. Murder."

"There has been a trial," says . . . Okay, call them person one and person two. Says Person One, carefully. "We tried him in absentia. Even using only the crimes we know about, there was more than enough for the jury to decide on execution, and this was before Alderaan."

"He didn't actually authorize Alderaan," says Vader. "He was extremely angry about it."

"Are you defending him?" asks Mon Mothma, voice still annoyingly even.

"He needs to be executed," he says, pronouncing the word with exaggerated care, "for his many crimes, hidden and open. But Alderaan wasn't one of them."

"And your crimes?" asks Person Two

"Do you want a list?" he asks.

"Yes, actually," says Person Two. "I'd love one."

"Fine. Give me a 'pad."

Person Two gapes at him, then rallies admirably. "But first I have some follow-up questions on the things you've already given us." Oh. He's an intelligence officer, or whatever passes for intelligence amongst the rebels.

He turns to Person One. "And you are?"

" . . . General Rieekan. I was the CO on Hoth."

He looks at Rieekan, who isn't very imposing, with new eyes. He'd been extremely impressed with whoever the rebel CO on Hoth was. They'd downed two AT-ATs and gotten almost the entire base, and all non-combat personnel, evacuated ahead of imperial reinforcements. There hadn't been anyone left to interrogate, and even the base computers had been wiped before the slicers arrived. "Good job."

Now it's Rieekan's turn to blink. "Good job? I lost a base!"

"Bases are just places," he says, utterly dismissive. Rieekan and Ackbar shared a disgruntled look. Then he adds, "Did you fight in the Clone Wars? You look familiar."

"I absolutely am not telling you what I did during the Clone Wars," says Rieekan.

"Maybe later, then," he says, although he is now very certain that he knows Rieekan. He wasn't 501st, and he wasn't 212th, he knew all of his men by name and in the Force. He knows the man from somewhere, though. "Are we done here, or haven't I sufficiently convinced you of my motives?"

"No," says Mothma, sounding like she's pitying him too, now. "Yes, you've convinced me that you're not on Palpatine's side. Now you have a debrief."

"A debrief," he says. He left debriefs behind at the end of the Clone Wars, and hasn't been answerable to anyone except Sidious since. "Well, why not? It might be entertaining."

 

It is. It's not fun, but Person One, whose name is Cracken and who is in Rebel Intelligence and who is therefore impressively paranoid even by his standards, actually gets a lot out of it. He gets a lot out if too, namely, what ops the Alliance is currently running. They match up pretty well with the things he already knew so it's not intel per se, but, as he has to continually remind himself, he's not on Sidious' side anyway. Not anymore.

They're not even remotely done four hours in, but that's when Leia shows up to collect him for the next of the day's (apparently) planned activities, which is . . .

A bacta tank.

He looks over to Leia, and he knows she can't see his face and he knows she understands the expression of, 'really?' anyway, because she says, "You told me you're supposed to get into a bacta tank once every six days. So get."

His situation is not going to get worse in a bacta tank, at least. Rebel medics probably do hold to their doctor's oaths, or at least more strongly than imperial medics. So he goes into the side chamber, where Luke is waiting to help him take off the parts of the prosthetics that come off and hook him up so he can get into the tank.

It's a different strain that he's used to, he can tell immediately. It's a different strain, and it's a better one, because when the Imperial military began denying medical care to civilians, they started breeding their own.

And then a doctor starts asking him questions. He first tries to avoid this with an I'm-in-a-bacta-tank-and-I-have-no-arms-you-morons gesture. One of the medics holds up an eyecam array in front of him, and then hands it up to the other medic, so they can gently reach down and fit it over his head. Leia is still staring at him. He looks into the projected display and starts answering questions.

Another couple of hours after that - it's not a new array so typing in answers is painfully slow - he's managed to make a lot of medics very angry. They aren't angry at him, at least. A lot of it appears to be directed at Sidious, and the rest at whoever had done the surgeries to put him in the suit. They're . . . trying to figure out how to get him out of the suit. He has no idea what to do with that, so he tells them that Luke has the plans he's already drafted on his 'pad. The questions continue.

Once they're gotten everything they can get, about his body and suit, they go away to be angry elsewhere. Possibly to do something useful, like figure out a less crap suit. Leia, who hasn't once moved from her spot leaning against the wall by the exit, straightens up and walks over. "You almost make me feel sorry for you. And then I remember the things you've done."

He uses the array to type a single word, babies. She reads it, and her expression doesn't change and her Force presence doesn't change, but the set of her shoulders does, enough that he knows she is trying and failing not to be amused.

"That's still a thing that is true," she says, wryly. "Do you want me to get a vid loaded up on there or something?"

Why, he writes.

"Because you still have another two and a half hours in the tank, and that's long enough to watch a vid?"

He knows this. That wasn't the question he asked. But, he figures, if she didn't tell him where Yavin was after dosing with a serious chemical cocktail and while he was digging around in her head with the Force, he isn't going to figure out anything she doesn't want to tell him now.

No, he writes. I usually take a nap.

"Yes, you should do something about the sleep debt. Pleasant hallucinations," she says, and she's out the door before he parses that out to sweet dreams.

She's there again when he wakes up. Or, rather, she wakes him up with an ungentle shove through the Force. He comes up choking and fighting before he remembers where he is.

It's a medical technician helping him get his right arm back on. "Sorry," the man apologizes. "Luke is asleep."

"How long was I out?" he asks.

"Eight hours. The princess said you needed the sleep, and it's not like sleeping in bacta hurts any, and we didn't need the tank for anyone else, so," he shrugs.

Vader put his left arm on, and then both legs, and then swaps out his nasal cannulae for his helm. The tech looks completely terrified by this ordinary sequence of perfectly explicable events. He tries, "Thank you."

The tech looks even more freaked out, but before he can say anything, Leia says, "Are you dressed yet?"

"No," he says. "Where did my armor go?"

Really, where did the rest of his suit go, but he doesn't really mind the smaller oxygen compressor someone (who'd better be Luke) has hooked up to the helm. Someone's also attached a halfway decent two-direction flow dialyzer, which, good. But he minds not having armor on a ship full of people who have reason to want to kill him.

"Ren took it," said Leia, and she can obviously feel him getting angry because she adds, "Ren is Mandalorian. She said she's fixing it."

He stops getting angry. He was only able to get Mandalorian armor in the first place because he'd threatened Korkarius Kyrze, but that behavior doesn't tend to end in alliances or armor repairs. This Ren person will undoubtedly do a better job of it than he could, but he knows how the Mandalorian gossip network works. Kyrze will know where he is within the week, and if he feels like selling them out, there isn't a damned thing the Rebellion can do to stop him. "This doesn't worry you?"

"It's armor, Vader, not a lightsaber."

"The Mand'alor knowing where I am doesn't worry you?"

"What?" asks Leia, which was how he finds out that the Rebels don't know how the Mandalorian gossip network works.

He sighs. "Kyrze is going to know, because whoever this Ren is, she's going to tell someone in her clan, who's going to pass it up until it gets to Bo-Katan, who is going to take it to Kork - the Mand'alor. And then he's going to either have to tell Sidious, or protect - "

"Sabine Wren gave Bo-Katan the darksaber and helped Clan Kyrze kick the Imperials off Mandalore," interrupts Leia. "And the empire can't really afford to offend Mandalore."

This is true. The Empire is stretched as it is, too many planets rebelling. If the Mandalorians come down on the other side, like they will if for example someone makes the insane decision to attack them, they will cripple massive swathes of the fleet by targeting supply lines. So Mandalore itself is safe, as long as the Rebellion lasts. After that it won't matter one way or the other if Kyrze knows where he is, because Sidious will too by then.

"Ah," he says. "I think I want to meet her. Wren."

"She probably doesn't want to meet you," says Leia. "She's lost family and clan to you."

"But she's fixing my armor."

"I asked," says Leia, offhand, casual, like asking a Mandalorian for something to help someone who has killed aliit is something people just do. "And Luke asked."

"Don't you need to sleep too at some point?"

"I took a nap."

He loses his patience. "Why are you my handler?"

"Because I'm the one who can tell that you don't, actually, want to kill me," she says. "And however much I hate you, I'm the one who isn't going to let something as stupid as hate get in the way of winning."

He stares. No one in the Jedi put it like that, and Sidious didn't put it like that. If either one had, he'd have understood at sometime before now. He has never, in his entire life, done anything else. He covers it by putting on the clothes, which are the kind of soft and faded black that only comes from being worn in by someone who loves these clothes very much. Finally, he says, "What's next?"

"Could you sleep more?"

He checks. "Yes, actually."

"Then that. I'll show you back to the Falcon."

There are two crew rooms on the Falcon: the one Chewbacca is sharing with Calrissian, and presumably shared with Han, and the one Luke shares with Leia. But Leia apparently has other quarters on the Home One, because she motions him inside to where Luke is already asleep. Luke hears him come in and pings him. Then, and without apparently waking up, Luke wraps him up in a sort of yes-okay-mine-good and rolls over.

It's the best he's slept in almost a decade.

Notes:

Happy Star Wars Day, and May the Fourth be with you always.

As always, please poke me if you spot typos or grammar mistakes.

Over here, big news in chez tanarill: I now have a fiance! \o/ Still looking for a job, even though the economy has gone to shit. Still, I have a partner on my team now, and it turns out team adulting is 50% less terrible than adulting alone. Who knew? :D

Chapter 4

In the morning, it's back to interrogation by Rebel spies, which Luke seems to mind more than he does. Sure, it's all the worst parts of the last two decades, but it's also a lot of people who want to do something about it. And, in a back-to-front rip-off-the-bandage way, it's a kind of cathartic too, to finally be able to tell someone who isn't a coercive empath, who doesn't expect to find him happy about having done so. Mostly, he finds, he just feels - exhausted. Commit enough atrocities, and apparently, he just wants to go take a nap instead.

Around lunch Leia comes in, followed by a doctor: a harch who, if he's reading the coloration and patterning correctly, is a sexually mature female who isn't looking for nuptial gifts at this time. She's pushing a cart. "All right, time for a break," she says, briskly. "My patient needs calories."

"Your patient?" he asks.

The harch squeaks and looks to Leia, but when she nods stands up a little straighter.

"Vader, this is Doctor Sarahae," says Leia. "She has agreed to become your primary care physican. Doctor Sarahae, Darth Vader. By 'agreed' I mean she was about ready to start biting the assholes who designed that 'life support system.'" She does little finger pops in the air.

Vader - pauses. Harch aren't particularly sturdy, so evolution instead equipped them with one of the deadliest neurotoxins produced by any sapient species. They are peaceful, though, and generally regard the idea of using their venom on sapient people as an act of war. "If it helps any," he says, "I killed them already, and reprogrammed the droids."

"That does not help," says Doctor Sarahae, clicking her chelicerae together. "Come. I have prepared nutrient fluid."

He tries, and fails, not to remember that harch are only equipped to drink their meals, which they prepare by injecting digestive enzymes into their prey until the flesh liquefies. Also that baby harch have their meals prepared by their parents. And, furthermore, that harch are biocompatible with humans. Even if it was a perfectly reasonable ration bar to start with before Doctor Sarahae got at, he's not sure if he can stomach it.

Doctor Sarahae rasps her auxiliary arms against each other, a soft shush-shush noise that does nothing to hide the fact that she's laughing at him. "These are sterile-filtered intravenous fluids," she says. "I made extra because you haven't been eating, or something, and you need more calories."

"I require less than fifteen hundred a day," he says.

"Right," says Doctor Sarahae grimly. "You are getting twenty-three hundred a day, and they will be supplemented with amino acids and extra vitamins, until you stop saying stupid things like 'I require less than two thousand calories a day.' Would you like to do the injection, or should I?"

"I'll do it."

"Excellent," she says, and folds her main arms across her chest.

" . . . right now?"

"Yes," she says, and plants both her main and auxiliary feet on the ground. "Now."

"Very well," he says, and pulls up his shirt. There are needlemarks all over his abdomen, because that's pretty much the only part of his body with subcutaneous fat packs that hadn't burned. He swabs up and inserts the needle with practiced ease. "Are you going to go now?"

"I am," says Leia. "She's not. You've managed to get the best doctor in the fleet on your side, Vader. If anyone can fix the travesty you call a body, it's her." She pauses, then adds, "Maybe try not to piss her off."

He never does, with doctors. He just figures out in what way Sidious wants them to 'help' him, and then finds an excuse to kill them. Sarahae isn't being ordered by Sidious, and she wouldn't follow the instructions even if she did have them. "I won't."

"Great. You can go back to whatever you were doing, which I absolutely never want to know."

Sarahae stays through two more bags of fluid, at which point he gives and asks where the 'fresher is.

"Oh, uh," says one of the interrogators, like it hadn't occurred to them that his kidneys work just fine and all the fluid was going to have to go somewhere.

"I'll show you," says Sarahae, and the questioners very clearly give each other looks that come down to deciding that trying to keep Darth Vader from going anywhere he doesn't want to be, even on the Home One, is above their pay grade.

The 'fresher is, thankfully, absolutely normal in every way.

When he returns, Luke has shown up and is in the process of convincing the interrogators to let him go . . . somewhere and do . . . something. It is adorable, and he stands there in the door just watching Luke Luke at them for a while before any of them notice him. There's a visible start when the first one does. Before she can freak out any more, he says, "I'm done for the day," and ignores their protests to follow Luke out of the room.

"Where are we going?" he asks, two bulkheads and a long corridor later.

Luke gives him a glance over his shoulder. "Parts pile."

"Parts . . . pile," he repeats, because that illuminated exactly nothing.

"We have this pile of parts," says Luke, "that came out of broken things where that part wasn't what was broken. We leave C-3PO there doing inventory when we're on this ship, because he finds it soothing and he doesn't have enough soothing things in his life. And between the point when it gets dumped in there and the point it gets inventoried, it's sort of up for grabs. Well, I mean, it is anyway, but, you know. It's searchable once it's in the system, and tends to go pretty fast. Whereas right now we can look through a pile of parts."

"You want a lightsaber that badly?"

Luke stops. Just, bam, middle of the hallway, stopped. It's not a big hallway, either, nothing like an imperial cruiser. "I want you," he says, slowly, enunciating, "to have a life support suit that isn't designed to hurt."

That deserves a response, he's pretty sure. "Oh."

"Some doctors came to talk to me," he adds, and Vader remembers that, yes, he did tell the medics about the plans they were drafting. "One of them said they're going to have to surgically remove some plates from your bones. And then," he continues, voice carefully neutral, "since the plates should have been taken out decades ago and in the meantime your bones grew up around them, they're going to have to surgically reconstruct large portions of your spine."

"But," he asks. "Why?"

Luke gives him another unwanted, pitying look. "Because the Alliance is getting its first good look under the hull of what it takes to make an imperial grand enforcer, and none of us like what we're seeing."

He thinks about Leia and Alderaan, about the still-unmet Sabine Wren and whatever he's done to her aliit, about Han Solo in carbonite, and Chewbacca out in space light-years from home. He can't fix Alderaan, and he can't fix Wren's clan. Dead is dead, after all.

The parts pile is fantastic. C-3PO is there, busily tidying his way through the room, but after effusively greeting 'Master Luke,' he goes back to it. Meanwhile, he closes his eyes and listens and there are more than half a dozen things in that pile singing to him. He stands back, breathes out, and raises the pile.

"Oh - "

He reaches for the parts of that are his. A moment later, baffled but clearly not having trouble tracking what he did, Luke does the same. They net a handful of items each, maybe fifteen total. Then, carefully, he lets the pile back down.

"All right," he says, "Let's see what we have."

Three quarters of the parts are for building some kind of life support system. He has no idea what kind, because there is no life support system he has ever heard of needs quite that much insulated monofilament wiring. Luke's haul is more useful, containing things like an oxygen compressor and enough of an analog clock that he can tell it's going to be a pacemaker.

The other quarter are things that are obviously going to be a lightsaber, and they are mostly his.

"I'm the one who really wants a lightsaber, hm?" says Luke.

"It is possible," he says, with great dignity, "that I might want to get rid of all the remains of my slave life immediately, if not sooner."

"Yeah, okay," says Luke. "Only I don't think anyone on this ship particularly wants you to have a lightsaber."

They haven't tried taking it away, because that would be monumentally stupid and they know it. But. "If I want to kill someone, lack of a lightsaber isn't going to stop me," he points out.

"You could be a little more friendly. Just because you're not . . . " He trails off, apparently at a loss about how to finish the statement, before he rallies, "doesn't mean you have to act like manners cost you anything."

"Do you think it will be less disturbing to people if I say 'please'?"

"It won't ever stop being disturbing if you don't even start," says Luke, almost sing-song.

He sighs. He's not on this ship to make friends, and none of the people here really want him - Luke excepted, of course. "We should go talk with the doctors again. Figure out how all of this fits into my new suit."

"Sure," says Luke, gracious in victory.

The doctors don't appreciate it, either. They keep looking over at him like they're waiting for him to attack. Which he does, but only to about half of the additions they've made to the blueprints, and then only with a red stylus. Then he settles in to consider how this build is going to change based on the salvaged parts, which parts of his own work he has to erase and rework to incorporate them. They watch him, slowly going quiet as he ruthlessly rips his own designs apart and rewrites them. Then they begin conversing with each other, in whispers. Finally, when he has something more coherent than not sketched out, one of them says, "Er, Lord Vader?"

"Just Vader," he says, and carefully adds, "Please."

"Um. Right. Vader. Can you maybe explain . . . um. The stuff you're drawing out as synthskin, for a start?"

"Synthskin doesn't give much feedback, and what it does give is analog. Hot-cold, on-off, yes-no. It's too granular. I'm making it better."

"Making it . . . you just - did this? Right now?"

"Yes?"

"Off the top of your head? These aren't just some schematics you happened to know?"

"If I had invented this earlier, why would I still be - oh, stop it. I'm not going to murder you for being interested."

"Uh. That's not. What the rumors say?"

"Yes, but Sidious' so-called doctors were all deliberately torturing me." They all flinch back, even though they've seen what's under the suit. "You're not, so we won't have any problems until someone tries to poison me."

"Until?" That's Sarahae.

"I'm not expecting it of you," he says honestly. She'd just bite him.

"But you are expecting it."

"It isn't paranoia," he says. "People try to kill me. Often."

"I can't imagine why," says Sarahae. "You will not kill them."

"I will - "

"You will bring them to us. And then they can explain, to we their fellow doctors and to Alliance high command, why they thought they had any right to break their oaths."

No imperial doctor, or at least not those under Sidious' command, would have cared, was the thing. Alliance doctors do care. "Very well; I'll do that."

A sort of sigh runs around the room, tension leaving even though he hasn't made any unbreakable oaths.

"So?" asks the one who'd spoken before. "Will you explain how it works?"

"I can try," he says.

So that's his day, more or less: telling the rebels all about things he's done and things the empire has done, followed by working on a less shit suit. The next few days follow in more or less the same vein, until the one when Leia comes in with a purple-haired human woman behind her and says, "This is a terrible idea."

"Probably," agrees the woman. "But it's not getting any more fixed until I have him present for fittings."

Oh. "Wren," he says, a neutral greeting.

"You know exactly where you can shove it," says Wren. "I'm not doing this for you. I'm doing this because Fulcrum and Leia both said Luke is going to die if I don't, and I'm not stupid enough to not pay attention to my seers."

He looks over to Leia, who raises an eyebrow at him.

"Come on, on the table," says Wren. "Left leg out. I need to take your measurements."

He waits a little while, until she's distracted with the work, before saying, "What were their names?"

Wren almost snaps at him. "Because you regret so much that you're going to put them on your list?"

"Not at the time," he says, stressing the word a little. "But I refuse to do this halfway. What were their names?"

Wren looks up at him sharply. Then, in carefully formal Mando'a, she says, «Are you seriously going to tell me you're Mando'ade under there?»

«Impossible,» he replies in the same language. «The Manda is incompatible with the Force.»

«Only if you adhere to strict Shogunite practice,» says Wren immediately.

«Which you clearly don't,» he says, looking her up and down.

She shrugs, and turns back to the armor. «The Force is demonstrably real. There are those among us, who have actually spoken with seers,» this is said with an aside glance at Leia, who is watching with an air of profound annoyance, «and know that no vision is ever the whole truth. The Shogunites and Jedi both built their doctrine on incomplete knowledge: on faith.»

«And you?»

«The Force is split into the light and the dark,» says Wren. «Despite light and dark actions being things that we, living people, define. We could define other divisions.»

« . . . the part of the Force that is the Manda, and the part of the Force that isn't? Defined by following the Resol'nare?»

«It's a theory,» says Wren, almost defensively.

«It's an elegant solution,» he says, as diplomatically as possible.

«I sense a 'but,'» says Wren.

He shakes his head. «It's something to ask the dead, not the living.»

Wren works quietly for a while more before she says, "Kanan Jarrus."

"Thank you," he says, and means it.

Later, while Leia is walking him back to the Falcon, she says, "I didn't know you spoke Mandalorian."

It is absolutely a question. "Give me ten hours and a book, and I can learn most languages."

"What were you talking about?"

"Philosophy," he said.

"Philosophy?"

"Traditional Mandalorian thought says we're headed for different afterlives. Traditional Jedi thought says there is only one afterlife. Interesting woman, Wren."

"You are not allowed to murder her," says Leia immediately.

"Why would I?" She is, after all, doing him a pretty big favor. He's going to owe her after this. "We'll see what Obi-wan has to say."

"Why would Obi-wan say anything at all?" demands Leia. He likes that about Leia, that she follows his lanes of thought easily enough that they don't have to talk about it.

"Obi-wan is one of nature's teachers. If he has an opportunity to lecture you about something, he will," he says. "Sanctimoniously."

"I'm pretty sure that's just you," says Leia. "Because you deserve it."

He thinks very briefly about Leia denying she'd have been a Jedi. She is right, but in this case it just means that she'd have been on the receiving end of an extra lot of sanctimonious Jedi bantha shit until she got fed up with it and left the Temple. There's no point in trying to convince her. She will learn for herself, whenever Obi-wan next stops by to talk/torment him. "Leia." She stops, turns to look at him. "Thank you."

She looks much more unsettled than she did when he showed up with Luke on Bespin. For that alone, he decides, he's going to keep being aggressively polite to everyone. "Yeah, well," she says, muttering almost to herself. "Thank flyboy."

Notes:

This has been A Year. On the plus side, adulting with a partner continues to be less terrible than adulting alone, so I married mine. \o/

My the Fourth be with you.

Chapter 5

He does, the next time he sees Luke, which isn't the next day. He knows Luke is trying to see him at least once a day, but he also knows Luke is not just in Rogue Squadron, he's in charge of it. So he just waits patiently until he can ask Luke why everyone on this ship seems to think he's some kind of miracle who must be protected at every cost, and in the meantime keeps telling Rebel - Alliance - Intelligence about horrible things he's done protecting Imperial interests. They have to keep stopping so he can figure out how he feels about it (mostly: bad) and purge the emotions that won't help into the Force. If Leia thinks anything at all about it, she doesn't tell him.

Then Luke comes back, and his breath catches. He remembers this, remembers the first time he saw a Jedi, the way the light seemed to follow Qui-gon around. It isn't light and it isn't following Luke, but it's palpable, probably even to people who aren't Force-sensitive. Luke is talking to someone, subordinate by his uniform and friend by his stance. He freezes a moment when he notices Vader looking.

"Uh," he says.

"Father," says Luke. "This is Wedge. Wedge - "

"Why Wedge?" he asks. It's obviously a callsign, and he knows those can get pretty wild, but wedge?

"Why Vader?" replies Wedge, then looks supremely shocked at his own bravery.

"It's a Sith word," he says. "One of the twelve aspects of Darkness. It means . . . quick-thinking, decisive in battle."

"Really?" asks Luke. "You didn't tell me that."

"You didn't ask." He goes back to looking at Wedge.

"For the formation!" squeaks Wedge. "I used to be pretty by-the-book, you know? And then I started actually flying missions."

"Ah." He turns to look at Luke.

Luke says, "Okay, Wedge."

Wedge retreats with alacrity.

"I didn't mean to do that," he comments.

Luke shrugs. "There are bound to be some teething pains. You did answer the question; he'll be fine. What are the other attributes of darkness?"

" . . . no," he says. "I am not going to teach you how to be a Sith lord."

Luke looks startled, then thoughtful. "I just don't think 'decisive in battle' is necessarily a bad thing."

"None of the aspects are. That's how they catch you. Did you ask Wren to fix my armor?"

"It's pretty obvious you're going to need it."

"Thank you," he says.

They alert Leia and then go to a room so he can show Luke how to field-strip a lightsaber. They're not actually complicated: a power pack, a laser, focusing lens, a plasma emitter, and a couple of coils to shape the electric fields. Any one of them, except the kyber, could be bought anywhere in the galaxy, or scavenged from hundreds of different subsystems. The kyber itself is not complicated either, being really just a rock grown in a strong standing Force locus. He finishes explaining this while Luke puts it back together. He's ready to step in if Luke makes even a minor mistake, but he doesn't.

"Hmm," says Luke, and, "Why didn't non-Jedi use these?"

"What?"

"They're not hard to build, and they cut through anything, and you can deflect blaster shots with them. Why did literally no one other than Jedi use these?"

"Flyboy. How exactly do you think ship shields work?" says Leia, cutting in, but it's useful because then he doesn't have to.

" . . . oh," says Luke.

"Natural kybers are rare, though," he says, "and law-enforcement officers don't generally tend to hand out blades that can cut through anything. Even if you give them to people you trust, they inevitably end up in the wrong hands." He means for it to be the truth, and it is; but it's also much bleaker than he meant it to be.

"Not yours," says Luke. "Not anymore. Never again."

Leia snorts. "As if he ever used them to any legitimate purpose."

He wasn't going to say anything, but Luke says, "He used to be a Jedi."

"Like I said," says Leia. "I know about the Jedi's shit policies, and I can sort-of understand flipping on them hard enough to kill them all. But what I don't get is why you flipped on the whole galaxy, too! You were the only one who gave a damn about - the people, the civilian costs, the things that actually fucking matter! Until you didn't. Why - " her voice breaks.

He looks at her, hearing in her rage his own anger, buried so deep he hadn't felt it, or had sublimated it to Sidious' will. "My wife died. I wanted to hurt other people the way I was hurting," he admits. "Sidious wanted people to be hurt. None of the reasons why I shouldn't seemed like good reasons anymore."

"That's three-year-old logic," says Leia, severely.

He shrugs. "The truth is the truth."

Leia sighs. "The truth is the truth. I think we're going to have to get you a therapist, too. If something like a loved one dying was enough to push you over the edge before - Luke does a dangerous job."

"It's not - I wouldn't do anything to endanger you."

"You don't think you would, but what you'd actually do is launch a suicide strike on Palpatine."

"Which wouldn't work," he says, bleak, resigned.

"It would, actually," said Leia, "but it wouldn't do a thing about the Empire. Let's try to keep that to plan thesh, all right?"

"Yes," he agrees. "All right."

His days continue to go like that. He gets to know his doctors pretty well, and as they gradually relax, even finds that he likes a couple of them. They do a lot of scans, and he draws and redraws the plans for his new prosthetics half a dozen times. They are insistent on them being functional prosthetics first, and working body armor as a distant non-concern. Of course, he has a Mandalorian armorer making it, so they are probably right about that. They discuss a lot about the surgeries, plural, they're going to have to do to reconstruct his arm- and leg-stubs, how they're going to start by taking a few skin samples so they can grow him more natural skin to replace the scars on the way out. The meetings are fascinating, and not at all for the faint-of-heart. Luke attends exactly one.

"I don't get how you can just sit there so calmly while they talk about cutting you open," says Luke, later, while practicing footwork. He's nowhere near ready for sparring against a live opponent, but he is progressing very well against the small zappy droid Vader built for him.

"The princess will be there." Leia doesn't like him; Leia, in fact, despises him. But he trusts that Leia won't let them kill him on an operating table.

"Well, yeah, but - "

"And it's not different from the surgeries you used to help Beru with."

"It's not?"

"Surgeries towards freedom," he explains.

"Oh," says Luke, and goes quiet for a while. "Father?"

"Mm?"

"What was Mother like?"

His throat closes, and he doesn't sob, but it's a close thing. He is certain Luke felt the burst of emotion, though, because he stops moving entirely and the droid zaps him.

"Ow!"

"That's what you get for letting superficial concerns distract you in battle."

"Mother is not superficial," grouses Luke as he lines up again.

"The first time we met, I asked her if she was an angel."

"That kind of pickup line works in real life?"

"No, but when you're ten everyone thinks it's cute. Ransling love."

"So what changed?"

"Nothing. For me . . . for me, love has always been - the Force doesn't really care about time, so when I'm going to love someone, I know that they will be mine immediately. Your mother was the first person I met like that - aside from my mother, I mean, but it's normal to love your own mother - and I knew." He pauses, then adds, "I didn't really properly fall in love with her, the person she actually was, until several years after she . . . after I killed her."

The obvious question at that point is 'why?' so of course that isn't the question Luke asks. "What about everyone else? I mean, you had to have known you'd love all the Jedi you loved immediately, too. Wouldn't you figure out the difference between things in the present and things in the future fairly quickly?"

" . . . no," he says, astonished by how steady his voice is. "No. I only ever really gave a damn about three Jedi. A sample size of four, spread out over eleven years . . . I only noticed it this time around because Obi-wan is being an ass about it."

"A helpful ass," says Luke, which . . .

He doesn't actually enjoy listening to people talk about how they're going cut him open and rearrange his insides. But they're going to do it so he won't be chained, ever again, to a doctor or a medical droid or even a damned piece of shit suit. That was never going to happen if he stayed Imperial. "Yes, fine. A helpful ass."

Luke smiles, and doesn't push any more that day.

Kenobi does come back, finally, while he's working with Luke to build a crystal autoclave so they can grow a kyber for his lightsaber. Leia notices first, because of course she does, but she says, "Vader."

He looks up, sees Obi-wan, and asks, "Does the Manda exist?"

"What?" says Obi-wan, completely nonplussed.

"I had an interesting conversation with a sister the other day. Does the Manda exist?"

" . . . when you become one with the Force, you become one with all of it," says Obi-wan. "Or I did. That's the easy part. The hard part is maintaining enough of a personality to still be an individual while also being everyone else."

"Mm," he says, surprised by the mostly non-evasive answer. "Luke?"

"Yes?" asks Luke, clearly startled.

"You also had a question."

"Not helpful ones," says Luke. "Just things to answer my own curiosity. I think we'd better let Leia do the talking, actually." He looks over to the princess.

Leia is looking at Obi-wan, assessing. Finally she says, "Peace, or justice?"

"I can see for you it's justice," said Obi-wan.

"But not for you."

"I don't believe they have to be mutually exclusive."

Leia continues to glare at him, accusing; he doesn't meet her eyes, which shows he also knows that's not an answer. "My next question, then. Is - did Mr. Handy retain enough of a personality that he could come talk to me?"

Obi-wan, of all things, winces.

"I thought not," said Leia. "But I still had to ask. You understand."

Obi-wan sighs. "I understand. If it helps any, he is really very sorry for dying on you like that."

Leia shrugs. "I did my mourning." Then she gestures. "You two both chose peace. Maybe you can bond about how terrible a decision that was."

Luke laughs, although only silently and into the Force. Leia turns her glare on him for a moment, before her expression softens. "I'm not joking."

"No," says Luke. "But your bedside manner could use some work. How about the two of you talk about the Hutts? Just for a start."

"Just for a start," says Obi-wan. "Well, it can't hurt."

"You're an idiot," says Vader.

What they end up doing, after the normal bitching about Hutts, is figuring out how to run a month-long op to take down the Hutts using only Alliance resources. They'd start on Tatooine with Jabba and finish by rolling up Nal Hutta. Of course, it's never going to happen; the Alliance is always going to have something more important to be doing someplace else, just like the Republic always had. At least, that's what he thinks right up until he looks up and sees Leia's expression. And Luke's.

"No," he says, firmly. "Absolutely not."

"We need to rescue Han at some point," says Leia.

"You don't have the infrastructure it would take to build the infrastructure you'd need to hold Tatooine, much less Nal Hutta."

"Write a list," orders Leia.

So that's another thing he has to do. He has more or less run out of current Imperial intelligence, but he's only a couple of years into his two decades in Sidious' service, so there is plenty more horrible history left to go. It's just not Alliance spies interrogating him anymore. It takes him a while to figure out that it's Alliance lawyers, because the Alliance wants to be able to put all the Imperial war criminals on trial. It is so absurd that he actually laughs out loud when he figures it out, which disturbs everyone in the room and ends that day's questioning early.

The plans for the surgery are still mostly plans, but another trip to the parts pile and his new prosthetics, or at least his new right leg, finally gels up all at once. He lets Leia persuade him to hand the design off to a cybernetics specialist, a clone who goes by Junkrat. Most of the clones are dead, the wars or the Empire or the damn Kaminoan gene meddling. It's pretty clear anyway he's a deserter who got out early, because he took a hit that would otherwise have "retired" him to Kamino, and then spent his entire life since then reaching back to pull other people out. He trusts Junkrat, immediately and completely.

Junkrat clearly does not trust him, but comes back anyway. "These are the best kriffing prosthetic plans I've ever seen. Who are you and what did you do with Darth Vader?"

"No, that's not the right question," he says. "Try again."

"Can I use these? There are other people who need better prosthetics."

"Yes," he says. "Make more than one. There are mistakes in there; I'd prefer them to be caught before I install one of these."

"You are a terrible person," says Junkrat flatly, but he takes the plans and wanders off.

Wren shows back up another week later, with his new armor. She's painted it already. The style would be enough to tell him she'd been a Ghost, even if he hadn't already known. The patterns might have been abstract to anyone who didn't know what they meant, but he can read the accusation, loud and clear. And the challenge. He says, "Thank you," and puts it all on but the helmet. Then, "Can you . . . can you tell me? How he died?"

"Which?" asks Wren.

"Rex," he says, tracing the jaig eyes. The five - he knows how Fives died, and Dogma and Echo and Tup and most of the other brothers whose names Wren put on his armor, but not Rex.

"Peacefully in his sleep, of all impossible things," says Wren.

"Rex?"

"Oh, so you knew him," says Wren. "I wasn't ever sure he was telling the truth about you having been five hundred first. The way he said it, General Skywalker was eight feet tall and breathed fire and wouldn't have let someone like you anywhere near his men."

"The Skywalker brat deserved everything he got," he says levelly. He puts the helmet on. It's been fitted with a compact oxygen compressor and nasal cannulae already.

While he's adjusting the cannulae, Wren comes to a decision, palpable in the Force. "Do you want my advice?"

"Yes," he says immediately.

«Teach Luke Mando,» says Wren; and, having had the last word, swans out while he's still too stunned to respond.

Leia turns to him with narrowed eyes. "What did she say?"

"'Teach Luke Mandalorian.'"

"What else did she say?"

"Nothing that needs to concern you," he says, and immediately feels the lie. Leia is only still opening her mouth when he says, " . . . Kyrze wants to talk."

"How do you get 'Kyrze wants to talk,' into 'teach Luke Mandalorian'?" asks Leia. She's not disputing his judgement, because she is not an idiot. She just, obviously, does not understand how the Mando'ade work at all.

"Do we want to talk to Kyrze?" he asks.

"Is whatever Kyrze wants with you likely to result in the Mandalorians joining the Alliance?"

He thought about the position the Mand'alor held in the hierarchy of the Mando'ade, and what he might want with someone like Vader. "Unlikely."

"Then we don't care," says Leia. "But if you're going to talk to him, tell us first."

"I'm going to talk to him," he says. "It will mostly be a very slow relay correspondence. It's not like I can do everything he just asked me to do immediately." Then he realizes this isn't exactly true, and adds, "I don't suppose Wren happens to have battle armor ready for Luke?"

Leia stares at him. "How the fuck did you know that?" Then she waves a hand. "Nevermind. Yes, there is armor. Wren made it a long time ago. Luke keeps refusing to wear it. If you can get him to do that . . . "

"Understood." And then, carefully, he adds, "But, Princess. This isn't, in general, a particularly good use of my skills. Telling you people about the past, but not letting me do anything to change the future."

"I know," says Leia, shortly.

"You know?"

"It's not my decision," she says. "Seers always see the truth, and never see the whole truth. SOP is to cover the blind spots with more than one seer, but it's usually too big a risk to keep more than one seer on the same ship at a time."

"This Fulcrum person," he says.

"Fulcrum doesn't want to come," says Leia. "Apparently, you tried pretty hard to kill them. So we're stuck waiting for Pathfinder instead, and Pathfinder . . . well, let's just say Pathfinder is difficult even for a Lothal."

He remembers very well how stubborn Lothal are. "You can tell Fulcrum I'm not going to try to kill them again."

"What makes you think they'll believe me?"

Which is a good point. "Then put me on some tiny little boat in space. Fulcrum can come and get a read without ever being in physical proximity, and you can torpedo the whole boat if I'm lying."

"You honestly think Luke wouldn't be on that boat with you?" asks Leia. When he doesn't answer, she grudgingly allows, "I'll send the audio file, let Fulcrum know how serious you are."

"And meanwhile?"

" . . . okay, throw me your best offer," she says.

"Whatever you're doing for tac training, you can't be using real data - at least, I hope you aren't that supid." Leia snorts; he didn't think so. "In that case, I can be the Imperial opposition pilot. There isn't much strat-tac data I can get out a sim, but your pilots all get better training."

"You mean Luke gets better training."

"Luke and his Rogues," says Vader. "And all your other squads too. The better they are at tactical flight, the less danger Luke will be in."

"I'll bring it up with Ackbar," says Leia.

He doesn't honestly expect anything to come out of that, but in fact what happens is that Ackbar gives him a soft 'no': he can train the X-wing fighters if and only if he can successfully complete the one Imperial pilot challenge that everyone fails, the sim of landing the Invisible Hand.

"Very well," he says, impatiently, and then lays out his reciprocal demands: R2-D2 for his astromech, and the ship has to run the sim with voxels of no more than one cubic millimeter.

"One cubic millimeter!" cries out Ackbar. "That's more computing than a hyperspace jump takes!"

"I know what the Skywalker brat did," he says, "but it will not work in a coarse-grain sim. Voxels of one cubic millimeter, or I won't do it."

He's worried, for a moment, that he's pushed too far; but then the opponent he's faced in half a dozen battles, the only one who never lost, Admiral Ackbar, comes out. "Fine," he says. "Absurdly tiny voxels."

"Much of ship interior can be modelled as a uniformly dense mass," he allows. The Home One isn't going to be able to run the sim in anything approaching real-time, if he doesn't compromise at least that much. "Down to a meter below the hull. That last meter is critical, though."

The war hadn't really lasted long enough after he'd landed the Invisible Hand for him to tell anyone, and then he'd been dead, as far as anyone else knew. He'd known they were using it as the impossible training run that everyone failed, but he hadn't cared.

"But he can't really," he overhears Wedge say to Luke. "I mean, Vader, sure, but - no one's ever been able to figure out how the Hero With No Fear did it!"

"Really?" he says, which is when Wedge notices him. "I can't imagine why not. It's very simple, once you have the flight logs and understand the Force."

" . . . oh, fuck," says Wedge, and, "Luke, I have to go check on some things. I'll catch up with you later!"

"I wasn't trying to scare him," he says almost plaintively, to Wedge's retreating back.

"You didn't," says Luke, watching him with worried eyes.

Wedge's reaction is basically everyone's reaction, though at least the doctors are professional and don't ask him about it until after they are done. They've decided on eight surgeries: one for each of the terrible prosthetic implants, another two to remove the metal plates and reconstruct his pelvis, one to replace his current pacemaker with the unhackable new one, and one final one to remodel his spine. All but the two pelvic surgeries can be done in any order, but Doctor Sarahae had clicked her chelicerae and announced they were doing the spine first, because that's where Sidious put the bombs.

"No, wait," he says, looking at the scans. "That one and that one and that one, yes, but this one is Hutt manufacture," he gestures to the one that's under his clavicle.

They all turn to stare at him again, in unanimous incandescent righteous rage. "If I ask why you have a Hutt explosive in your - "

"Why does anyone have a Hutt explosive in them?" he demands, and they all shut up.

"Well," says Sarahae. "If you want it out, we can get that one today."

Suddenly, he does want it out, decades ago, the second Obi-wan took him to his first check-up in the Jedi temple infirmary. "Yes. Please."

It really is that simple, it turns out. They don't even put him under, just give him a local anaesthetic and it's a quick incision, in and out in half an hour. Outside his body, it doesn't even look like anything, just a bean sitting on a tray. "What are you going to do with," he nods, "that?"

"Space it and then detonate it." Then, a little hesitantly, "Sometimes people like to detonate it themselves?"

"Yes," he says, so that's what they do. The detonation isn't even really visible from inside the ship, it's such a small thing. The Hutts didn't believe in killing any slaves who happened to be near a runaway, after all.

One day, he decides, he's going to kill Jabba. Maybe when they go back to Tatooine to rescue Han, but really, even if not then, then when the Alliance goes in. He owes his homeworld that, and his mother's grave, and the child he'd once been. It is a debt he never could have paid, before: both the Republic and the Empire depended too much on Hutt financial support. He doesn't know who funds the Alliance, but he knows that Mon Mothma would never accept Hutt money, and even if she wanted to, Leia wouldn't let her. In this strange shining new world, where he has a son who loves him and a team he trusts, he can plant his feet, and turn around to reach back, and start pulling people out.

Notes:

It has, once again, been A Year. On the plus side, I finally get to have my honeymoon soon. Here, have some feels.

May the Fourth be with you.

Chapter 6

Summary:

There is a difference between revenge and justice. There is also, it turns out, a difference between avoiding grief and processing it.

The Home One parks itself in orbit around a star to free up enough computer to run the sim. It would be a great time for an ambush, he thinks, and then immediately goes to tell Leia about it.

She rolls her eyes. "We're on standby, but as far as I can tell Sidious' range is only seven thousand light years and we're well outside that. ImpSec has nothing on us. And we do have the fighters prepped, just in case. And you can shut up," she says, rolling her eyes at a corner of the room that contains no one. He blinks, and decides not to say anything.

It's most of the ship, therefore, that is watching. They've had him on board for almost a month, and he's been unfailingly polite to everyone the whole time and spends most of his time either in medical or with Luke or onboard the Millenium Falcon. This is not expected Imperial Lord Darth Vader behavior, at least according to the rumor mill, which he pays attention to because it's his best bet for hearing about the inevitable assassination attempt before it happens.

(The rumor mill has also decided a few more things about him. One, he is from Tatooine and is, therefore, probably Luke's actual biological father. Two, he almost certainly killed Anakin Skywalker, because even twenty years later he's still got an obvious grudge against the Hero With No Fear, whom he only ever refers to as 'the Skywalker brat' or 'the Skywalker traitor.' Three, and this is the important one, he also hates Emperor Palpatine with fierce and justifiable passion. This might, if he keeps acting this way for long enough, convince a few of them that, four, he was never so much on the emperor's side as working with him because their goals happened to align. He isn't quite sure why Leia hasn't stomped on any of these rumors with the truth. Either way, he's not holding his breath.)

Anyway. Curious ship full of Alliance command, who had mostly been shinies in the Clone Wars, and Alliance shinies, and Alliance veterans like Leia and Luke. They are all, with few exceptions, huge Jedi nerds. They want to know how Anakin Skywalker did it.

He settles into the flight simulator, R2-D2 plugging in to the interface beside him. Around him, in the real world, he can feel the sim booting up. One layer deeper, inside the sim, he can feel the Invisible Hand, huge and indistinct and just failing to glance off the atmosphere as it begins entry.

"Can you fly a cruiser like this?" asks a dead man in his memories.

He takes a breath. Knowing how to pilot the cruiser is as irrelevant now as it had been back then, but whoever built the sim got some things wrong. The engines are properly nonfunctional, but the attitude thrusters aren't. The wiring on all the flight surfaces isn't welded shut by Grievous' last-ditch attempt to kill them via uncontrolled atmospheric entry. The ship isn't banged to all hell and back, either, which means it's not going to break up halfway through descent, and the square-cube law means he's going to have to slow down about half a battle cruiser's worth of extra mass. No wonder none of the shinies can finish this sim. He's not entirely sure he can.

Still. Luke is watching. And Leia. He has to give it his best try.

"Open all hatches," he says, commands coming out crisp and clear. "Extend all flaps and drag fins." And then, a second later, "Close hatches aurek-7 through krill-14. Adjust flaps - "

And they're off, R2-D2 forcing the ship's hatches, flaps, and fins to shape the wind moving past the ship, even as the hull heats first to annealing, and then to glowing. He's in charge of using the attitude thrusters. A real atmospheric entry should take only a few minutes, but by the time they should have slammed into the surface, he's gotten the ship leveled out into a shallow glide. Every drag fin has snapped off and the flaps have been welded into place. About half the hatches aren't really hatches anymore. They're still going well above the speed of sound, but he'll be able to glide like this for long enough to get well away from the Senate Dome and the Jedi Temple and more densely populated Capital District. Once out over an industrial area, he could ground it. That would be long enough to evacuate everyone in the landing area down into the underlayer -

The sim cuts off. He blinks stupidly in the dark for a moment, and then, beside him, R2-D2 says, «Good to have you back. You shit-eating absolute fucking asshole.»

While he's still in shock over that, the lights finally do cycle back on and the sim door opens. It's Luke out there, with Wedge and Gond and the rest of his wing. " -ot actually possible," Wedge is saying.

"Looked pretty possible to me," points out Ackbar, who is standing behind him in a parade rest.

"It was tricky," he admits, resettling his armor. "The real Invisible Hand was significantly more damaged going in; it broke up halfway through descent and the Coruscant defense shot down the rest of it."

"Really?" asks Wedge.

"Watch the holos," he says.

"If that's true, then you are arguably the better pilot," murmurs Ackbar. "To land the whole thing."

"Of course I am," he says. Anakin Skywalker had been a cocky, self-absorbed brat.

"And I suppose a bargain is a bargain," says Ackbar. "If my fighters can learn to bring you down, normal TIE fighters won't present a significant challenge."

"Good luck with that," he says.

What this means is that instead of interrogation time, it's now sim time. He plays the imperial side, and the baby X-wing pilots try to outfly him. This works about as well as anyone with a brain might expect the first half-dozen times, but by the end of the first dozen they're getting a handle on their ships.

"I am amazed," he says, after the first sim where they actually manage to work together and present him with some resistance, "that you fools managed to destroy the Death Star."

"Oh, well," says Wedge. He's mostly gotten over the fear, or at least subsumed it into his desire to win one of these sims. "That was Luke. Him and Tycho are the only ones left from the original Rogues. Everyone else died."

He did not need to know that; he needed to know that four years ago.

Why hadn't Obi-wan told him?

"I see," he says, over the very loud pounding of blood in his ears, and totally fails to pay any attention to the post-sim discussion amongst the Rogues. Ten minutes later Leia shows up and demands he accompany her back to the Falcon, which he does. Once there she more or less frogmarches him into the little room he's still sharing with Luke, pushes him down onto the bed, and hands him the pillow. "What?"

"You need to scream," she says, "so turn off your vocoder and scream."

He screams for a solid minute before feeling slightly better enough to pull back and turn his vocoder on. "Do you ever get tired of being my babysitter?"

"Do you ever get tired of acting like a baby?"

He hugs the pillow to his chest.

Leia says, "I'll make some tea. And you can continue to shut up," she adds, viciously, to a corner of the room currently occupied by R2-D2's empty charger station, before leaving the room. He can hear her arguing with whoever it is, though, all the way down the hall.

Later, once he has his hands wrapped around a mug of some mystery brown liquid that smells fantastic, she says, "Do I even want to know what set you off this time?"

"Luke could have died. At Yavin. Luke could have died, and I could have been the one to shoot him down. I did shoot down most of his wing. I could have killed him without ever even knowing I had a son."

"Yes," says Leia. "You could have." She blows on her tea, sips a little bit. "That's the price you pay, for being willing to murder people."

He squeezes the pillow, much harder than anything living could have afforded to be squeezed.

"I am not going to have a comparative ethics debate with you, Vader. I don't care how you justified it, when you bothered to justify it all. It doesn't matter. Alderaan isn't coming back, and Alderaan is the least of your crimes. If you don't want people to be dead, then stop killing people."

She is, he thinks, what a lightsaber is supposed to be: naked justice, burning bright. Then he rethinks, because a lightsaber is a weapon and it's only as just as the person wielding it. Leia Organa wouldn't have bothered fucking around with lightsabers anyway. She'd have ripped the Council to pieces with her bare hands.

More the pillow than to her, he says, "What if I want to?"

"What?"

He lifts his head so she'll be able to hear him. "What if I want to kill people? Sidious, for example?"

Leia is quiet for a moment, sipping her tea. She's not conceding the point, though; she's merely thinking about how to phrase her answer. "Pointing yourself at one specific person isn't actually a different thing than pointing yourself at the whole galaxy. It's only a matter of degree."

"I don't want to kill Sidious for revenge," he says, then immediately corrects himself. "Not only for revenge. Not most importantly for revenge. I want to make the galaxy safe for Luke. That won't happen as long as Sidious is alive."

"It won't happen even if Sidious is dead," says Leia. "Not as long as the Empire stands."

She isn't wrong, of course. She is never wrong. "Princess," he says.

"What do you want me to say? 'Congratulations! Good job on learning the difference between vengeance and justice'?" She sniffed. "You don't get praise for managing the bare minimum expected of a rational adult, Vader."

"You're the one who said I need passion."

"I also said murder isn't a particularly good method," says Leia dryly. "Isn't there anything you actually enjoy doing?"

"Flying," he replies without thinking. "Mechanics. Fighting - sparring. Going into the Force."

"The Force?" Leia laughs, in her silent way. "You're terrible at that!"

"You asked me what I enjoy doing," he says.

"All right," says Leia, tone more pitying than he'd have accepted from literally anyone else, including Luke. "Then, for the next little while, that's all you're going to do. Go into the Force."

At that moment, there's nothing he wants to do more. He shakes his head. "It's not safe."

"It's not - "

"It's not like a bacta tank. In a tank, I can still act. In the Force, I'm just one grain of sand in the sandstorm; I cannot control - it's not safe. Not for anyone on this ship, and not for me."

Leia tilts her, sipped her tea. Blows out a breath. "Okay."

"Okay?"

"Okay. I'll go get Luke. You won't do anything too dangerous with him here."

"Princess . . . "

"I have a name," says Leia sharply.

"Do you want me to use it?" he asks.

She does, and she doesn't. She refused at nine to take her mother's title, allow Alderaan's democratic royalty to turn into a monarchy. By the time she was old enough to call the vote, Alderaan was gone. She refuses to take the title now in remembrance of all who were lost, so she is instead eternally the Princess of Alderaan. She made it clear, the very first time they met on Coruscant when she was fourteen, that he was to call her by her title. He broke that rule then because he could. Now, however, it feels . . . disrespectful, to do anything different, even though she has a name.

It is, in fact, the first time he's ever really landed a hit on her.

She takes it gracefully. "No, I suppose not. Still. I don't want you to call me 'princess,' either."

He levels the helmet's unblinking stare at her to tell her what he thinks of that.

"Yes, yes, I know. What else would you call me?"

He doesn't know, and then he does. " . . . One of the gods of Tatooine is Krayt. The suns are her eyes and the wind is her breath and the sandstorms are her rage. The dragons are her children, her messengers and her warriors. If anyone is a dragon of Krayt, then you are."

"Dragon," muses Leia out loud. "Let me get back to you."

She goes away. Luke comes in a little while later. "What was that about?"

He looks at his son and completely fails to say anything.

"Leia said you have to meditate. Do you want a shrine?"

"You have one?"

"Yeah," says Luke.

It's a small shrine, and Luke doesn't really keep it assembled. He goes and fills a bowl of water from the kitchenette, and uses his own polished multitool for the mirror. For the sand, he has a tiny vial filled in layers to make an abstract pattern resembling a wave, or maybe a sunrise. It throws him back forty years all at once, to sitting on the hard ground of the home on slave row in Mos Espa, Shmi clasping her hands and her lips moving soundlessly as she spoke to the gods.

He doesn't believe in his mother's gods. He doesn't believe in the Jedi Code, nor, it seems, the Sith one. He wonders briefly if there's anything left to believe in, and then chides himself for his own stupidity. The Force. Obviously.

Then, on the heels of that realization: he's used the Force, but hasn't trusted it, not recently. He couldn't have shot Luke down. He didn't, and he'd been trying. It's such a relief that he almost passes out. He does grey out, and for a moment, he hears someone say, right at the edge of audibility, " - actually need to breathe - " and then his vision stops swimming and Luke is smiling at him.

"Okay?" asks Luke.

"I don't believe in gods," he says, just to make that point absolutely clear. "The gods never helped anyone. Not once. They can't, because they don't exist."

"Of course they don't. Only people can help other people," says Luke, like this is the simplest and most obvious thing in the galaxy. Vader didn't think it was possible to love his son any more than he already does, but he was very wrong. "They're good stories, though. Are you okay now?"

"No," he says, because he's not okay. He can, however, for the first time in a long time, see a way forward. "Come on. It's time for 'saber practice."

Luke groans. "Really? You just - whatever - and now you want to practice with lightsabers?"

"No," he says again. What he wants is mostly to wrap himself around his son and pull them both into the Force. "But every day means every day."

" . . . no," says Luke. "That's the Jedi way to do things." The way he says it, Vader can tell he's decided that Leia is right and that the Jedi way was, is, and will always be the stupid way. This isn't wrong; it's just that he now knows the Sith way isn't the right way either. "I'll practice under your supervision, but you have to sit it out. And talk to me."

That is the best he's going to get. "Very well."

They go to one of the larger exercise rooms, one with a wall of mirrors, to do this. He pings Leia to let her know what they're doing, and gets back a sort of exasperated sigh. He sits down in the corner, and turns on the zappy droid. Luke is, to be perfectly honest, more than ready to move on from it; he was ready on day one, and Vader the one who'd been unnecessarily worried about Luke's foundations. Luke is just going along with it because - because -

"How often does Obi-wan follow you around?" he asks.

Luke shrugs, and catches a little zap. "He did it a lot more before I knew what I was doing, I think."

"You think?"

"Leia showed me how to meditate, after - Alderaan." The first Death Star, he meant. "She kept coming to find me and making me do more. I wasn't really any good at it until Dankayo. Dankayo . . . you know how the songs go? 'Green as far as the eye can see, and rain every day'? That's how Dankayo actually is. I used to go outside and stand in it, listening to the green." He's smiling faintly, eye closed as he defends against the electric shocks. "Han always thought I was trying to catch a cold and die, but really you couldn't, not in water that warm. He just hauled me inside and dried me off.

"It . . . wasn't an all-at-once thing, learning to hear properly. It was just, when we left, I could hear the quiet where the green was, and then when we got to Hoth, it was all resonant tones, the glaciers singing. Obi-wan is - I don't know. He's like a desert cave spring, green hidden by sandstone and lit by sunbeams. It wouldn't really stand out against Dankayo, but even so. I think he was there a lot."

"Spying on you?"

Luke rolls his eyes. "Because an unsupervised novice meditating alone is so safe. You need to stop assuming the worst. That's always Sidious talking."

Oh.

"Now it's my turn," says Luke. "What did happen? I'm pretty sure you aren't suddenly terrified of Wedge."

"Of myself," he says.

"Well," says Luke, mollified. "That's at least valid."

"Thank you."

"I'm going to start doing forms now," says Luke, and does. "But I have to wonder. Why are you scared now? The right time would have been - a long time ago."

"No," he says. "All my people then could defend themselves." Except Padme, because it turns out she couldn't turn her perfect blaster shots on him -

"Stop that," says Luke. "Not the, the grief, that's fine, that's normal, but the - hating yourself. That's also Sidious talking."

"Luke," he says. "I did kill your mother."

"I know," says Luke. "And you're going to have to figure that out. But not by hating yourself. That's not helpful. That's never going to be helpful."

"I don't know what else to do." It's a whisper when he says it, but the vocoder doesn't do things like whisper, so it ends up coming out in the same resonant tones as anything else he ever says.

"I mean," says Luke, doing the complicated footwork of a parry-counterattack combo. "You could ask. Sarahae, or Chewbacca, or - I'm not sure about Leia, actually, but you made a pretty big impression on Wren."

He snorts.

"What? It was a good impression." Another parry. "At least, I thought."

"Wren thinks you need to wear more body armor," he says. "And learn to speak Mando'a."

"And you . . . agree with her?" asks Luke, pulling the answer more out of shared empathy than out of anything said aloud.

"You need to wear armor," he says.

"Nope," says Luke, popping the 'p'.

"Why?"

"We're not stormtroopers," says Luke, as if a stormtrooper is the worst possible thing to be. From his point of view - a Tatooine native, a stop on the Freedom Trail - it probably is.

"What about learning Mando'a?"

Luke shrugs, at least as much as he can without disrupting his practice. "Why does Wren want me to know?"

"She doesn't care. She wants me to spend time teaching it to you."

Now it's Luke's turn to be nonplussed. "Er . . . "

He waves a hand. "It's a facet of Mando'ade culture which doesn't translate very well into Basic."

«And in Huttese?» asks Luke.

«It translates terribly,» he replies. «It's something like 'family first,'» and he remembers, clasping hands with a fellow slave, making the promise, «but not very. No Mando would ever allow themselves to be a slave, for one.»

«Yeah, and when the Hutts implanted an explosive?»

«They'd dig them out again,» he replies, evenly, with the certainty of someone who's watched them do it on multiple occasions. «And then use it to blow up the Hutt in question, probably.»

There's a pause. "No," says Luke, finally. "That's not the right way for me."

He refuses to talk about anything other than lightsabers and forms until Vader gives in and teaches him another one.

Notes:

I am still unemployed, but it turns out that I also, to nobody's surprise, have autism. (I'm big mad that none of the people whose job it was to notice and diagnose me did that, for twenty years. I had to diagnose myself, and then go find a doctor who could do the tests and officially confirm what I already knew.) It's . . . I'm adjusting. To answer an Important Question, I ask that any of you who decide to comment please also tell me if my diagnosis makes you think less of me, more of me, or some secret third thing that you'll explain in the comment.

May the Fourth be with you!

Chapter 7

He does actually go and ask Sarahae, though.

"Hate you?" She clicks her chelicerae once, dismissive. "No. You are an extremely good patient and even when you lie you always lie to yourself first. I hate whoever designed and built that," another click, "thing."

He was already aware of this. "Yes, but - how do you feel about me?"

"You're my patient," says Sarahae, and that seems to be that.

He also tries to ask Chewbacca, which results in the wookie inviting him to a hand-to-hand sparring match. He does not accept because he does not feel like losing all four of his limbs, however temporarily, today. It's a decent enough answer, though: enough to want to fight him and inflict serious but impermanent bodily harm; not enough to murder him.

He goes back to training the Rogues - and the rest of the ship's X-wing squads - with renewed vigor. In practice this means that, nine out of ten times, he achieves a total squadron kill in half an hour or less. The tenth time, it's very nearly always Luke who's still alive. After a week of this, Ackbar takes him aside and explains that he can't expect them to climb a vertical learning curve, and to knock if off. Thereafter he stops outflying them quite as much as he can, and they start shaping up pretty quickly.

"Why," asks Tycho, "did you not fly like this at the Battle of Yavin?"

He doesn't owe Tycho an answer, but . . . maybe he owes one to himself. "I'd just killed Obi-wan Kenobi."

" . . . and this made you fly terribly?" asks Tycho. "I thought you hated him!"

"So did I." There. That was an ambiguous enough true statement.

Only apparently not, because that's when Obi-wan choses to say, "Nothing started to unravel until you let Luke steal you. Admit it; you were grieving."

"Gods alone know why."

"So . . . you - secretly didn't hate Obi-wan?" That's Wedge, who has gotten over the fact that he can be polite and now mostly just asks questions.

"I hate all Jedi," he says. "I'm now certain that, by the end, Obi-wan was no Jedi. I . . . regret . . . losing the opportunity to learn more."

"Griev-ing," says Obi-wan.

"What, so you think he was a Sith?"

"Am I still a Sith?" he asks, which thankfully shuts all of them up. "There are other things to be."

" . . . huh," says Luke. "That's - good. We can learn together." His eyes slide sideways a little bit, to Obi-wan, before he abruptly says, "You should go meditate."

He doesn't object because Luke clearly doesn't mean actually meditate so much as he means, 'Go talk to Obi-wan.'

They don't trust him to wander around the ship unaccompanied, but they're also still incapable of stopping him. What therefore ends up happening is two Alliance soldiers following him, hemming and hawing even though he goes straight to the berth where the Millenium Falcon sits and locks himself into his shared bedroom.

"Grieving," he says, as soon as he has.

"What did you think you were doing?"

"Having second thoughts about the Death Star."

"Is that such a bad thing?"

Here's the thing: he'd never actually thought they'd fire it, not like they did. He'd thought a few uninhabited planetoids. A city, maybe, as a demonstration to show that even planet shields didn't block the Death Star. Now he knows the Alliance would never have rolled over out of fear. Sidious would never have had the Death Star and not used it, as often as possible, because the dark fed off fear and suffering and death. Alderaan would have been only the beginning.

"No," he admits.

Obi-wan sits down across from him, on Luke's bed. "If it helps any, it took me years to grieve for you, and you weren't even dead."

"And whose fault was that?" he asks.

Obi-wan winces.

He continues. "What the karking fuck was that anyway? You can leave me to burn, but not kill me? You can tell me you loved me, but not help me? If you do something, you should commit to it! You taught me that!"

"I couldn't kill you," said Obi-wan. "I thought you deserved an answer."

He certainly hadn't deserved anything else, at the time. "Mm."

"I am sorry; I know I shouldn't have left you there."

Did he mean he should have taken Anakin with him, or that he should have put him out of his misery . . . ? "I don't think I can forgive you that."

Obi-wan sighs. "That's fine. I've never been able to forgive myself, either."

They sit there for a while in companionable silence, or at least in non-hostile silence. Then Obi-wan offers, "Emotions are complicated. You can have two or more contradictory emotions at the same time."

"Yes, thank you," he says, dryly.

"But Jedi weren't supposed to," adds Obi-wan, and Vader understands that this, too, is Obi-wan deciding he's owed an explanation. "I wasn't supposed to."

"The Jedi code was such utter shit," he says. He means: it's not actually physically possible for a human mind to want exactly and only one thing, ever. Human brains are scenario machines: pattern-recognition devices and hypothetical-futures predictors. It isn't possible to ask one to only consider one scenario, any more than it's possible to make antimatter not pair-annihilate with baryonic matter.

"Mm," says Obi-wan. "The code was originally meant to - if there was a job that you couldn't do, morally or emotionally, you were supposed to recuse yourself. The code was a guide about when to do that, not to prevent any situations that might require recusal in the first place!"

"The Jedi code," he repeats, "was such utter shit."

"The way I did it," says Obi-wan, "yes."

"You and your whole generation. And every generation, going back to whenever Yoda got his claws into it."

"Now that's unfair," says Obi-wan. "The transition occurred at least three thousand years ago."

He perks up a little. Three thousand years ago was smack in the middle of the period of on-again, off-again fighting between the Sith Empire and the Republic that was unimaginatively called the Sith Wars. "Really?"

"It was more a tragedy than an evil Sith plot. The Jedi rejected a candidate for being psychologically unfit, which she then amply proved by becoming a Sith instead of getting therapy. She took out an entire Temple before she was stopped. It was later found that her husband, who was a Jedi, had . . . taught her a few things he probably shouldn't have, and then compounded the failure by not recusing himself from the whole mess. After that happened enough times, the Jedi decided that instead of better oversight procedures, Jedi were only allowed to marry other Jedi."

He snorts.

"Yes, yes, I know now," says Obi-wan. "I should have listened to Amidala, and I should have listened to Kyrze, and I should have listened to you. What do you want me to do about it?"

"Tell Luke not to follow the code."

"Do you honestly think Luke was ever going to follow the Code?" Obi-wan sounds mostly puzzled and a little amused, a genuine question.

He does, Vader has to admit, have a point. "Tell Luke what the code was, and what it became."

"I'd do that anyway."

"Hmm." He returns to the original topic. "And now it appears grieving was never necessary in the first place."

"It was," says Obi-wan. "Trust me on this. Not grieving, even for people who are in the Force and fine, will hurt you in the long run."

Something about the way Obi-wan says it tells him he's speaking from personal experience that has nothing to do with Vader or any of Vader's past lives. He decides not to ask. "I hope you don't expect me to grieve for any of the Jedi I've killed."

"Why would you?" asked Obi-wan. Then he adds, "They - some of them - do want to talk to you, though, if you feel up to it. Or you could follow Luke's suggestion, and meditate."

"I'll do that," he says, because the idea of talking to any of the Jedi he's killed - no. Just no.

 

He and Luke finish building the autoclave over the next week and a half. It isn't complicated, but it is a highly pressurized device and it would be really stupid to turn it on while still on the ship. Luke does seem to agree with him about that, at least, which hopefully means he's arranging for both of them to go vegetate on a planet someplace while they run it. He's not stupid enough to believe someone else wouldn't be there too, just in case, but there are a lot of planets and they don't need whichever one they settle on to have much more than an oxygen atmosphere.

Clearly that hasn't happened yet, though, so he spends more time training the baby pilots. They get better, slowly. They can't match him, of course, because no one can, even Luke has twenty years too little experience flying; but they start to be able to coordinate pincer attacks which means he at least isn't achieving flawless total squad kills anymore. It is more than a little unfair in his favor anyway, because usually he is directing the TIE squad tactically and can take control of any of his fighters and rapidly switch between them, whereas they are each in whatever fighter they are in for the duration of the sim. He is . . . proud of them, a bit. Not that it stops him from winning every single sim.

"Ouch," says Tycho, after a particularly brutal one where he used superior numbers and the fact that all the human fighters still have a tendency to think in only two dimensions to line them all up and then take six of them out with a single well-placed shot. "You don't have to show off so much."

"I don't," he says, amused.

"You are such an asshole," says Wedge.

"Practice for tomorrow is to fly the initial Yavin trench run." Gold squadron had all died, although he hadn't twigged to what they were trying to do until halfway through Red Squadron's run. All of them groan except Tycho, because Tycho has noticed that he assigns that particular run when he thinks they need to see how far they've progressed as pilots. None of them can make the shot, of course, but they can usually all get through the trench, and they've even begun to be able to pick off the stationary artillery on the way through.

At the next medical meeting, Dr. Sarahae says, "Let's schedule the surgery."

"What?"

"We've been going around in circles about the neuroblastia for the last two meetings, and at this point they will either work, or they won't. You've built your pacemaker. We have cultured cartilage plates and skin grafts ready. There is no point in delaying any further."

There really isn't, and he doesn't want to stay in the stupid shiny black target, so he bites back his protests and they schedule the damn surgery. It's going to be the complete opposite of fun, hours on an operating table relying on local anaesthetics because neurosurgery requires the patient to be able to give feedback. On the dubiously-positive side he won't be unconscious until after, when they plan to dump him in a bacta tank for four days to let the tissue and skin grafts heal up before putting any strain on them.

Leia, predictably, turns up while this is happening, stays long enough to figure out what is happening, and then leaves again. It's nice to know that she accepts internal screaming on his part as long as it's based on something she considers rational. Except, no, because she shows up later while he's drinking his dinner (they've been able to get the nutrient fluid to stop tasting like salty lemons, at least, but they haven't been able to make it taste anything approaching good) and sits down across from him and says, "You know I'm going to be there with a blaster, right?"

"And Luke," he says. "And probably Obi-wan, too."

"And Chewbacca. And R2-D2."

"R2-D2 is a droid."

Leia looks at him in astonishment.

He tries again. "As far as anyone knows, R2-D2 is a droid, and it is not our place to say otherwise."

Leia snorts, genuinely amused. "When I was ten, my father and I retrofitted him with a taser."

He looks at her, confused by the non-sequitur.

"R2-D2 may be a droid, but that doesn't mean he can't defend people . . . Do you want to get drunk? Sometimes people like to get drunk."

"It wouldn't help," he says. If nothing else, he still processes alcohol like a Jedi raised by Obi-wan Kenobi.

"High?"

"No."

" . . . meditate? Together, I mean."

He considers. She is genuinely trying to help, he knows. It's just that behind her shields, Leia is also -

"What's wrong with my shields?" asks Leia.

"Nothing," he says. "You, Dragon, are fire; and I have reason to find fire . . . "

Leia shrugs. "You don't have to. You just . . . " She visibly struggles for words. "I don't understand why you didn't turn on Palpatine the moment he betrayed you!"

Of course she would have; she is a dragon of Krayt. "It's true Sidious could not give me what I desired," he says. "But, at that point, no one could. Was I supposed to turn around and plunge the galaxy back into war, after we'd - finally - finished?"

Leia shakes her head. "Fear isn't the same as peace, Vader."

That's true. It is exactly opposite to the lie Sidious has told him since the end of the Clone Wars, but she's a seer. She can probably lie, but why would she when the truth is so much more effective?

This is what Padme would have told him, too. Did tell him, in fact, except that he was being too much of a headstrong idiot to listen. Learning to be free, it turns out, is much harder than leaving Tatooine and finding someone else to call 'Master.' (Just because he loved you didn't make you free.) He still hasn't managed it, not yet. Not properly.

"It's easier, I suppose, if you know what real peace looks like. I didn't."

"That's fair," says Leia, finally. She stands up, stretching her arms above her head until he hears her spine crack. "You're so much work. The offer's open if you change your mind."

He doesn't, but he does go meditate. It can't hurt, and in fact Padme is there, sitting quietly and smiling her inscrutable smile. He stays with her until the meditation dissolves into sleep.

The surgery is . . . well, they use the good anaesthetic, so at least he can't feel it. Then it's just Luke and Leia looking over his shoulder and grimacing occasionally while taking turns to talk to him in low, coaxing voices.

"I'm not a frightened animal," he snaps.

"No," says Leia. "You're a frightened, overpowered, Force-sensitive madman. That's much more terrifying."

"Give me an update, at least," he says.

"We've got the first explosive out," says Sarahae, from behind him. "But the second is very close to your nerves. We're figuring out how to get it out without wrecking your spine. Wiggle your toes."

He does, and then keeps on doing those small movements while, painfully slowly, they extract that one, detonator first.

"One more," says Luke. "Come on, Father. You can do this."

"Yes," he says. He wishes he could just meditate it away, but he can't: someone is going to attack, he's sure of it, and even if he's splayed open on the table he has to be able to respond.

The attack, when it actually happens, isn't by anyone, or at least not anyone present. It's Sidious, of course, attempting to kill him across years and light-years, when the detonator on the third explosive goes. If he hadn't been paying such close attention, it would've killed him and everyone else in the room. As it is, he only just manages to grab the electron and hold it just on the edge of the P/NP junction.

"Vader?" says Sarahae, concerned. "Did that hurt?"

"The explosive just tried to detonate," he grits out. "I'm holding it, for now. Work quickly. Please."

Luke looks to Leia. Leia jerks her head to indicate him, and a moment later, Luke joins him. He catches what he's doing fairly quickly, and out loud he says, "You'll have to break the junction."

"What?"

"The opposite of building a crystal? Just - leech some of the boron out, okay? So that there's nowhere for the electron to go."

Vader - hesitates. Luke's plan is simple and straightforward and still nothing any Jedi would ever have conceived. Nor is he wrong that, of the two of them, he has too little experience to pull it off. Keeping one electron in position, preventing it from tunneling forward, will be significantly easier than trying to break an NP junction when he barely knows how to build crystals at all.

"Can you hold it?"

"It's one electron," says Luke. "I've got it."

He'd hesitate more but they don't have time. "All right, then."

The chip controlling the explosive isn't particularly compact or elegant. It didn't have to be, because the Hutts didn't care if it was bulky or painful or poorly-designed, as long as it was cheap and it worked. Sidious did some extra work, barely, to attempt a pain modulator function, which had never worked either. One, that would have required neural integration and the window for neural integration closed for him more than a decade before Sidious got the chip into him; instead his immune system just violently rejected it. Two, that would have required those neurons to ever be off, which is true some of the time now but hadn't been immediately after. Functionally, it means that he has a lot more mass that he can use as a boron sink, which is . . . good.

It isn't quite like building a new crystal from minerals. It's more like what he did with the sonic, fusing a crystal along grain boundaries, except there aren't any grain boundaries and he's not fusing anything. He's just moving the atoms, point-to-point through the crystal, pulling the boron further and further away from where Luke is holding one vibrating electron and in return moving silicon back. He knows the instant he's moved all the boron atoms he needs to, because he feels the quantum confinement go heavy and impermeable even to electron tunneling.

Luke says, "Should I keep on holding it?"

"If you like," he says.

"Yes," says Leia, firmly.

So Luke does. For the entire rest of the surgery until the thing is out of him and in fact outside of the ship. It still doesn't detonate even then, because he'd made it impossible for it to do so. By then Sarahae has closed up his spine and is carefully sewing the skin grafts into place while the local anaesthetic wears off. After that's done, he's in a tank and being pumped full of painkillers. The eyecam array is still old and clunky, but Leia queued up a whole string of nature documentaries for him to watch. Luke, more sensibly, queued pod racing. He loads up the first one, but is unconscious by the time the credits start rolling.

Padmé is there, though, the entire time, so it is really quite a tolerable convalescence.

Then he wakes up days later to find that the neuroblastia worked after all, and so all the phantom pains have cleared up as those neurons were replaced. He's really surprised to find how much of his pain had been an impacted spinal column, as opposed to his damaged limbs. It's not that there's no pain, or anything - for one, the spinal surgery did nothing about his shattered-and-hastily-glued-back-together pelvis - but the cessation of so much of it all at once has him almost floating about the ship.

"Excellent," says Sarahae, clicking her chelicerae. "We will give you a few months to heal up from that and decide what your new baseline pain is, and then we can begin work on the pelvic surgeries."

"If it's all the same to you, I'd prefer to fix my prosthetics first."

Sarahae tilts her head at him, all of her eyes shiny and beetle-back. "I meant taking the scans. The reconstruction is going to be much worse then just taking out some bombs and drilling out some pins and shaving off some extra bone. We're going to have to do a full-scale practice mock-up, possibly several, to get it right on the first try. There is plenty of time to redo your prosthetics." She clicks her chelicerae again. "After you finish recovering."

"Yes, yes," he says. Actually, the plan is for Chewbacca to take him and Luke and probably Leia to some uninhabited planetoid and hide out for a few weeks while he recovers and they run the autoclave. At some point, the mysterious Fulcrum might also stop by, although that is a big might. He's mostly just putting together what he thinks is a reasonable set of exercises to keep his baby pilots in practice while he's gone, if not improving them any, and waiting for Leia to be ready to leave.

It's more than a week before Leia is ready to leave, which is long enough for the skin grafts to heal up so he can stop sleeping on his front. He still doesn't have neural integration yet, but he's got the pins-and-needles feeling of growing nerves, so that's at least happening. Then he gets about ten minutes' warning when Leia is ready to leave. It's not an issue for him because literally everything he owns that he doesn't carry with him, which is mostly clothes, is already in the berth locker; but he can see when Luke and Chewbacca come no one had warned either of them, either, and Chewbacca at least is annoyed by it.

They're smoothly professional about it until after launch, and as soon as they hit hyperspace Leia turns to them and says, "Sorry. I had a premonition, and - we had to leave right then. Don't ask me why."

This is par for the course, as far as seers go, so it makes sense to him. Luke also shrugs. Chewbacca, who isn't Force-sensitive but is a wookie, says, «All right. Where are we going?»

The planet doesn't actually have a name, because it has no useful minerals or sapient life or even terrestrial life to speak of. Instead, there are lots of green ferny things colonizing the land and busily composting into soil. There are lots of small flying things developing into the niche covered, on more civilized worlds, by insects. There are a few - very few - species of things halfway between a fish and a lizard, figuring out this whole 'walking' thing. But those green ferny things provide lots of aerial cover, and those flying things provide a dense carpet of life to hide from life-sign detectors, and the lizards aren't big enough to be a threat. It is, in fact, very nearly perfect.

«It reminds me of home,» says Chewbacca, sounding happy about it.

"It reminds me of Dankayo," says Luke.

"Great," says Leia, irritably. "I'm glad someone is happy." She isn't, for reasons that Vader isn't even going to try to figure out. They got here just fine and no one's even going to be able to find them, much less attack. It's a good place to recuperate. Vader allows himself to, fractionally, relax.

Notes:

This year, I might actually get around to answering comments on this fic from the last two chapters! XD The outpouring of love and acceptance from all of you made my year, seriously.

Also, now I'm a professor. I teach chemistry to baby chemists. \o/

May the Fourth be with you.

Chapter 8

That first day they mostly spend cutting paths through the riotous undergrowth, him and Luke with lightsabers, Chewbacca and Leia with machetes, and getting the perimeter markers set up. They spend pretty much the entire next day, on his insistence, upgrading the markers to a defensible perimeter. Then he turns to Luke, and realizes he's going to have to teach Luke how to generate a standing wave in the Force. This is a significant problem, because the only way he knows how to do that is the Dark one, and - no. He's not teaching that to Luke, ever.

"What now?" asks Leia impatiently.

"I just realized I can't actually teach Luke how to do this," he says, and then when she opens her mouth to respond, "Not without him going Dark."

She closes her mouth. "So this was entirely a waste of my time - "

"No. I can do it." Then just to annoy her, he adds, "And if you can figure out what I'm doing, we might even be able to work out a nice way to do it."

Leia narrows her eyes and doesn't say anything, but stomps over to a chair, sits down, and gestures to him. With her blaster.

He sits. He does, at least, have enough practice with this that setting up the wave is as simple as dropping into very light meditation and allowing himself to get angry. This time, for the first time ever, he's being angry at Sidious; but target doesn't really matter as much as the emotion. Once he's sufficiently buoyed up by that power, he reaches out with it and bullies the Force into shape -

"Oh, ouch," says Leia, as the pseudo-nexus forms around them.

"I know," he says, grimacing. Even if she can't see it.

"Have you tried doing it without the - " Leia waves a hand, " - the hate?"

He stares at her. "No."

"No, you can't, or no, you haven't tried?"

"Neither," he says, "It wouldn't work. The Force requires feeling, and I am . . . not one to be consistently happy for weeks on end."

At that, Leia's lips press down into a thinner line, but before she can say anything, Luke cuts in and says, "Leia. We talked about this."

This was news to him. "Talked?"

«A good person does not blame a slave for not knowing freedom,» says Chewbacca, not unkindly.

"Yes," he says. He still doesn't really know how to be free, not really.

"But it could work on happiness?" persists Leia.

"Theoretically," he says. "Why? Are you going to try?"

"Give me a few days," says Leia. Then she stands up and says, "I'm going to meditate, away from - this." She picks up a blaster and a machete on the way out.

Once the hatch closes behind her, Luke turns to him and says, "So! Autoclave! And then maybe lightsaber training?"

"Lightsaber training," he agrees.

Luke is making good progress, now that they're practicing on a daily basis. By the time the crystal is ready for his 'saber, he'll be ready for it, too. He's careful not to wonder too much, even in his own head, about his 'saber: the elements they added to the autoclave should produce a cool green blade for both of them, and as eager as he is to get rid of the Sith one, he still isn't sure a new crystal will accept him.

These aren't concerns for Luke, though, so he has his son practice until they're both starting to feel exhausted. Then it is Luke's turn to chivvy him through doing the PT exercises that will ensure his spine heals properly and his new skin scarlessly. He cooks, because he wouldn't put it past Leia to figure out how to burn water, Luke only really knows how to cook with ingredients native to Tatooine, and Chewbacca is a wookie and at best can produce food that won't kill humans. Leia spends most of her time meditating, or locked in the cockpit on comms with someone. One remarkably peaceful week passes.

Then Leia comes stomping in from one of her meditations while Luke is getting him through the PT, and says, "Look lively, everybody. We're about to have a visitor."

"We are?" asks Luke; and then, because Freedom Trail people are nothing if not paranoid, he stretches himself out. Vader knows because he's doing the same, and even so, they're both barely in time to catch it when the ship slams down out of hyperspace, just barely above the atmosphere and going fast enough that it'll bounce off instead of insert if it keeps going at that angle. There isn't really enough room to maneuver it, but the pilot does anyway, diving like a waterbird and using the atmosphere itself as a brake.

Vader abruptly realizes that he knows the pilot; only that's actually impossible, because he'd murdered her more than four years ago. Anyway, if she were this close, surely he'd be able to feel her in the Force?

"Who is that?" asks Luke, beside him, mostly friendly curiosity.

"Fulcrum," says Leia.

"I thought she was staying away," says Vader.

"She was," says Leia, in tones that say clearly that even if she knew why Fulcrum had changed her mind, she wouldn't tell him.

"Huh," says Luke, as the ship gets close enough to actually be visible to the eye.

It doesn't really take all that long for it to arrive. The ship's a beautiful little cutter, made for maneuverability in atmo, but with solar sails so in space it can just orbit a star for months on end. She probably doesn't do that unless she needs to lie low, but it's . . . nice . . . that she has the option. The ship descends, and then lands on the ferny things a little way from the Falcon. There is a delay while the pilot unstraps and does post-flight, and then the door opens, and she comes out.

There is a very long moment, and then she demands, "You put them on your helmet?" in outright indignation.

"I didn't!" he protests immediately. "Wren did!"

Fulcrum . . . pauses, and he can tell she just asked the Force a question, but he has no idea what either the question or the answer were. "Oh, well," she says. "That's different. Are you going to try to kill me again?"

"Snips," he says roughly, although the vocoder corrects this to deep resonant tones, "Of course not: I am done pretending I'm not attached." He realizes how that sounds. "Er. If you want - "

"Well, start as you mean to go on, I suppose," says Tano. She looks at Luke. "Padmé, right?"

He nods.

"Who?" asks Luke.

"Padmé Amidala?" asks Leia, for some reason now indignant all over again.

"Your mother," says Vader.

"Oh," says Luke, and, "Amidala isn't a Tatooine name."

"She wasn't from Tatooine," says Leia. "She was the queen of Naboo, and then when her term limits expired she became their senator instead. She was one of the loudest voices calling for peace, all the way through the Clone Wars. Her death was one of the major factors that caused Sidious to start the Empire. Or so he said, anyway." This was said with maybe half a twist of question, like she wanted Vader to fill in more there.

"You never told me that," says Luke, with just a smidge of accusation.

"That's true," he admits. "I - " don't want to talk about it. "It hurts," he says, lamely.

"I can tell you about her," says Tano. "As long as you tell me how you got him out of Sidious' clutches."

"Oh, that," says Luke. "He didn't actually want to be there anymore, so all I really had to do was ask him to come with me instead."

That was very much not how Vader remembered it - there had been the city they were both on sinking into the uninhabitable layers of Bespin, for one - but he held his peace.

Tano says, "Attachments as saving grace, mm?"

"It's better than the Jedi ever managed," he says, trying not to sound defensive about it. "It at least looks at the way people are, instead of the way Yoda would like us to be."

Tano laughs.

"What?"

Tano shakes her head. "It's good to have you back. Skyguy?"

"Mm," he says.

'Skyguy?' mouths Luke, asking Leia. Leia, who is clearly just as mystified, shrugs in response.

"Well, we'll figure something out," says Tano.

Chewbacca, as the only sensible sophont amongst them, has made tea. Tano takes her cuppa appreciatively, Luke with a slightly confused expression. Then they sit down - as much as one can in the cramped all-purpose room of the Falcon, anyway - but before he can say anything, Luke pipes up with, "So you're the - the Alliance Jedi?"

Tano smiles. "There are a few of us," she says. "But I'm one of them, yes. Ahsoka Tano."

That's a name Luke knows. "Tano, as in, Commander Tano? The Hero With No Fear's padawan? I thought you went missing, midway through the war!"

"I did, and I didn't," says Tano. "The Jedi failed to give me a trial, and even after I proved I was innocent - well, I wasn't going to stick with commanding officers who weren't going to stick by me. I left the Jedi, such as they were." Leia snorts. "And then later, after Order Sixty-Six . . . I wasn't a Jedi, but I knew the difference between right and wrong. I joined the Alliance back when it was still mostly just guerillas and best wishes."

"Wow," says Luke, clearly impressed. "I've always wanted to be a pilot, but my aunt and uncle didn't want me to join the Alliance."

"Can you blame them?" asks Tano. "It's dangerous work."

Luke shrugs. "More or less dangerous than a functional Death Star?"

Tano laughs, and says to him, "Well, he's your kid, all right."

"Were they really my aunt and uncle, though?" asks Luke.

"Who?"

"Owen and Beru Lars," says Luke.

Vader blinks, impressed by Obi-wan Kenobi's thoroughness. And his own blindness. "Yes, actually. My mother married Owen's father. As far as I know, she adopted him properly, so - "

"I'm sorry," interrupts Leia. "Your mother?"

"Most people have one," he says.

Leia shakes her head. "The Hero with No Fear was a Jedi. Jedi don't - do family! They aren't even supposed to know who their birth families are!"

"Well, I was found late," he says, "so I knew her. I even met Owen and Beru once."

"You did?" asks Luke.

"And you didn't kill them?" asks Leia, only half-sarcastic.

"It was at our parents' funeral," he says. "I wasn't . . . in a happy mood, then, but who would be?"

"Who would be," echoes Leia, and he belatedly remembers that she'd had not only her parents but her entire world murdered in front of her, because she'd been unwilling to sell out her allies.

"I haven't thought of them in - years. How are they?"

"Dead," says Luke flatly. "Murdered by Imperial stormtroopers." Vader winces; he had still been cleaning up on Scarif at the time, and hadn't wanted to have anything to do with the hunt on Tatooine, but he knows he'd have given the same order. "I joined the Alliance as soon as I could."

He'd blown up the Death Star, using the kind of trick flying a boy from rural Tatooine would have practiced to impress his friends. "Ah. And that covers the histories of everyone here except Chewbacca."

«No,» says Chewbacca. «Except what I've said already.»

"What did he say already?" asks Tano, sotto voce.

"He'll forgive me when his family is free on Kashyyyk," says Vader. It's going to require dismantling the Empire, but it's also going to require freeing all the slaves. Chewbacca, for all he doesn't say much, is very wise.

"Good," says Luke, and, "Changing the topic entirely: what's the plan now?"

"The same," he says, before Leia can. "We're here for another few weeks while the kybers finish growing. Fulcrum - "

" - Snips - "

"Snips can do whatever it is she's here to do," he says. "And then go back to whatever she was doing, which we will not ask, Luke, because we understand the meaning of the words 'operational security.'"

"I know how OpSec works," says Luke, almost peevish under his perpetual good nature. He probably does: the Freedom Trail would have required it. "Anyway, I just thought - maybe you wouldn't mind giving me some pointers?"

"Pointers?" asks Tano. She doesn't wrinkle her nose anymore while confused, but it isn't enough to prevent him knowing that she is confused.

Luke nods. "He's teaching me lightsabers, and I'm doing okay, but - having only one teacher isn't a particularly good idea, is it?"

Tano darts a sharp glare over to him, a question. He shrugs with one arm: Luke was never taught the Jedi way, so of course he doesn't know it. He doesn't need to unlearn anything. Vader has to wonder how much of that he put into the Force when Tano's expression clears, but out loud she says, "I'm not sure that lightsabers are a particularly good use of our time. I have to be off this planet by nightfall if I'm going to make my next appointment."

"Oh," says Luke, disappointed.

Tano laughs. "How about this: we can meditate together, while I do what I came here to do, and maybe I'll be able to teach you a different way of looking through the Force."

So she sits down, and Luke sits down, and with considerably less effort than it would have been before the surgery, he does too. Leia stays standing up, alert and on-guard along with Chewbacca.

Meditating is . . . interesting. Tano is looking at him, and looking in a direction he can follow only up to a point and no further, no matter how he tries. It is intensely frustrating, because he knows that he can look in that direction, has at least twice that he knows about and perhaps as many as a dozen. It is irritating in another way, too: in the temple, it had always been viewed as a talent that people either did or did not have. Windu had it. Leia has it. Tano did not, but she has clearly learned, which means it's a teachable skill that none of his masters has ever bothered to teach him.

(Kenobi almost certainly didn't know it was teachable, but despite being dead he's still kicking around, clearly knows that he still owes Vader, and yet hasn't taught this.)

Tano only meditates for about half an hour anyway. Then opens her eyes, wrinkles her nose, and says, "Babies!?"

"Right?" replies Leia, not missing a beat. "How is that possibly a good idea?"

" . . . I mean," says Tano, slowly, like she doesn't like this but still has to say it because it is, in fact, the truth, "he is pretty good with small children."

Leia snorts. "When he isn't murdering them by the dozen."

"Well, yes," says Tano. Because this, too, is true, it almost doesn't hurt when she says it. Almost. "But since this is what the Force wills . . . I don't suppose there are any babies you could give him?"

He can actually see the thought form in Leia's mind, even though she is, if anything, more shielded than usual. The thought goes: there is one very young child on the Home One. And his mother.

Luke says, "Do baby pilots count?"

Both women look over to him. Tano says, " . . . of course he's training the baby pilots. Why wouldn't he be training pilots?"

Leia says, "They don't count."

Tano sighs. "No, but it's - I think it is a step in the right direction." She sighs again. "I cannot believe I'm going to say this, but: do your best to make sure he gets Attached to them. The more Attachments he has, the less likely he is to Fall back to the Dark."

"I am standing right here," he says, but with the certainty that this isn't going to do anything.

"Yes, and when you have something useful to contribute to the conversation," begins Leia.

"Actually," says Luke. "If what we need are small children for him to be attached to . . . has anyone actually introduced Jacen to him?"

Leia and Tano both stare at him. Finally, Leia says, as gently as she can say anything, "Syndulla won't allow it."

"Have you asked?" persists Luke.

"If you want to ask her," says Leia.

"You know what? I will," says Luke. "Master Tano, it was nice to meet you, but I have a comm to go make - "

"Just Tano," says Tano, gently. "I was never actually knighted, much less managing to bring a padawan to knighting myself." Then she takes pity on Luke's obvious distress. "It was the reason I was able to survive, in the end, and - find the way that had been lost." Her eyes flicker, to him and back, and she adds, "May the Force be with you."

"May the Force be with you," echoes Luke, automatically. He waits until Tano has exited the Falcon and climbed back into her own little skimmer and is lifting off before he goes to make the comm. Tano, he thinks, is not what Luke expected. She isn't what he expected either, and he can't help but think that it's better that she'd continued to live and change and grow, all that time while he'd just been wallowing in old lies.

"Did I pass the test?" he asks out loud to Leia.

"What am I even going to do if Jacen doesn't like you," says Leia, and then more alarmed, "What am I going to do if he does?"

"Dragon," he says, and then doesn't have anything else to follow it, so the word just hangs there. It feels a little like saying 'my master,' but only a little. Leia wouldn't stand the claim on her anyway. She accepts 'dragon' because that's a truth, and because, maybe, she approves of dragons. She does not approve of him, and she is waiting for him to speak, so he hurriedly says, "I can't change whatever it is I did to Jacen's father, but I can teach him how to counter it."

Leia snorts. "It wasn't you personally. The Imperials on Lothal, led by Thrawn, were the proximal cause, but if the Empire hadn't existed . . . And there really isn't a way to counter 'being too close to explosive ordnance when it goes off.' At best you can train him a bit, although I have my doubts that getting that child to sit down and meditate is possible at all."

He digests that. "There is a way to counter explosives going off, though." She's seen him do it, and she's seen Luke do it. "Skills can be practiced."

Leia makes an even more distressed face. "Syndulla won't be happy to hear that, but . . . when Luke asks, I'll ask too."

"Thank y-"

"And you've just bought yourself the job of teaching Pathfinder how to prevent explosive ordnance from going off," she adds. "He hates you."

Vader nods. "As long as he doesn't let hatred get in the way of winning."

Leia gives him a look that is, maybe, very faintly, approving. Then she turns to the air next to him, and says in a pained voice, "No, and stop asking."

He decides that discretion is the better part of valor, and leaves.

Notes:

Another year, another chapter. This one is mostly people talking, and not very many choices getting made at all.

This was not the year I answered comments. XD

IRL, I have continued professor-ing, and learned that I'm actually quite shit a teaching the babiest of chemists. This is primarily because, for about half of them, the year they were supposed to be learning algebra was COVID instead, and they learned nothing, and therefore they cannot manipulate equations or even round. What, I ask, is a chemistry teacher supposed to do about STEM students with no M skills?

Notes:

Before you ask: no, it isn't done. However, this fic only updates once a year, on Star Wars Day, so while you know exactly when the next update is going to be, it's (depending on when you read this) not going to be for a while. See you on Star Wars Day!