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Jan. 28th, 2020 04:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anghrainetitle: The Jedi and the Sith Lord (6/?)
verse: Lucy Skywalker: my f!Luke AU, following from The Adventures of Lucy Skywalker and The Imperial Menace
characters: Luke/Lucy Skywalker, Anakin Skywalker; Tuvié (F-2VA)
stuff that happens: Lucy begins teaching Tuvié, and asks a question of Darth Vader.
previous sections: one, two, three, four, five
CHAPTER SIX
Lucy woke blearily, her thoughts immediately skittering between Padmé Amidala and the Rogue One team. She could still hardly believe that she’d seen Captain Andor and Jyn Erso and all the rest, and yet it seemed scarcely more incredible than knowing her mother’s name.
Amidala. Queen, senator, Rebel.
No, Lucy thought. Padmé. If Vader could go around calling her by her first name, so could Lucy.
Shadows flickered around her. Still sleepy, Lucy just blinked. What had Padmé thought of her, in those first unremembered minutes? What had she expected for her daughter? Hoped?
What about Andor and Erso and Rook and—loyally, she tried to recall each face. The blind monk whose name she still didn’t remember. The burly man whom she suspected might be his husband. The shapeshifting droid. Lieutenant Sefla. They’d wanted to see her. What had they thought, as she babbled about Vader and her captivity and all of it? They hadn’t seemed disappointed, or … they’d wanted to help. So many people did. Padmé, too, in her last days.
Lucy had no memory of Padmé or what she might have said, but she focused tightly on the team whose sacrifice had led to her victory.
Remember who you are.
Be ready.
Don’t spend your life without reason.
You can always do more alive than dead.
You are never alone in the Force.
There’s someone who can help you—
Who? Where?
One of the shadows, roughly human-shaped, drew nearer to her, blotting out the lighter ones around it. How odd. Lucy’s thoughts drifted from her vision and her past, to the present moment. Was she still asleep?
“Who are—”
With a click, the shadows all slightly lightened.
“Good morning, Miss Lucy!”
Lucy squinted at the human-ish shadow. “Tuvié?”
“Can you visually identify me?” she asked. “Are you going to jump again?”
“No,” said Lucy. “That is, not at the moment. And I can’t see … but I can see something.”
She turned her head right and left, reaching for tendrils of the Force to make sense of the blurry shapes around her. She had to close her eyes, slow her breathing, and try several times to manage it, but when she looked around again, her sense of the objects around her matched up with her muddled vision.
She pointed across the room at something tall, broad, and rectangular. “That’s the wardrobe, right?”
“Why, yes!” said Tuvié. Something about her voice struck Lucy as a little strange. Not very, just … off. Was she lying? “How wonderful! You’ll be fully recovered in no time!”
It didn’t feel like no time. Lucy almost itched for the day when she’d be what she was before the carbon-freeze. But that could bring its own danger with it. Vader might well be less tolerant of her resistance once she could see. He certainly might if she kept reaching for the Force—no matter what said, she knew he wanted her to turn to the Dark Side so he could use her for his own ends, whatever they might be. He didn’t really want her to be a Jedi. Certainly not a proper Jedi, walking in the Light.
Lucy didn’t know how much Tuvié had been told of the real situation—clearly not much—but perhaps some part of that knowledge had percolated through her circuits. Or maybe something else was bothering her.
“I’m looking forward to it,” Lucy said. “Tuvié, are you all right?”
Tuvié went absolutely silent for several moments. Then she said,
“Yes! I always am! My programming, equipment, and component parts are all of excellent quality.”
“Right,” said Lucy.
“It—it is very kind of you to ask,” Tuvié went on, her tone lowering. “Especially when I will soon be providing such limited services to you.”
Lucy had told herself that she couldn’t trust Vader’s droids. She had no business developing attachments to them. Nevertheless, she burst out,
“You’re leaving?”
“Leaving? Not at all,” said Tuvié. “But once you have full command of your senses, you will require much less assistance from me. I shall continue to guard and protect you to the utmost of my capacities, of course.”
She sounded positively morose. It might be an act, or a limitation of her knowledge or programming, but—
There’s someone who can help you, Lucy remembered the monk saying. No, that wasn’t quite right. There’s someone there who can help you. Who will, if you follow your feelings.
Someone here, in the castle. Had he meant Tuvié?
It was, in all honesty, difficult to imagine him meaning anyone else. Still, even free droids were usually loyal to their programmers, and Tuvié seemed devoted to Vader. How was Lucy, a mere … guest, supposed to break through that in time to achieve anything? What could Tuvié even do for her, anyway?
Lucy concentrated on the anxious swirl of her emotions. She couldn’t quite pick them out, not as she had the night before, and the Force was slipping out of her grasp. But she liked Tuvié. Was that the kind of feeling she could trust? Could she trust Tuvié?
“I’m sure I’ll still need your help,” Lucy told her, and managed a faint smile. “At least with Sen—with Mother’s clothes.”
“I hadn’t considered that!” said Tuvié, her tone brightening. “They are quite complex. Yes, you’re correct.”
Lucy paused, then replied, “Ei-yanà.”
“I didn’t catch that, Miss Lucy,” Tuvié said.
Lucy couldn’t hang onto the smile, but she made sure her voice was firm as she dropped from the bed to the floor.
“That’s how we’d say it.”
Tuvié gave a loud squeak. “In the mystery language?”
“Alsaraic,” said Lucy, heading towards the fresher.
“Al-sa-rai-ic,” Tuvié repeated dutifully. “Ei-yanà. You are correct. Valiya. Maker. No—you said it was closer to ‘mother’ in typical usage, yes? And then you said that both your valì and valiya had been terminated. Valì is … father?”
“That’s right,” said Lucy, peering around at the muddled shadows of the fresher. She nearly jumped when Tuvié stepped forward and began methodically unbraiding her hair, even though she’d grown used to it, or thought she had. Lucy didn’t quite have the heart to tell Tuvié that she could do it on her own.
She couldn’t, however, figure out the controls on the sonic shower on her own; they were too blurry to even distinguish as separate objects. Teeth gritted, Lucy stepped into the shower stall and waited.
Tuvié only turned on the cleanser after a very cold second.
“But what would you call yourself, Miss Lucy?”
Kavashti, thought Lucy, though she’d almost never even heard the word, only the Basic equivalent.
Freeborn.
On Tatooine, or at least the part of Tatooine that she knew, freeborn didn’t mean just anyone free from birth. It referred to the ones who would have been born into slavery, if luck had not intervened—the children of freed slaves and of slave families. Among the people Lucy had known, it was as often an insult as not. But Beru said that kavashti was a term of honour and joy among the Alsarai, that Shmi had told her so when Beru admitted that her grandfather was freeborn.
She didn’t feel like explaining it all to Tuvié, and the sound of the shower at least gave her an excuse not to. She didn’t even know why it had come into her head.
When the roar of the cleanser and its vibrations against her skin stopped, Lucy stepped out, shivering, onto the floor.
“Da,” she said at last. “That’s I.”
-
Once she was dressed, Lucy hurried out of her bedroom with Tuvié, determined to pick up whatever details she could with her dim new vision. Following the half-familiar path that she took everyday, she peered at the blurry dark shapes all around her while offering words and phrases to Tuvié, who seemed even more delighted than usual.
They were nearly to the dining hall by the time it struck Lucy that, if she’d been able to sense Vader when she connected herself to the Force, he might well have sensed her in return. She guessed so, at any rate; there was a lot she still didn’t know about how the Force worked.
Well, she wasn’t going to cut herself off just to hide. Lucy couldn’t see what else she might do about it, except ignore the clench in her chest.
She straightened.
“Mm,” she said. “Is that breakfast? It smells delicious.”
She had only just sat down and reached for something she presumed to be a fork when she felt the darkness of the Force in the place sharpening into something weightier and more mingled. Vader.
Lucy’s fingers tightened on the utensil.
“Is this a fork?” she asked Tuvié, as lightly as she could.
“Yes,” said Tuvié, adjusting her grip. “There you are, Miss Lucy. Do you need further assistance in manipulating the meal?”
“Maybe,” said Lucy, not quite willing to trust her management of the fuzzy object on her plate. “But I was asking for you. It’s a kila.”
The heavy presence drew nearer.
“Kila!” Tuvié repeated happily. “That is how you say fork?”
“Yes. My aunt used to say savà kilad—that’s ‘use your fork.’ I didn’t like them for some reason when I was little.”
“Ah, so possession is indicated by—”
The door slammed open.
“Lord Vader!” exclaimed Tuvié. “Good morning! As you can see, Miss Lucy is nearly prepared for an enjoyable and fulfilling day!”
Vader’s steps thudded forwards, until he stood almost immediately behind Lucy. Her muscles twitched. She tended to think he’d kill her face-to-face, but sitting with her back to Vader, entirely defenseless, was not something she’d recommend to anyone. More nervous than she would admit, Lucy stabbed the thing on her plate. It was unexpectedly fluffy.
“Let us hope so,” said Vader, his tone dry enough that Lucy suspected even Tuvié would notice it. “Well done, F-2VA. You may go.”
“Of course, sir.”
As soon as the door shut behind Tuvié, Vader strode past Lucy. In her newfound vision, he was a towering shadow, even more so than in the Force. She swallowed, but refused to betray herself otherwise, instead shoveling Arren’s latest delicacy into her mouth. Eggs, she thought. Better than Aunt Beru’s. He probably had better ingredients to work with, though, here on … wherever.
Vader continued to the end of the table, but didn’t sit. It was hard to imagine, really, outside of a starship.
“Lucy,” he said, then halted for some reason.
Lucy ate another bite of eggs. “I’m not turning to the Dark Side.”
Predictably, Vader ignored this, but just loomed, making no sound except for his mechanized breaths. Lucy had almost entirely lost her appetite, but kept eating, doing her best to concentrate on the tastes. That was what her mother would do, wouldn’t it? Or something like that.
“You will. It is your destiny,” he told her.
“I don’t have a destiny,” replied Lucy. “Everything’s just choices and consequences.”
“You believe that now. But soon, you will learn otherwise.”
Some part of her urged her to ask what he meant by soon. Maybe he just believed that this destiny would come knocking. But maybe he knew something, or intended something. Lucy set the fork down on the edge of the table, nearly jumping when it instead clattered to the floor.
“No, I won’t,” she said, and glanced over at him. “You do know this isn’t going anywhere, right? I’ll never turn, no matter how nice the food or whatever you do or don’t do to me.”
Vader seemed to look down at her. He didn’t move, at least, and the top of his shadow appeared tilted towards her.
“At your age, I thought like you,” he said. “You will come to understand what I did.”
Lucy glared at the shadow. “We’re nothing alike!”
But the memory of the Dark Side cave on Dagobah thrust itself into her mind. She’d reacted just as Vader would have done, hadn’t she? But she’d learned her lesson; he never had. She could be better than her worst instincts.
“You may believe that if it gives you comfort. For now,” said Vader. “Your vision has returned?”
“No,” she said.
“There is no point in lying,” he told her. “The Force reveals the truth.”
“I don’t see why you bother asking questions, then,” said Lucy. “Anyway, it’s only a little. Everything’s still blurry, and mostly just dark.”
“You will almost certainly recover before long,” he said.
“Thanks,” she replied, her tone as dry as his had been. “I don’t suppose it’s occurred to you that it wouldn’t be almost if you hadn’t, I don’t know, stuck me in carbon-freeze and carted me off to only the Force knows where!”
“Bast Castle,” said Vader.
That meant nothing to her. Lucy shrugged it off, and braced herself for whatever would come next. But Vader said nothing more.
For a good five minutes, Lucy remained stubbornly silent, glancing around the dining hall and folding her hands on Amid—Padmé’s skirts, fingers and teeth clenched.
Yet again, she wondered how he’d come by Padmé’s possessions. She had no difficulty imagining him seizing anything of value to him from anyone, dead or alive, but why these? Why—
Obi-Wan never told you about Padmé?
Lucy exhaled, not wanting to give in. But this might be her only chance. She said,
“Did you know my mother?”
Vader gazed down at her, his outline perfectly still. Several seconds passed.
“Yes,” he said, and stalked out of the room.
verse: Lucy Skywalker: my f!Luke AU, following from The Adventures of Lucy Skywalker and The Imperial Menace
characters: Luke/Lucy Skywalker, Anakin Skywalker; Tuvié (F-2VA)
stuff that happens: Lucy begins teaching Tuvié, and asks a question of Darth Vader.
previous sections: one, two, three, four, five
CHAPTER SIX
Lucy woke blearily, her thoughts immediately skittering between Padmé Amidala and the Rogue One team. She could still hardly believe that she’d seen Captain Andor and Jyn Erso and all the rest, and yet it seemed scarcely more incredible than knowing her mother’s name.
Amidala. Queen, senator, Rebel.
No, Lucy thought. Padmé. If Vader could go around calling her by her first name, so could Lucy.
Shadows flickered around her. Still sleepy, Lucy just blinked. What had Padmé thought of her, in those first unremembered minutes? What had she expected for her daughter? Hoped?
What about Andor and Erso and Rook and—loyally, she tried to recall each face. The blind monk whose name she still didn’t remember. The burly man whom she suspected might be his husband. The shapeshifting droid. Lieutenant Sefla. They’d wanted to see her. What had they thought, as she babbled about Vader and her captivity and all of it? They hadn’t seemed disappointed, or … they’d wanted to help. So many people did. Padmé, too, in her last days.
Lucy had no memory of Padmé or what she might have said, but she focused tightly on the team whose sacrifice had led to her victory.
Remember who you are.
Be ready.
Don’t spend your life without reason.
You can always do more alive than dead.
You are never alone in the Force.
There’s someone who can help you—
Who? Where?
One of the shadows, roughly human-shaped, drew nearer to her, blotting out the lighter ones around it. How odd. Lucy’s thoughts drifted from her vision and her past, to the present moment. Was she still asleep?
“Who are—”
With a click, the shadows all slightly lightened.
“Good morning, Miss Lucy!”
Lucy squinted at the human-ish shadow. “Tuvié?”
“Can you visually identify me?” she asked. “Are you going to jump again?”
“No,” said Lucy. “That is, not at the moment. And I can’t see … but I can see something.”
She turned her head right and left, reaching for tendrils of the Force to make sense of the blurry shapes around her. She had to close her eyes, slow her breathing, and try several times to manage it, but when she looked around again, her sense of the objects around her matched up with her muddled vision.
She pointed across the room at something tall, broad, and rectangular. “That’s the wardrobe, right?”
“Why, yes!” said Tuvié. Something about her voice struck Lucy as a little strange. Not very, just … off. Was she lying? “How wonderful! You’ll be fully recovered in no time!”
It didn’t feel like no time. Lucy almost itched for the day when she’d be what she was before the carbon-freeze. But that could bring its own danger with it. Vader might well be less tolerant of her resistance once she could see. He certainly might if she kept reaching for the Force—no matter what said, she knew he wanted her to turn to the Dark Side so he could use her for his own ends, whatever they might be. He didn’t really want her to be a Jedi. Certainly not a proper Jedi, walking in the Light.
Lucy didn’t know how much Tuvié had been told of the real situation—clearly not much—but perhaps some part of that knowledge had percolated through her circuits. Or maybe something else was bothering her.
“I’m looking forward to it,” Lucy said. “Tuvié, are you all right?”
Tuvié went absolutely silent for several moments. Then she said,
“Yes! I always am! My programming, equipment, and component parts are all of excellent quality.”
“Right,” said Lucy.
“It—it is very kind of you to ask,” Tuvié went on, her tone lowering. “Especially when I will soon be providing such limited services to you.”
Lucy had told herself that she couldn’t trust Vader’s droids. She had no business developing attachments to them. Nevertheless, she burst out,
“You’re leaving?”
“Leaving? Not at all,” said Tuvié. “But once you have full command of your senses, you will require much less assistance from me. I shall continue to guard and protect you to the utmost of my capacities, of course.”
She sounded positively morose. It might be an act, or a limitation of her knowledge or programming, but—
There’s someone who can help you, Lucy remembered the monk saying. No, that wasn’t quite right. There’s someone there who can help you. Who will, if you follow your feelings.
Someone here, in the castle. Had he meant Tuvié?
It was, in all honesty, difficult to imagine him meaning anyone else. Still, even free droids were usually loyal to their programmers, and Tuvié seemed devoted to Vader. How was Lucy, a mere … guest, supposed to break through that in time to achieve anything? What could Tuvié even do for her, anyway?
Lucy concentrated on the anxious swirl of her emotions. She couldn’t quite pick them out, not as she had the night before, and the Force was slipping out of her grasp. But she liked Tuvié. Was that the kind of feeling she could trust? Could she trust Tuvié?
“I’m sure I’ll still need your help,” Lucy told her, and managed a faint smile. “At least with Sen—with Mother’s clothes.”
“I hadn’t considered that!” said Tuvié, her tone brightening. “They are quite complex. Yes, you’re correct.”
Lucy paused, then replied, “Ei-yanà.”
“I didn’t catch that, Miss Lucy,” Tuvié said.
Lucy couldn’t hang onto the smile, but she made sure her voice was firm as she dropped from the bed to the floor.
“That’s how we’d say it.”
Tuvié gave a loud squeak. “In the mystery language?”
“Alsaraic,” said Lucy, heading towards the fresher.
“Al-sa-rai-ic,” Tuvié repeated dutifully. “Ei-yanà. You are correct. Valiya. Maker. No—you said it was closer to ‘mother’ in typical usage, yes? And then you said that both your valì and valiya had been terminated. Valì is … father?”
“That’s right,” said Lucy, peering around at the muddled shadows of the fresher. She nearly jumped when Tuvié stepped forward and began methodically unbraiding her hair, even though she’d grown used to it, or thought she had. Lucy didn’t quite have the heart to tell Tuvié that she could do it on her own.
She couldn’t, however, figure out the controls on the sonic shower on her own; they were too blurry to even distinguish as separate objects. Teeth gritted, Lucy stepped into the shower stall and waited.
Tuvié only turned on the cleanser after a very cold second.
“But what would you call yourself, Miss Lucy?”
Kavashti, thought Lucy, though she’d almost never even heard the word, only the Basic equivalent.
Freeborn.
On Tatooine, or at least the part of Tatooine that she knew, freeborn didn’t mean just anyone free from birth. It referred to the ones who would have been born into slavery, if luck had not intervened—the children of freed slaves and of slave families. Among the people Lucy had known, it was as often an insult as not. But Beru said that kavashti was a term of honour and joy among the Alsarai, that Shmi had told her so when Beru admitted that her grandfather was freeborn.
She didn’t feel like explaining it all to Tuvié, and the sound of the shower at least gave her an excuse not to. She didn’t even know why it had come into her head.
When the roar of the cleanser and its vibrations against her skin stopped, Lucy stepped out, shivering, onto the floor.
“Da,” she said at last. “That’s I.”
-
Once she was dressed, Lucy hurried out of her bedroom with Tuvié, determined to pick up whatever details she could with her dim new vision. Following the half-familiar path that she took everyday, she peered at the blurry dark shapes all around her while offering words and phrases to Tuvié, who seemed even more delighted than usual.
They were nearly to the dining hall by the time it struck Lucy that, if she’d been able to sense Vader when she connected herself to the Force, he might well have sensed her in return. She guessed so, at any rate; there was a lot she still didn’t know about how the Force worked.
Well, she wasn’t going to cut herself off just to hide. Lucy couldn’t see what else she might do about it, except ignore the clench in her chest.
She straightened.
“Mm,” she said. “Is that breakfast? It smells delicious.”
She had only just sat down and reached for something she presumed to be a fork when she felt the darkness of the Force in the place sharpening into something weightier and more mingled. Vader.
Lucy’s fingers tightened on the utensil.
“Is this a fork?” she asked Tuvié, as lightly as she could.
“Yes,” said Tuvié, adjusting her grip. “There you are, Miss Lucy. Do you need further assistance in manipulating the meal?”
“Maybe,” said Lucy, not quite willing to trust her management of the fuzzy object on her plate. “But I was asking for you. It’s a kila.”
The heavy presence drew nearer.
“Kila!” Tuvié repeated happily. “That is how you say fork?”
“Yes. My aunt used to say savà kilad—that’s ‘use your fork.’ I didn’t like them for some reason when I was little.”
“Ah, so possession is indicated by—”
The door slammed open.
“Lord Vader!” exclaimed Tuvié. “Good morning! As you can see, Miss Lucy is nearly prepared for an enjoyable and fulfilling day!”
Vader’s steps thudded forwards, until he stood almost immediately behind Lucy. Her muscles twitched. She tended to think he’d kill her face-to-face, but sitting with her back to Vader, entirely defenseless, was not something she’d recommend to anyone. More nervous than she would admit, Lucy stabbed the thing on her plate. It was unexpectedly fluffy.
“Let us hope so,” said Vader, his tone dry enough that Lucy suspected even Tuvié would notice it. “Well done, F-2VA. You may go.”
“Of course, sir.”
As soon as the door shut behind Tuvié, Vader strode past Lucy. In her newfound vision, he was a towering shadow, even more so than in the Force. She swallowed, but refused to betray herself otherwise, instead shoveling Arren’s latest delicacy into her mouth. Eggs, she thought. Better than Aunt Beru’s. He probably had better ingredients to work with, though, here on … wherever.
Vader continued to the end of the table, but didn’t sit. It was hard to imagine, really, outside of a starship.
“Lucy,” he said, then halted for some reason.
Lucy ate another bite of eggs. “I’m not turning to the Dark Side.”
Predictably, Vader ignored this, but just loomed, making no sound except for his mechanized breaths. Lucy had almost entirely lost her appetite, but kept eating, doing her best to concentrate on the tastes. That was what her mother would do, wouldn’t it? Or something like that.
“You will. It is your destiny,” he told her.
“I don’t have a destiny,” replied Lucy. “Everything’s just choices and consequences.”
“You believe that now. But soon, you will learn otherwise.”
Some part of her urged her to ask what he meant by soon. Maybe he just believed that this destiny would come knocking. But maybe he knew something, or intended something. Lucy set the fork down on the edge of the table, nearly jumping when it instead clattered to the floor.
“No, I won’t,” she said, and glanced over at him. “You do know this isn’t going anywhere, right? I’ll never turn, no matter how nice the food or whatever you do or don’t do to me.”
Vader seemed to look down at her. He didn’t move, at least, and the top of his shadow appeared tilted towards her.
“At your age, I thought like you,” he said. “You will come to understand what I did.”
Lucy glared at the shadow. “We’re nothing alike!”
But the memory of the Dark Side cave on Dagobah thrust itself into her mind. She’d reacted just as Vader would have done, hadn’t she? But she’d learned her lesson; he never had. She could be better than her worst instincts.
“You may believe that if it gives you comfort. For now,” said Vader. “Your vision has returned?”
“No,” she said.
“There is no point in lying,” he told her. “The Force reveals the truth.”
“I don’t see why you bother asking questions, then,” said Lucy. “Anyway, it’s only a little. Everything’s still blurry, and mostly just dark.”
“You will almost certainly recover before long,” he said.
“Thanks,” she replied, her tone as dry as his had been. “I don’t suppose it’s occurred to you that it wouldn’t be almost if you hadn’t, I don’t know, stuck me in carbon-freeze and carted me off to only the Force knows where!”
“Bast Castle,” said Vader.
That meant nothing to her. Lucy shrugged it off, and braced herself for whatever would come next. But Vader said nothing more.
For a good five minutes, Lucy remained stubbornly silent, glancing around the dining hall and folding her hands on Amid—Padmé’s skirts, fingers and teeth clenched.
Yet again, she wondered how he’d come by Padmé’s possessions. She had no difficulty imagining him seizing anything of value to him from anyone, dead or alive, but why these? Why—
Obi-Wan never told you about Padmé?
Lucy exhaled, not wanting to give in. But this might be her only chance. She said,
“Did you know my mother?”
Vader gazed down at her, his outline perfectly still. Several seconds passed.
“Yes,” he said, and stalked out of the room.