![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
another chapter I dashed out in a day!
A day I went to work, no less! It's shorter than usual, but I really wanted it to end where it does.
title: The Jedi and the Sith Lord (12/?)
verse: Lucy Skywalker: my f!Luke AU, following from The Adventures of Lucy Skywalker and The Imperial Menace
characters: Luke/Lucy Skywalker, Anakin Skywalker; Ellex (LX-3)
stuff that happens: Lucy struggles to accept the truth, and Vader to deny it.
previous sections: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven
CHAPTER TWELVE
Lucy practiced her exercises under Ellex’s sensors, acutely aware of Tuvié’s absence.
She climbed up the rungs on the wall, relieved at how much easier it seemed after the cliff, and leapt onto the nearest platform, then launched herself onto more and more distant ones until the Force thrummed in her. Apart from her own breaths and the sound of her feet, she heard nothing—certainly no polite claps or fretful cries. Ellex seemed entirely unconcerned and entirely unimpressed, until Lucy took up her stick and shifted to the handful of lightsaber forms she knew.
Ellex stalked over.
“What are you doing?”
“Practicing,” said Lucy, trying not to look like she intended any threat or mischief.
“Practicing what?”
Lucy knew that Ellex must consider her a dubious character already, so maybe the truth wouldn’t matter. And she’d already told Tuvié, anyway, though that was different.
“The stances for using a lightsaber,” said Lucy.
“You do not possess a lightsaber,” Ellex replied.
Lucy knew that. The one she’d considered hers—well, she couldn’t really be angry at Vader any more for taking his own lightsaber back.
“I know that,” Lucy said. “I told you, I’m just practicing. I don’t want to forget what I’ve learned.”
Ellex stood still and regarded her with her flashing optical sensors. “Hand me the item.”
Reluctantly, Lucy handed it over, half-expecting that Ellex would immediately snap it in two. Instead, the droid held it with a careful grip and lifted it up to her optics, closely examining the thing.
“This object makes for a very inferior weapon,” she said at last. “You could not harm Lord Vader or myself with it.”
“I wasn’t planning on trying,” said Lucy.
Ellex tucked the stick under her arm. “My faculties are extensive, but cannot determine that. I will consult with Lord Vader.”
Lucy scowled. She couldn’t think that he’d be particularly impressed by a stick, and she had no idea what he’d think of her attempting to continue her training on her own. She didn’t even know what she wanted him to think—if anything.
“Fine,” she said to Ellex, then moved away to try the forms with just a closed fist.
It wasn’t at all the same. Sighing, she dropped her hand and went to stretch.
Thinking of Vader, she still couldn’t quite understand why he’d rescued her. Well, she could—he needed her for his plots—but not why he’d done it in that way. He could have damaged himself, and to go by the life support panel on his suit and the knowledge that he’d been left to die in lava, she didn’t imagine he could take much damage. Maybe he just hadn’t thought it through; recovering her body without bothering to use his force field might have been the impulse of the moment.
She had trouble imagining Vader as impulsive, though. Owen and Yoda both said Anakin had been, when they mentioned him at all, but she still struggled to fuse Anakin and Vader together in her mind. They were one person and she knew they were one person; it was just hard.
Other people suffered worse things, she told herself. Other people had suffered worse things at Vader’s hands, at that. And here she sat, dressed in velvet and feeling sorry for herself because her father cared enough, in his way, to risk his life saving hers.
Lucy tightened her hands on her knees and squeezed her eyes shut.
Force, it was hard.
-
Several days passed with monotonous regularity. Lucy slept, exercised, and ate, and otherwise got shut up in her room. Dutifully, she tried to ignore Ellex’s blasters and meditate. The Light Side seemed to flow more strongly than before, but remained slippery, sometimes responding to her efforts to reach it, but just as often sliding away.
All the while, Lucy shifted between frustration with her weaknesses and failures, anxiety over her friends and the Rebellion, curiosity about what her father was up to, and sheer boredom. She hadn’t felt as restless since her days on the moisture farm. At least then, she’d had her uncle and aunt, and things to do. Now she really was the prisoner she’d imagined herself.
When she felt the shift in the Force that heralded Vader’s arrival, she almost welcomed it as much as she dreaded it. She didn’t look forward to the conversation that she knew would happen—that had to happen—but it would at least be different. And if she could get through it, it’d be over. She just had to be strong.
Normally, she looked to Leia’s or Han’s examples for that. But this required a different sort of strength, one she couldn’t borrow. She could do it, though. She had to.
Lucy took a steadying breath. She needed all the peace she could get. And there was no point in working herself up, anyway. It might be hours before Vader decided to harangue her or drop some new terrible revelation. Instead, she counted backwards in Alsaraic until her nerves settled and the Force coursed through her.
Anger did, too—yet, oddly, the Light Side and its comforting warmth stayed with her. She didn’t even know what she was angry about. There were a lot of options, but usually something brought it on. Lucy sat there, puzzled even as her teeth clenched with frustration. She wasn’t frustrated, not really, with the Force wrapped around her, connecting her to everything from the fresher’s mirror to the droids outside her door to Vader himself—
Vader. Cautiously, Lucy let her attention drift to the riotous tangle of power and emotions that accompanied him. As she did, her anger escalated, her heart racing and some instinct urging her to throw herself at Ellex and damn the consequences. She just had to break free of this nonsense and make them obey. They’d learn—
She shook her head free of it. What? Who did she want obeying her, anyway? Ellex and the droids? The idea was laughable.
Lucy shifted her attention again, back to herself and her room, and the burst of outrage dwindled back to frustration. She wanted to do something, but there were obstacles in her path, ones she couldn’t see her way past. Like fully armed droids at her door?
No, she thought. It wasn’t her path at all. It was—Vader’s? He was angry. He hadn’t achieved whatever it was he’d meant to do. He meant to teach them to obey him, whoever “they” were.
But was that good news for her or bad? She had no idea. She didn’t even know if picking up on Vader’s seething emotions was good or bad. Maybe a little of both.
Regardless, his rage soon cooled to icy displeasure. After that, she felt nothing at all beyond his distant presence. Lucy breathed a sigh of relief.
Ellex, on the other hand, twitched, one metal hand going to the side of her head.
“Yes, sir,” she said. “The situation is under control. No, sir—none.” After a pause, she said, “Very well.”
“What is it?” said Lucy.
“Get up,” snapped Ellex. “Lord Vader has returned.”
“He wants to see me already?” Lucy asked.
At least he’d waited until he wasn’t in a fury. Or he’d had more important things to do. Who knew?
“I will stun and carry you if you resist,” said Ellex.
Lucy scrambled off the bed and lifted her hands. “I’m not resisting. I was just surprised. Let’s go.”
Ellex all but pushed her out of the door. If Lucy hadn’t eagerly ducked out as soon as the door was unsealed, before it’d even opened all the way, she suspected Ellex would have actually done it. As it was, the droid clanged forward with a brusque,
“Keep up.”
Tone aside, she maintained a pace that Lucy could match without running, even if she wouldn’t have exactly called it comfortable. She didn’t trouble herself with talking; over the last few days, they’d long since subsided into silence. Lucy had nothing more to say, and Ellex presumably no interest, since Lucy didn’t fool herself into thinking she was anything to the droid but the object of an appointed task. Probably one she didn’t care for, at that.
Ellex rapped at the usual door, which immediately opened, though nobody seemed to be inside. Lucy, a little confused, followed her into the room, avoiding the patch of green light and sitting down. She even folded her hands on her lap, doing her best to look particularly accommodating; she didn’t fancy getting knocked unconscious after avoiding it for five days.
Ellex stared down at her as if she might make a run for it at any moment.
They’d only waited a few minutes when Darth Vader swept through the door. Without a word, he looked from Ellex to Lucy and back again.
“LX-3. Remain outside the door,” he said at last.
“Yes, sir.”
Once she’d marched out, he returned his unsettling red-black gaze to Lucy. Refusing to put herself at more disadvantage than she was already, Lucy jumped to her feet.
She straightened herself to her full five feet of height, feeling even smaller than she had before.
“I trust you have had time to reconsider your actions,” he said.
She thought about lying, or giving a flippant answer that would do nothing for his temper but make her feel better. But he hadn’t lied to her, even when everyone else seemed to be deceptive or ignorant.
“I’m not sure there’s enough time in the galaxy for that,” said Lucy. “Maybe I should have made sure it was really a Rebel fleet before I used up the force field’s charge. And I am sorry about Tuvié—I just didn’t think.”
“Hopefully,” said Vader, “you will think in the future.”
He didn’t sound convinced. Lucy had to admit that she wouldn’t have been, either.
“You didn’t,” she said.
“What are you talking about?”
“I heard that you didn’t use a force-field out there,” said Lucy. “You could have died, just like that.” She snapped her fingers.
With barely a twitch of movement, he managed to loom over her even more.
“However much you may wish otherwise, I was in no danger. My equipment protects me.”
“Not from everything,” Lucy insisted. “You heard Doctor Izahay. She said we both might have died.”
“She usually overstates matters,” said Vader. “There is no comparison between your actions and mine.”
Lucy hesitated. It’d been easier to think it through when he wasn’t there, so much Darth Vader that she could almost deny the truth again. But she couldn’t.
“Maybe not,” she allowed. “I ran into poison fumes on purpose. You were just trying to save my life.”
Without quite knowing how, she could tell he was surprised. He tilted his helmet down to look at her directly, otherwise motionless and silent but for his respirator. After several seconds of mechanized breaths, he said,
“Then what point do you think you are making?”
“You did save my life,” said Lucy. Her pulse was beating a quick rhythm in her chest and head. To him, she knew she must seem tiny and weak, something to be trapped or rescued as suited the occasion. But she had to do this. She squared her shoulders, doing her best to meet his unseen gaze. “Thank you, Father.”
He didn’t react in any visible way.
“So,” he said, “you have accepted the truth.”
“I’ve accepted the truth,” said Lucy, “that you were once Anakin Skywalker, my father.”
“That name no longer has any meaning for me,” Vader told her.
Oh, clearly.
“It is the name of your true self!” she said indignantly.
Beru had once told her about how they met Anakin. When Lucy’s grandmother was abducted by the Tusken Raiders and tortured to death, Anakin had rushed ahead to go find them and recover the body. He’d returned without a scratch, and Shmi’s corpse in his arms. He’d done that, and now chose an empty title over the name and personhood his mother had given him?
“And if it isn’t,” she went on, “then my father is truly dead.”
Real anger was running through her, her own anger, and all the more as he said nothing.
“Did you need anything else, Lord Vader?” said Lucy.
Vader kept looking down at her. Then he said,
“No.”
-
Darth Vader spent much of his life in a towering rage. It fed the power of the Dark Side in him, and he certainly had found himself surrounded by causes for it. On this particular day, he had more than usual.
For one, Jerjerrod—whom he felt almost certain must be involved in that ridiculous, but traitorous, attack on Bast Castle—had been moved to a different project, one so secret that Vader himself only knew the vaguest details. That made him virtually inaccessible.
And Varti, Jerjerrod’s companion in scheming, was a favourite of the Emperor’s: just the sort of slick, self-interested bootlicker that Palpatine preferred. Vader couldn’t risk everything he’d planned on a direct threat to someone as useless as Varti, all the more as it turned out Varti was currently stationed on the Emperor’s home planet as some sort of honour—a planet that Vader had no intention of visiting.
In addition to that, the crucial ingredient to his plans, Lucy, had shown herself more than recalcitrant in her latest escapade. He’d immediately moved to secure her, of course, but that didn’t make her any more reliable. While he had won some time to turn her to the Dark Side and prove her value, that time was not indefinite, and he knew exactly who would be called upon to … to resolve the situation if she could not be turned.
Valì?
He nearly recoiled. Even as he’d pronounced himself her father, he never quite envisioned Lucy saying it, until she had. Even then, he wouldn’t have imagined hearing it at any point when she was conscious and coherent, much less what she’d said.
Sorinen, Valì.
Lucy, thanking him for anything? A day ago, the idea would have beggared belief. Part of him thought, vaguely, that it seemed an important step, and he should make some use of it. The rest of him felt too startled to think anything at all, except that she no longer denied the truth. For a moment, his residual anger had converted to relief. Then, of course, she had to speak of Anakin Skywalker—not some other man, whatever anyone said, but another name, the name attached to his weaknesses and failures. It meant nothing.
He should have felt just as much relief at her flash of fury. That was good; it would carry her more swiftly to the Dark Side. But—
Fa valiyat khiris ai-dûru.
He had been considered dead for many years: dead as Anakin Skywalker, and a dead man walking as Darth Vader. He never much cared about that. But he was honest enough, and weak enough, to admit to himself that Lucy relegating him to the dead had made for an unpleasant experience—unpleasant enough that it wiped his mind of any reply. Then she’d switched to Basic, from Valì to Lord Vader, and somehow that seemed more unpleasant still.
He should have been enraged, of course. He should still be. But he only felt tired—very tired, and very old.
In a rare moment of reminiscence, Vader let himself think back. His mind flitted from the Darth Vader of this miserable day, to a reckless young Jedi Knight, to a newborn slave beneath Gardulla’s palace. Yes, he’d counted right.
He was forty-three.
title: The Jedi and the Sith Lord (12/?)
verse: Lucy Skywalker: my f!Luke AU, following from The Adventures of Lucy Skywalker and The Imperial Menace
characters: Luke/Lucy Skywalker, Anakin Skywalker; Ellex (LX-3)
stuff that happens: Lucy struggles to accept the truth, and Vader to deny it.
previous sections: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven
CHAPTER TWELVE
Lucy practiced her exercises under Ellex’s sensors, acutely aware of Tuvié’s absence.
She climbed up the rungs on the wall, relieved at how much easier it seemed after the cliff, and leapt onto the nearest platform, then launched herself onto more and more distant ones until the Force thrummed in her. Apart from her own breaths and the sound of her feet, she heard nothing—certainly no polite claps or fretful cries. Ellex seemed entirely unconcerned and entirely unimpressed, until Lucy took up her stick and shifted to the handful of lightsaber forms she knew.
Ellex stalked over.
“What are you doing?”
“Practicing,” said Lucy, trying not to look like she intended any threat or mischief.
“Practicing what?”
Lucy knew that Ellex must consider her a dubious character already, so maybe the truth wouldn’t matter. And she’d already told Tuvié, anyway, though that was different.
“The stances for using a lightsaber,” said Lucy.
“You do not possess a lightsaber,” Ellex replied.
Lucy knew that. The one she’d considered hers—well, she couldn’t really be angry at Vader any more for taking his own lightsaber back.
“I know that,” Lucy said. “I told you, I’m just practicing. I don’t want to forget what I’ve learned.”
Ellex stood still and regarded her with her flashing optical sensors. “Hand me the item.”
Reluctantly, Lucy handed it over, half-expecting that Ellex would immediately snap it in two. Instead, the droid held it with a careful grip and lifted it up to her optics, closely examining the thing.
“This object makes for a very inferior weapon,” she said at last. “You could not harm Lord Vader or myself with it.”
“I wasn’t planning on trying,” said Lucy.
Ellex tucked the stick under her arm. “My faculties are extensive, but cannot determine that. I will consult with Lord Vader.”
Lucy scowled. She couldn’t think that he’d be particularly impressed by a stick, and she had no idea what he’d think of her attempting to continue her training on her own. She didn’t even know what she wanted him to think—if anything.
“Fine,” she said to Ellex, then moved away to try the forms with just a closed fist.
It wasn’t at all the same. Sighing, she dropped her hand and went to stretch.
Thinking of Vader, she still couldn’t quite understand why he’d rescued her. Well, she could—he needed her for his plots—but not why he’d done it in that way. He could have damaged himself, and to go by the life support panel on his suit and the knowledge that he’d been left to die in lava, she didn’t imagine he could take much damage. Maybe he just hadn’t thought it through; recovering her body without bothering to use his force field might have been the impulse of the moment.
She had trouble imagining Vader as impulsive, though. Owen and Yoda both said Anakin had been, when they mentioned him at all, but she still struggled to fuse Anakin and Vader together in her mind. They were one person and she knew they were one person; it was just hard.
Other people suffered worse things, she told herself. Other people had suffered worse things at Vader’s hands, at that. And here she sat, dressed in velvet and feeling sorry for herself because her father cared enough, in his way, to risk his life saving hers.
Lucy tightened her hands on her knees and squeezed her eyes shut.
Force, it was hard.
-
Several days passed with monotonous regularity. Lucy slept, exercised, and ate, and otherwise got shut up in her room. Dutifully, she tried to ignore Ellex’s blasters and meditate. The Light Side seemed to flow more strongly than before, but remained slippery, sometimes responding to her efforts to reach it, but just as often sliding away.
All the while, Lucy shifted between frustration with her weaknesses and failures, anxiety over her friends and the Rebellion, curiosity about what her father was up to, and sheer boredom. She hadn’t felt as restless since her days on the moisture farm. At least then, she’d had her uncle and aunt, and things to do. Now she really was the prisoner she’d imagined herself.
When she felt the shift in the Force that heralded Vader’s arrival, she almost welcomed it as much as she dreaded it. She didn’t look forward to the conversation that she knew would happen—that had to happen—but it would at least be different. And if she could get through it, it’d be over. She just had to be strong.
Normally, she looked to Leia’s or Han’s examples for that. But this required a different sort of strength, one she couldn’t borrow. She could do it, though. She had to.
Lucy took a steadying breath. She needed all the peace she could get. And there was no point in working herself up, anyway. It might be hours before Vader decided to harangue her or drop some new terrible revelation. Instead, she counted backwards in Alsaraic until her nerves settled and the Force coursed through her.
Anger did, too—yet, oddly, the Light Side and its comforting warmth stayed with her. She didn’t even know what she was angry about. There were a lot of options, but usually something brought it on. Lucy sat there, puzzled even as her teeth clenched with frustration. She wasn’t frustrated, not really, with the Force wrapped around her, connecting her to everything from the fresher’s mirror to the droids outside her door to Vader himself—
Vader. Cautiously, Lucy let her attention drift to the riotous tangle of power and emotions that accompanied him. As she did, her anger escalated, her heart racing and some instinct urging her to throw herself at Ellex and damn the consequences. She just had to break free of this nonsense and make them obey. They’d learn—
She shook her head free of it. What? Who did she want obeying her, anyway? Ellex and the droids? The idea was laughable.
Lucy shifted her attention again, back to herself and her room, and the burst of outrage dwindled back to frustration. She wanted to do something, but there were obstacles in her path, ones she couldn’t see her way past. Like fully armed droids at her door?
No, she thought. It wasn’t her path at all. It was—Vader’s? He was angry. He hadn’t achieved whatever it was he’d meant to do. He meant to teach them to obey him, whoever “they” were.
But was that good news for her or bad? She had no idea. She didn’t even know if picking up on Vader’s seething emotions was good or bad. Maybe a little of both.
Regardless, his rage soon cooled to icy displeasure. After that, she felt nothing at all beyond his distant presence. Lucy breathed a sigh of relief.
Ellex, on the other hand, twitched, one metal hand going to the side of her head.
“Yes, sir,” she said. “The situation is under control. No, sir—none.” After a pause, she said, “Very well.”
“What is it?” said Lucy.
“Get up,” snapped Ellex. “Lord Vader has returned.”
“He wants to see me already?” Lucy asked.
At least he’d waited until he wasn’t in a fury. Or he’d had more important things to do. Who knew?
“I will stun and carry you if you resist,” said Ellex.
Lucy scrambled off the bed and lifted her hands. “I’m not resisting. I was just surprised. Let’s go.”
Ellex all but pushed her out of the door. If Lucy hadn’t eagerly ducked out as soon as the door was unsealed, before it’d even opened all the way, she suspected Ellex would have actually done it. As it was, the droid clanged forward with a brusque,
“Keep up.”
Tone aside, she maintained a pace that Lucy could match without running, even if she wouldn’t have exactly called it comfortable. She didn’t trouble herself with talking; over the last few days, they’d long since subsided into silence. Lucy had nothing more to say, and Ellex presumably no interest, since Lucy didn’t fool herself into thinking she was anything to the droid but the object of an appointed task. Probably one she didn’t care for, at that.
Ellex rapped at the usual door, which immediately opened, though nobody seemed to be inside. Lucy, a little confused, followed her into the room, avoiding the patch of green light and sitting down. She even folded her hands on her lap, doing her best to look particularly accommodating; she didn’t fancy getting knocked unconscious after avoiding it for five days.
Ellex stared down at her as if she might make a run for it at any moment.
They’d only waited a few minutes when Darth Vader swept through the door. Without a word, he looked from Ellex to Lucy and back again.
“LX-3. Remain outside the door,” he said at last.
“Yes, sir.”
Once she’d marched out, he returned his unsettling red-black gaze to Lucy. Refusing to put herself at more disadvantage than she was already, Lucy jumped to her feet.
She straightened herself to her full five feet of height, feeling even smaller than she had before.
“I trust you have had time to reconsider your actions,” he said.
She thought about lying, or giving a flippant answer that would do nothing for his temper but make her feel better. But he hadn’t lied to her, even when everyone else seemed to be deceptive or ignorant.
“I’m not sure there’s enough time in the galaxy for that,” said Lucy. “Maybe I should have made sure it was really a Rebel fleet before I used up the force field’s charge. And I am sorry about Tuvié—I just didn’t think.”
“Hopefully,” said Vader, “you will think in the future.”
He didn’t sound convinced. Lucy had to admit that she wouldn’t have been, either.
“You didn’t,” she said.
“What are you talking about?”
“I heard that you didn’t use a force-field out there,” said Lucy. “You could have died, just like that.” She snapped her fingers.
With barely a twitch of movement, he managed to loom over her even more.
“However much you may wish otherwise, I was in no danger. My equipment protects me.”
“Not from everything,” Lucy insisted. “You heard Doctor Izahay. She said we both might have died.”
“She usually overstates matters,” said Vader. “There is no comparison between your actions and mine.”
Lucy hesitated. It’d been easier to think it through when he wasn’t there, so much Darth Vader that she could almost deny the truth again. But she couldn’t.
“Maybe not,” she allowed. “I ran into poison fumes on purpose. You were just trying to save my life.”
Without quite knowing how, she could tell he was surprised. He tilted his helmet down to look at her directly, otherwise motionless and silent but for his respirator. After several seconds of mechanized breaths, he said,
“Then what point do you think you are making?”
“You did save my life,” said Lucy. Her pulse was beating a quick rhythm in her chest and head. To him, she knew she must seem tiny and weak, something to be trapped or rescued as suited the occasion. But she had to do this. She squared her shoulders, doing her best to meet his unseen gaze. “Thank you, Father.”
He didn’t react in any visible way.
“So,” he said, “you have accepted the truth.”
“I’ve accepted the truth,” said Lucy, “that you were once Anakin Skywalker, my father.”
“That name no longer has any meaning for me,” Vader told her.
Oh, clearly.
“It is the name of your true self!” she said indignantly.
Beru had once told her about how they met Anakin. When Lucy’s grandmother was abducted by the Tusken Raiders and tortured to death, Anakin had rushed ahead to go find them and recover the body. He’d returned without a scratch, and Shmi’s corpse in his arms. He’d done that, and now chose an empty title over the name and personhood his mother had given him?
“And if it isn’t,” she went on, “then my father is truly dead.”
Real anger was running through her, her own anger, and all the more as he said nothing.
“Did you need anything else, Lord Vader?” said Lucy.
Vader kept looking down at her. Then he said,
“No.”
-
Darth Vader spent much of his life in a towering rage. It fed the power of the Dark Side in him, and he certainly had found himself surrounded by causes for it. On this particular day, he had more than usual.
For one, Jerjerrod—whom he felt almost certain must be involved in that ridiculous, but traitorous, attack on Bast Castle—had been moved to a different project, one so secret that Vader himself only knew the vaguest details. That made him virtually inaccessible.
And Varti, Jerjerrod’s companion in scheming, was a favourite of the Emperor’s: just the sort of slick, self-interested bootlicker that Palpatine preferred. Vader couldn’t risk everything he’d planned on a direct threat to someone as useless as Varti, all the more as it turned out Varti was currently stationed on the Emperor’s home planet as some sort of honour—a planet that Vader had no intention of visiting.
In addition to that, the crucial ingredient to his plans, Lucy, had shown herself more than recalcitrant in her latest escapade. He’d immediately moved to secure her, of course, but that didn’t make her any more reliable. While he had won some time to turn her to the Dark Side and prove her value, that time was not indefinite, and he knew exactly who would be called upon to … to resolve the situation if she could not be turned.
Valì?
He nearly recoiled. Even as he’d pronounced himself her father, he never quite envisioned Lucy saying it, until she had. Even then, he wouldn’t have imagined hearing it at any point when she was conscious and coherent, much less what she’d said.
Sorinen, Valì.
Lucy, thanking him for anything? A day ago, the idea would have beggared belief. Part of him thought, vaguely, that it seemed an important step, and he should make some use of it. The rest of him felt too startled to think anything at all, except that she no longer denied the truth. For a moment, his residual anger had converted to relief. Then, of course, she had to speak of Anakin Skywalker—not some other man, whatever anyone said, but another name, the name attached to his weaknesses and failures. It meant nothing.
He should have felt just as much relief at her flash of fury. That was good; it would carry her more swiftly to the Dark Side. But—
Fa valiyat khiris ai-dûru.
He had been considered dead for many years: dead as Anakin Skywalker, and a dead man walking as Darth Vader. He never much cared about that. But he was honest enough, and weak enough, to admit to himself that Lucy relegating him to the dead had made for an unpleasant experience—unpleasant enough that it wiped his mind of any reply. Then she’d switched to Basic, from Valì to Lord Vader, and somehow that seemed more unpleasant still.
He should have been enraged, of course. He should still be. But he only felt tired—very tired, and very old.
In a rare moment of reminiscence, Vader let himself think back. His mind flitted from the Darth Vader of this miserable day, to a reckless young Jedi Knight, to a newborn slave beneath Gardulla’s palace. Yes, he’d counted right.
He was forty-three.