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wherein Anakin makes lesson plans
title: The Jedi and the Sith Lord (14/?)
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: Vader takes up Lucy's Jedi training.
previous sections: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“I don’t see the point,” said Lucy.
“Good posture is critical for—”
Vader broke off as he realized, horrifyingly, that his voice had fallen into the exact cadence of Obi-Wan’s. Instead, he laid his hands on her shoulders and straightened them. Lucy twitched, but he only sensed annoyance and a confusion he couldn’t quite identify, not fear.
“Hold this position and try the third form,” he ordered.
“There is no try,” said Lucy, looking down at her stick. Determinedly, she lifted it. “Only success or failure.”
“Nonsense,” Vader said, though he was aware his men probably thought he believed such a thing. “The point of practice is to make attempts. You repeat your attempts until you can succeed consistently, or until success is no longer possible. You do not give up after a single failure.”
Or many failures. He’d learned that painfully and repeatedly.
Lucy heaved a long-suffering sigh, then straightened to her full, if tiny, height and lifted the stick. She adjusted her footing and lunged forward.
“Better,” Vader told her. “Now, try again.”
“I’ve done it twelve times today,” said Lucy.
He didn’t doubt that she’d counted. Lucy, he’d quickly discovered, was one to nurse her grievances. In anyone else, he’d have soon crushed the quality; with Lucy, he reluctantly recalled his own youth, and suspected that some cosmic justice had caught up with him.
He told her, “Then another twelve will not hurt you.”
She groaned.
“A Jedi,” he said, “must be disciplined and relentless.”
“I’m not a Jedi,” said Lucy, pushing her hair out of her face. “You said so yourself.”
You will be.
Vader laid his hands on her shoulders again, holding them in place. “Try again.”
It was what had become a typical day. Palpatine had given him a kind of limited leave in order to turn Lucy—Vader suspected the new project had some part in this—and he was able to carry out his more urgent duties from Bast Castle or Vjun’s orbit. When not preoccupied with Rebel attacks and Imperial machinations, or the painful regimen of treatments made necessary by Obi-Wan, he found himself tracking down Lucy. Sometimes he simply oversaw her lightsaber practices without comment, but more often, they spoke, Lucy either slinging questions at him, or arguing, or sometimes, eagerly listening to what he had to say.
He didn’t term it training; she’d refused that, and he knew that if he presented it in that sense, she would back away again. But, however rudimentary the techniques he taught her—Obi-Wan seemed to have made an even more inadequate teacher to Lucy—it was, in fact, very little short of full Jedi training. He even consulted the databanks they’d preserved from the Temple, his memories of those early stages of his padawan training no longer sharply clear, and in any case, not something he wished to remember.
He avoid mentioning the Dark Side. Her rejection of the necessity awaiting her remained strong, and this was the first real progress he’d made with her. He had to break down her defenses before she would choose to walk down her destined path.
This, he told himself, was the reason he’d started observing her practices and then intervening in them. It was their first step to ruling the galaxy.
Yet he couldn’t deny the fuller truth. He’d started training her because he wanted to. That first moment of correcting her grip had come without thought beyond a vague and instinctive sense that she should know. She was his daughter, the child he had expected and then thought dead, standing alive and well in front of him. She had a right to know such things, however little she enjoyed hearing them or demonstrating them.
And sometimes, in fact, she did seem to enjoy one or the other.
Once, when she set down her stick after a long practice, he said, “You weren’t trained with a lightsaber, were you?”
“A little,” said Lucy. Then she paused, plainly hiding something. “But that was more about defense. Mostly, I did other things.”
“Ah. What types of things?” he asked, intrigued. It took all his resolve to restrain himself from insisting on taking up her incomplete training in … whatever it was.
Her brows knitted together, and he suspected she might refuse to answer. Instead, she said slowly,
“Well, there was a lot of running and jumping.”
“Running and jumping?” he repeated. “That is how you were trained?”
Obi-Wan had taught him a wide array of abilities, many certainly involving speed and maneuvers, but he’d always focused on the lightsaber above all else. Vader had no idea how many hours he’d spent practicing forms and deflection under his master’s critical eye, except too many. And then there’d been real combat training, and then—well.
This weapon is your life.
“It helps,” said Lucy.
“How?” he asked.
She seemed both thoughtful and bemused. Then she gave a little shrug.
“Watch, Father.”
With no more warning than that, she took off running for the rung ladder on the side of the wall, scaled it with alarming speed, and all but bounced off the wall and onto a platform. She took an unhesitating leap to another platform, one her short legs could barely reach, then took another—and suddenly, she was burning in the Force, and somersaulting right off a high platform to one that her legs couldn’t possibly reach.
The Force would protect her, of course. He knew that, but if he hadn’t known that, and if the suit didn’t regulate it, his heart might nearly have stopped.
With every appearance of little effort, she sprang over distances that no other person of her size could have made or, in all probability, survived. Finally, she threw herself at the wall, caught a rung with her hands, and clambered down like a spider, still shining. As she landed, she turned towards him, and her stick lifted into the air and soared into her waiting hand.
Lucy jogged over.
“That’s the idea,” she told him.
“I see,” said Vader. “Impressive.”
She actually grinned. He could sense none of her petty irritations and frustrations, or the sullen anger that usually smouldered beneath them. In that moment, she seemed happy.
-
As for further discussion of their respective pasts, they confined those to Lucy’s mealtimes. Even then, Vader generally diverted conversation onto Lucy’s past rather than his own, which he could hardly think about without feeling deafened by the echoes of the rage and despair that had dominated so much of his life. Speaking of it was still worse, and yet, he nevertheless found himself doing so now and then. Anything that made Lucy more amenable had to be attempted, and total ignorance would hardly serve her well. And in this, too, he felt that she had something like a right to know—particularly to know the things that Obi-Wan had obscured or omitted.
“The Emperor was your mother’s mentor in her teenage years,” he told her. “She admired and respected him until their visions diverged.”
“Did she know what he was?” Lucy asked in a tight voice, between mouthfuls of some kind of vegetable soup.
She was the only person he knew who could eat soup aggressively.
“No,” said Vader. “None of us did.”
Us rang out oddly. It felt peculiar to class himself in with Padmé, who’d betrayed him, and Obi-Wan, who had more than betrayed him, and the corrupted Jedi Order of the time. But between them, they had comprised much of the galaxy for him, until he came to see more clearly.
Lucy, heiress to that galaxy, just nodded.
“That makes it better,” she said. “Did you—”
“You said you knew Obi-Wan from your childhood,” he said abruptly. “Yet he did not interfere in your upbringing?”
She didn’t look fooled, but if he’d forced himself into a certain level of accommodation, so had Lucy. She accepted the change of subject without protest.
“I think Uncle Owen might have shot anyone who tried.”
The horror of Shmi’s last hours had vastly overshadowed Anakin’s brief interchanges with Owen Lars. Dimly, however, he found himself approving of the man. It was a pity about the stormtroopers. A too-frequent pity, perhaps. Lucy might be able to more effectively take charge of them, once she became empress.
-
Lucy tried to consult her feelings. She’d learned to trust them, more or less—but only when she knew what they were. As it was, she felt a blurry mixture of determination and annoyance and resentment and excitement that gave her hardly any direction at all. Even at her calmest moments, the Light Side pouring through her, she had little idea of what she should be doing.
She didn’t see Ben again, and couldn’t trust his advice anyway. Chirrut only appeared in her dreams now and again, encouraging but bemused by the whole situation. Yoda was entirely inaccessible. When she referred to his teachings, though never with attribution, Anakin almost always quarrelled with them, and often sounded convincing—but he was Darth Vader.
She never let herself forget that, even as she learned what she could from him and followed his instructions. When she did, anyway. At night, she constantly questioned herself, worrying that she was sliding into the Dark Side against her own will, and certain that, at the very least, he must be trying to soften her up for it. But the Dark Side fed off anger and fear and hatred. However complicated her feelings about her father, she didn’t hate him, and rarely felt worse than a general aggravation. And she wasn’t afraid. Nervous, sometimes—but not afraid.
Sometimes, she was even happy.
That worried her most of all. She’d heard about people who became happy in captivity, who were trapped so long that they came to like it, or think that they did. People could get used to almost anything. And, in fairness, she didn’t have a whole lot of bad things to get used to, beyond the captivity itself and the disappearance of Tuvié, whose absent chatter still gave Ellex’s silences a heavy weight. Lucy knew it had to be purposeful: give her comforts, and an unspoken threat that they might be taken away at any moment, and it would grind her down.
If she couldn’t sense her father in the Force, she might have focused on that, learning caution. But she could feel him, and the more time passed, the more clearly she sensed him. She knew there was more going on here, had known it from the moment he stepped out of his ship to recover her. She could feel his present and remembered rage, his shifts to cool calculation, his deep resentments. But she could also feel his anger subsiding into a simple close attention when he came to teach her, the Light Side becoming easier for her to grasp than at any other time.
She sensed more than that, too. When she’d first shown him a part of what she could do, she’d finished with a decided sense of satisfaction and pride at her execution of the difficult routine and control over the Force—more satisfaction, in fact, than she actually felt. And she’d realized he was proud of her. Nothing more than that, perhaps, but nothing less: he had seen Lucy’s abilities, seen her succeed, and felt proud.
That, in itself, didn’t have to say much about him, even if the awareness that her father was alive and proud of her made her feel like the darkest parts of the galaxy had turned inside-out and lit up like Empire Day. She was his daughter; it made sense that he’d see her, at times, as an extension of himself, and her successes as extensions of his own. It made all the more sense considering his ultimate plans for her. And yet it didn’t really feel like that. It felt like he—well, like he wanted her to succeed for her own sake, too, for no better reason than that he was her father and, in his way, he cared about her.
She dared not trust it. But she dared not disregard it, either, when she could see nothing of whatever futures might await her. And it made life here easier, feeling echoed pride when she did something well, and concern when she did something dangerous (not really dangerous, of course), and interest when she said anything at all. They felt like traces of the Anakin Skywalker he had once been, of some fractured inner goodness that somehow persisted.
Was there still good in him?
She didn’t know. But in the end, Lucy could see no other way but forward.
-
“Ellex,” said Lucy.
Ellex didn’t respond.
“Hey, Ellex!”
She looked at Lucy, managing to imbue the slight shake of her head with profound long-suffering. She still didn’t say anything.
“LX-3,” Lucy tried.
“I am the only LZ-line droid in Castle Bast,” said Ellex. “Quite probably, I am the only one on the planet.”
“Sure,” said Lucy. “I mean, it seems likely. But I had an idea for something you could help me with.”
Ellex shifted slightly, the red flash of her optical sensors about as encouraging as usual.
Not very.
“Is it required for your basic functioning?” Ellex said.
“No,” Lucy replied, “but—”
“Then why should I assist you?” Ellex’s sensors flashed again. “You are a prisoner here. I will act to prevent any plans for escape you may have—”
“I don’t have any,” said Lucy.
“Given your history,” Ellex told her, “that seems extremely doubtful.”
Lucy stopped. She hadn’t lied; she really wasn’t thinking about escape. Maybe her exposure to the planet’s deadly environment had killed that idea, though she didn’t recall any specific moment when she’d given it up. She just hadn’t considered it for awhile. Shouldn’t that trouble her?
It did, a little. But not much. She focused on her tangled emotions, trying yet again to pin down something that might guide her. But the Light Side supplied nothing but the general comfort of its presence. Maybe that meant that she was supposed to be here. Or maybe it just meant that she might as well be here as anywhere else, or—no, she couldn’t go through all that again.
Lucy shrugged the entire question off. “My idea isn’t about that. It’s about moving the platforms.”
She could feel her father approaching, though, so she privately gave up, even as Ellex tilted her head back to inspect the platforms.
“I fail to see a purpose in doing so.”
“You’d do it while I was up there,” said Lucy. “With the remote.”
Ellex clicked several times, then said, “I now see a purpose.”
Lucy honestly didn’t know if Ellex meant that she understood Lucy’s purpose, or would just find it entertaining.
“However,” the droid went on, “I do not wish to be—”
The door opened.
“—disintegrated by Lord Vader,” finished Ellex.
Vader glanced between them. Ellex clattered a little from some indistinguishable motion, but to Lucy’s senses, he seemed intrigued rather than angered.
“Who have I disintegrated today?” he asked.
Lucy thought he might be joking. If he knew how.
“No one,” she said. “I mean, I assume.”
“Miss Skywalker,” said Ellex, in faintly accusing tones, “was suggesting that I move the platforms while she is on them.”
For an instant, Lucy did feel afraid. It wasn’t her fear, though.
Vader sounded perfectly calm as he said, “Hm.”
“That’s why they move, isn’t it?” Lucy asked.
He didn’t answer, but just tilted his head back to examine the platforms.
“This has got to be a place for a”—she remembered that she wasn’t a Jedi apprentice any more—“for someone with the Force running in them.”
“It was,” he said at last. “Very well. But there will be no acrobatics. For now, you will attempt the leaps, and that is all. Go on.”
Ellex, with what Lucy suspected was decided droidly pleasure, took up the remote and began to adjust the platforms. Lucy climbed the ladder took her usual leap onto the platforms, then just took a running jump that nearly failed as the new platform shifted towards her instead of away as she’d expected. She managed the next landing, but she did fail the third, only managing to hang on to the edge of the platform by her hands, while her legs dangled in the air. The Force gathered around Vader, though she neither knew nor wanted to know what he intended. She managed to hoist herself up, adrenaline rushing through her.
With all the stops and starts and adjustments, it took longer than usual to fully open herself to the Force, but once she did, everything became clear. Something in her instincts told her which way the platforms would move before they actually did, and after that, she smoothly ran and sprang from platform to platform until she finally tired out. Lucy made her final jump before the ladder, then let go of the Force, launched herself at the wall—and as the last platform shifted under her feet, she failed.
For real, this time. There was no way to grasp either the platform she’d leapt from or the rungs ahead of her. But she didn’t have time to yell, because she simply stopped moving, her body hanging in the air.
Vader didn’t speak, but as clear as anything, she heard his voice. Do not try to free yourself.
What?
Slowly, she floated down to the floor, and landed with a scuffle of her boots. Well, she hadn’t thought of using that on people. Could she, even? Lucy looked doubtfully at Vader as he strode over to her, the stick in hand.
“That was exceptionally dangerous, young woman,” he said.
She dusted herself off and smiled. “All things are possible with the Force, Father.”
“Not if you release the Force.”
Lucy thought about it.
“That depends, doesn’t it? After all, it’s still around.”
He now seemed irritated, but also something else she couldn’t pin down. And—curious?
“Anyway,” she went on, “you were there.”
“I am here,” said Vader grimly, though she wasn’t sure what he meant by it. “Open yourself to the Force.”
“I won’t—”
“I didn’t say the Dark Side,” he said, as if hadn’t ordered her to turn for weeks on end.
Lucy eyed him with some suspicion, but she trusted that the Light Side would never lead her astray. She breathed in, recalling the moments when every shift of the platforms had fallen into place and her muscles had just seemed to know what to do, and with nothing more than that, it coursed through her. Her weariness faded, a little.
“All right,” she said.
He dropped the stick into her hand. “Sixth form. Go.”
She almost refused, almost insisted, I can’t, I’m too tired, but remembered just who he was. With a heavy exhalation, she adjusted her feet and shoulders and swung the stick upwards, going through the movements of deflection even though nothing was attacking her. With her hands sweaty and her muscles aching, it seemed particularly pointless.
Still, she dutifully carried out the prescribed movements, feeling rather like a dancing puppet. Vader, as far as she could tell, was pleased, but also dissatisfied in some way.
“Well?” demanded Lucy, lowering the stick and rubbing her arm.
“Good,” he said, “though you will not progress further with a stick and no real opponents.”
“It’s not my fault,” said Lucy.
“That,” said Vader, “is extremely debatable. But it must be changed.”
She blinked, baffled. “How are you going to find opponents for me?”
“Quite easily,” he replied, and reached for something under his cape, then tossed it at her.
Lucy caught it without thinking—and her hands closed around the hilt of a lightsaber. She stared at it, instantly recognizing the shape and design as the one she’d carried for so long, then lifted her eyes to her father.
“What—”
Vader drew his own—his current—lightsaber and flicked it onwards, its red light jarring in the white and blue room. Lucy took a step back.
He lifted the saber.
“Defend yourself!”
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: Vader takes up Lucy's Jedi training.
previous sections: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“I don’t see the point,” said Lucy.
“Good posture is critical for—”
Vader broke off as he realized, horrifyingly, that his voice had fallen into the exact cadence of Obi-Wan’s. Instead, he laid his hands on her shoulders and straightened them. Lucy twitched, but he only sensed annoyance and a confusion he couldn’t quite identify, not fear.
“Hold this position and try the third form,” he ordered.
“There is no try,” said Lucy, looking down at her stick. Determinedly, she lifted it. “Only success or failure.”
“Nonsense,” Vader said, though he was aware his men probably thought he believed such a thing. “The point of practice is to make attempts. You repeat your attempts until you can succeed consistently, or until success is no longer possible. You do not give up after a single failure.”
Or many failures. He’d learned that painfully and repeatedly.
Lucy heaved a long-suffering sigh, then straightened to her full, if tiny, height and lifted the stick. She adjusted her footing and lunged forward.
“Better,” Vader told her. “Now, try again.”
“I’ve done it twelve times today,” said Lucy.
He didn’t doubt that she’d counted. Lucy, he’d quickly discovered, was one to nurse her grievances. In anyone else, he’d have soon crushed the quality; with Lucy, he reluctantly recalled his own youth, and suspected that some cosmic justice had caught up with him.
He told her, “Then another twelve will not hurt you.”
She groaned.
“A Jedi,” he said, “must be disciplined and relentless.”
“I’m not a Jedi,” said Lucy, pushing her hair out of her face. “You said so yourself.”
You will be.
Vader laid his hands on her shoulders again, holding them in place. “Try again.”
It was what had become a typical day. Palpatine had given him a kind of limited leave in order to turn Lucy—Vader suspected the new project had some part in this—and he was able to carry out his more urgent duties from Bast Castle or Vjun’s orbit. When not preoccupied with Rebel attacks and Imperial machinations, or the painful regimen of treatments made necessary by Obi-Wan, he found himself tracking down Lucy. Sometimes he simply oversaw her lightsaber practices without comment, but more often, they spoke, Lucy either slinging questions at him, or arguing, or sometimes, eagerly listening to what he had to say.
He didn’t term it training; she’d refused that, and he knew that if he presented it in that sense, she would back away again. But, however rudimentary the techniques he taught her—Obi-Wan seemed to have made an even more inadequate teacher to Lucy—it was, in fact, very little short of full Jedi training. He even consulted the databanks they’d preserved from the Temple, his memories of those early stages of his padawan training no longer sharply clear, and in any case, not something he wished to remember.
He avoid mentioning the Dark Side. Her rejection of the necessity awaiting her remained strong, and this was the first real progress he’d made with her. He had to break down her defenses before she would choose to walk down her destined path.
This, he told himself, was the reason he’d started observing her practices and then intervening in them. It was their first step to ruling the galaxy.
Yet he couldn’t deny the fuller truth. He’d started training her because he wanted to. That first moment of correcting her grip had come without thought beyond a vague and instinctive sense that she should know. She was his daughter, the child he had expected and then thought dead, standing alive and well in front of him. She had a right to know such things, however little she enjoyed hearing them or demonstrating them.
And sometimes, in fact, she did seem to enjoy one or the other.
Once, when she set down her stick after a long practice, he said, “You weren’t trained with a lightsaber, were you?”
“A little,” said Lucy. Then she paused, plainly hiding something. “But that was more about defense. Mostly, I did other things.”
“Ah. What types of things?” he asked, intrigued. It took all his resolve to restrain himself from insisting on taking up her incomplete training in … whatever it was.
Her brows knitted together, and he suspected she might refuse to answer. Instead, she said slowly,
“Well, there was a lot of running and jumping.”
“Running and jumping?” he repeated. “That is how you were trained?”
Obi-Wan had taught him a wide array of abilities, many certainly involving speed and maneuvers, but he’d always focused on the lightsaber above all else. Vader had no idea how many hours he’d spent practicing forms and deflection under his master’s critical eye, except too many. And then there’d been real combat training, and then—well.
This weapon is your life.
“It helps,” said Lucy.
“How?” he asked.
She seemed both thoughtful and bemused. Then she gave a little shrug.
“Watch, Father.”
With no more warning than that, she took off running for the rung ladder on the side of the wall, scaled it with alarming speed, and all but bounced off the wall and onto a platform. She took an unhesitating leap to another platform, one her short legs could barely reach, then took another—and suddenly, she was burning in the Force, and somersaulting right off a high platform to one that her legs couldn’t possibly reach.
The Force would protect her, of course. He knew that, but if he hadn’t known that, and if the suit didn’t regulate it, his heart might nearly have stopped.
With every appearance of little effort, she sprang over distances that no other person of her size could have made or, in all probability, survived. Finally, she threw herself at the wall, caught a rung with her hands, and clambered down like a spider, still shining. As she landed, she turned towards him, and her stick lifted into the air and soared into her waiting hand.
Lucy jogged over.
“That’s the idea,” she told him.
“I see,” said Vader. “Impressive.”
She actually grinned. He could sense none of her petty irritations and frustrations, or the sullen anger that usually smouldered beneath them. In that moment, she seemed happy.
-
As for further discussion of their respective pasts, they confined those to Lucy’s mealtimes. Even then, Vader generally diverted conversation onto Lucy’s past rather than his own, which he could hardly think about without feeling deafened by the echoes of the rage and despair that had dominated so much of his life. Speaking of it was still worse, and yet, he nevertheless found himself doing so now and then. Anything that made Lucy more amenable had to be attempted, and total ignorance would hardly serve her well. And in this, too, he felt that she had something like a right to know—particularly to know the things that Obi-Wan had obscured or omitted.
“The Emperor was your mother’s mentor in her teenage years,” he told her. “She admired and respected him until their visions diverged.”
“Did she know what he was?” Lucy asked in a tight voice, between mouthfuls of some kind of vegetable soup.
She was the only person he knew who could eat soup aggressively.
“No,” said Vader. “None of us did.”
Us rang out oddly. It felt peculiar to class himself in with Padmé, who’d betrayed him, and Obi-Wan, who had more than betrayed him, and the corrupted Jedi Order of the time. But between them, they had comprised much of the galaxy for him, until he came to see more clearly.
Lucy, heiress to that galaxy, just nodded.
“That makes it better,” she said. “Did you—”
“You said you knew Obi-Wan from your childhood,” he said abruptly. “Yet he did not interfere in your upbringing?”
She didn’t look fooled, but if he’d forced himself into a certain level of accommodation, so had Lucy. She accepted the change of subject without protest.
“I think Uncle Owen might have shot anyone who tried.”
The horror of Shmi’s last hours had vastly overshadowed Anakin’s brief interchanges with Owen Lars. Dimly, however, he found himself approving of the man. It was a pity about the stormtroopers. A too-frequent pity, perhaps. Lucy might be able to more effectively take charge of them, once she became empress.
-
Lucy tried to consult her feelings. She’d learned to trust them, more or less—but only when she knew what they were. As it was, she felt a blurry mixture of determination and annoyance and resentment and excitement that gave her hardly any direction at all. Even at her calmest moments, the Light Side pouring through her, she had little idea of what she should be doing.
She didn’t see Ben again, and couldn’t trust his advice anyway. Chirrut only appeared in her dreams now and again, encouraging but bemused by the whole situation. Yoda was entirely inaccessible. When she referred to his teachings, though never with attribution, Anakin almost always quarrelled with them, and often sounded convincing—but he was Darth Vader.
She never let herself forget that, even as she learned what she could from him and followed his instructions. When she did, anyway. At night, she constantly questioned herself, worrying that she was sliding into the Dark Side against her own will, and certain that, at the very least, he must be trying to soften her up for it. But the Dark Side fed off anger and fear and hatred. However complicated her feelings about her father, she didn’t hate him, and rarely felt worse than a general aggravation. And she wasn’t afraid. Nervous, sometimes—but not afraid.
Sometimes, she was even happy.
That worried her most of all. She’d heard about people who became happy in captivity, who were trapped so long that they came to like it, or think that they did. People could get used to almost anything. And, in fairness, she didn’t have a whole lot of bad things to get used to, beyond the captivity itself and the disappearance of Tuvié, whose absent chatter still gave Ellex’s silences a heavy weight. Lucy knew it had to be purposeful: give her comforts, and an unspoken threat that they might be taken away at any moment, and it would grind her down.
If she couldn’t sense her father in the Force, she might have focused on that, learning caution. But she could feel him, and the more time passed, the more clearly she sensed him. She knew there was more going on here, had known it from the moment he stepped out of his ship to recover her. She could feel his present and remembered rage, his shifts to cool calculation, his deep resentments. But she could also feel his anger subsiding into a simple close attention when he came to teach her, the Light Side becoming easier for her to grasp than at any other time.
She sensed more than that, too. When she’d first shown him a part of what she could do, she’d finished with a decided sense of satisfaction and pride at her execution of the difficult routine and control over the Force—more satisfaction, in fact, than she actually felt. And she’d realized he was proud of her. Nothing more than that, perhaps, but nothing less: he had seen Lucy’s abilities, seen her succeed, and felt proud.
That, in itself, didn’t have to say much about him, even if the awareness that her father was alive and proud of her made her feel like the darkest parts of the galaxy had turned inside-out and lit up like Empire Day. She was his daughter; it made sense that he’d see her, at times, as an extension of himself, and her successes as extensions of his own. It made all the more sense considering his ultimate plans for her. And yet it didn’t really feel like that. It felt like he—well, like he wanted her to succeed for her own sake, too, for no better reason than that he was her father and, in his way, he cared about her.
She dared not trust it. But she dared not disregard it, either, when she could see nothing of whatever futures might await her. And it made life here easier, feeling echoed pride when she did something well, and concern when she did something dangerous (not really dangerous, of course), and interest when she said anything at all. They felt like traces of the Anakin Skywalker he had once been, of some fractured inner goodness that somehow persisted.
Was there still good in him?
She didn’t know. But in the end, Lucy could see no other way but forward.
-
“Ellex,” said Lucy.
Ellex didn’t respond.
“Hey, Ellex!”
She looked at Lucy, managing to imbue the slight shake of her head with profound long-suffering. She still didn’t say anything.
“LX-3,” Lucy tried.
“I am the only LZ-line droid in Castle Bast,” said Ellex. “Quite probably, I am the only one on the planet.”
“Sure,” said Lucy. “I mean, it seems likely. But I had an idea for something you could help me with.”
Ellex shifted slightly, the red flash of her optical sensors about as encouraging as usual.
Not very.
“Is it required for your basic functioning?” Ellex said.
“No,” Lucy replied, “but—”
“Then why should I assist you?” Ellex’s sensors flashed again. “You are a prisoner here. I will act to prevent any plans for escape you may have—”
“I don’t have any,” said Lucy.
“Given your history,” Ellex told her, “that seems extremely doubtful.”
Lucy stopped. She hadn’t lied; she really wasn’t thinking about escape. Maybe her exposure to the planet’s deadly environment had killed that idea, though she didn’t recall any specific moment when she’d given it up. She just hadn’t considered it for awhile. Shouldn’t that trouble her?
It did, a little. But not much. She focused on her tangled emotions, trying yet again to pin down something that might guide her. But the Light Side supplied nothing but the general comfort of its presence. Maybe that meant that she was supposed to be here. Or maybe it just meant that she might as well be here as anywhere else, or—no, she couldn’t go through all that again.
Lucy shrugged the entire question off. “My idea isn’t about that. It’s about moving the platforms.”
She could feel her father approaching, though, so she privately gave up, even as Ellex tilted her head back to inspect the platforms.
“I fail to see a purpose in doing so.”
“You’d do it while I was up there,” said Lucy. “With the remote.”
Ellex clicked several times, then said, “I now see a purpose.”
Lucy honestly didn’t know if Ellex meant that she understood Lucy’s purpose, or would just find it entertaining.
“However,” the droid went on, “I do not wish to be—”
The door opened.
“—disintegrated by Lord Vader,” finished Ellex.
Vader glanced between them. Ellex clattered a little from some indistinguishable motion, but to Lucy’s senses, he seemed intrigued rather than angered.
“Who have I disintegrated today?” he asked.
Lucy thought he might be joking. If he knew how.
“No one,” she said. “I mean, I assume.”
“Miss Skywalker,” said Ellex, in faintly accusing tones, “was suggesting that I move the platforms while she is on them.”
For an instant, Lucy did feel afraid. It wasn’t her fear, though.
Vader sounded perfectly calm as he said, “Hm.”
“That’s why they move, isn’t it?” Lucy asked.
He didn’t answer, but just tilted his head back to examine the platforms.
“This has got to be a place for a”—she remembered that she wasn’t a Jedi apprentice any more—“for someone with the Force running in them.”
“It was,” he said at last. “Very well. But there will be no acrobatics. For now, you will attempt the leaps, and that is all. Go on.”
Ellex, with what Lucy suspected was decided droidly pleasure, took up the remote and began to adjust the platforms. Lucy climbed the ladder took her usual leap onto the platforms, then just took a running jump that nearly failed as the new platform shifted towards her instead of away as she’d expected. She managed the next landing, but she did fail the third, only managing to hang on to the edge of the platform by her hands, while her legs dangled in the air. The Force gathered around Vader, though she neither knew nor wanted to know what he intended. She managed to hoist herself up, adrenaline rushing through her.
With all the stops and starts and adjustments, it took longer than usual to fully open herself to the Force, but once she did, everything became clear. Something in her instincts told her which way the platforms would move before they actually did, and after that, she smoothly ran and sprang from platform to platform until she finally tired out. Lucy made her final jump before the ladder, then let go of the Force, launched herself at the wall—and as the last platform shifted under her feet, she failed.
For real, this time. There was no way to grasp either the platform she’d leapt from or the rungs ahead of her. But she didn’t have time to yell, because she simply stopped moving, her body hanging in the air.
Vader didn’t speak, but as clear as anything, she heard his voice. Do not try to free yourself.
What?
Slowly, she floated down to the floor, and landed with a scuffle of her boots. Well, she hadn’t thought of using that on people. Could she, even? Lucy looked doubtfully at Vader as he strode over to her, the stick in hand.
“That was exceptionally dangerous, young woman,” he said.
She dusted herself off and smiled. “All things are possible with the Force, Father.”
“Not if you release the Force.”
Lucy thought about it.
“That depends, doesn’t it? After all, it’s still around.”
He now seemed irritated, but also something else she couldn’t pin down. And—curious?
“Anyway,” she went on, “you were there.”
“I am here,” said Vader grimly, though she wasn’t sure what he meant by it. “Open yourself to the Force.”
“I won’t—”
“I didn’t say the Dark Side,” he said, as if hadn’t ordered her to turn for weeks on end.
Lucy eyed him with some suspicion, but she trusted that the Light Side would never lead her astray. She breathed in, recalling the moments when every shift of the platforms had fallen into place and her muscles had just seemed to know what to do, and with nothing more than that, it coursed through her. Her weariness faded, a little.
“All right,” she said.
He dropped the stick into her hand. “Sixth form. Go.”
She almost refused, almost insisted, I can’t, I’m too tired, but remembered just who he was. With a heavy exhalation, she adjusted her feet and shoulders and swung the stick upwards, going through the movements of deflection even though nothing was attacking her. With her hands sweaty and her muscles aching, it seemed particularly pointless.
Still, she dutifully carried out the prescribed movements, feeling rather like a dancing puppet. Vader, as far as she could tell, was pleased, but also dissatisfied in some way.
“Well?” demanded Lucy, lowering the stick and rubbing her arm.
“Good,” he said, “though you will not progress further with a stick and no real opponents.”
“It’s not my fault,” said Lucy.
“That,” said Vader, “is extremely debatable. But it must be changed.”
She blinked, baffled. “How are you going to find opponents for me?”
“Quite easily,” he replied, and reached for something under his cape, then tossed it at her.
Lucy caught it without thinking—and her hands closed around the hilt of a lightsaber. She stared at it, instantly recognizing the shape and design as the one she’d carried for so long, then lifted her eyes to her father.
“What—”
Vader drew his own—his current—lightsaber and flicked it onwards, its red light jarring in the white and blue room. Lucy took a step back.
He lifted the saber.
“Defend yourself!”