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the prequels exist!
title: The Jedi and the Sith Lord (19/?)
verse: Lucy Skywalker: my f!Luke AU, following from The Adventures of Lucy Skywalker and The Imperial Menace
characters: Luke/Lucy Skywalker, Anakin Skywalker; Padmé Amidala (background); Anakin/Padmé
stuff that happens: Anakin has Lucy seek visions, and reveals another uncomfortable truth.
previous sections: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen
CHAPTER NINETEEN
With the sacrificial bestowal of life force, renewal of cellular formations becomes possible, particularly when it comes to disjunctures of flesh, though this is limited to renewal and not, for instance, the total regrowth of a limb or (in most cases) an organ. Bacterial and viral conditions, on the other hand, create especially complex difficulties—
For the fifth time that morning, Lucy nearly nodded off. Whatever else she might have expected of access to forbidden Jedi knowledge, she hadn’t imagined being bored out of her skull. The sheer level of gobbledygook made it both a struggle to understand and petrifyingly dull. It had so many explanations, and so few of them were about what she wanted to know.
She’d at least figured out that the book, or this section of the book, was about using the Force to heal. The idea struck her as enormously useful, and impressive, too. If she’d know she could do that back on Tatooine—
Of course, she couldn’t do it back on Tatooine. Or now, for that matter.
Lucy scowled at the book. The thing she still didn’t understand was how you went around sacrificing your life force at all. Did it magically happen when you wanted it to? Did some people have the ability and some people not?
With a sigh, she flopped back on her bed, half-frustrated, half-luxuriating in solitude. Ellex still came to Lucy’s lessons sometimes to shoot things at her, but she seemed generally busy with whatever it was Ellex did. For several days, Lucy had slept with no one watching her. That was something, anyway.
She checked the timepiece above her bed; it was nearly noon, when she’d be due for whatever training was in store for her today. With Anakin, you never knew what might be coming. If he believed in anything—other than the Force—it was the value of unpredictability. She couldn’t say she disagreed, but she very much preferred it when she was the one helping recruits than when she was on other side of the lightsaber.
The thought of the lightsaber, however, cheered her up. There was always a duel and usually deflection practice, and she felt more and more comfortable with it, no often how much she lost. Sometimes she never did lose with deflection, at least, even over an hour or two, as long as she could reach the Light Side and hold onto it. That was, in fairness, easier said than done, but it had become so much easier than when she started grabbing at it that she wasn’t inclined to complain.
Lucy tucked the book under her arm and, immediately more alert, ran to the training room, even though she’d be early. The droids along the way barely glanced at her as she passed, accustomed to her oddities.
When she darted through the door, she found an exercise mat from the other side of the room flying towards the table with the metal parts. Lucy watched it hurtle into place right in front of the table, then looked at her father.
“What are those for?” she asked.
“Comfort,” he said, surprising her all over again. Somehow he always managed to that; her consolation was that she constantly surprised him, too.
After slightly rearranging the pile of metal, he pointed at the mat.
“Sit down,” he said.
Lucy eyed him with some suspicion, but obeyed, folding her legs in front of her.
“What now?”
To her even greater surprise, he sat down opposite her, his armour giving a few creaks and his cape trailing on the floor. Their knees were almost touching. Did he have knees?
“The Force,” said Anakin, “binds everything in the galaxy together, no matter what its size or composition.”
Lucy opened her mouth to say I know that, then shut it again.
“You will have felt this—the connections from you to places and people distant from you. You saw the interiors of the ships that attacked us, for instance, from the surface of the planet.”
She nodded.
“You can reach beyond that. If you are truly open to the Force, nothing can stop you from sensing people and events across the entire galaxy—and further than that.”
Putting her vision of Leia out of her mind, Lucy asked, “Further? You mean … into other galaxies?”
“Perhaps,” Anakin said, the idea plainly not occurring to him, “but no, I did not mean that. I mean that it connects both space and time.”
Now, she remembered her vision of Cloud City, of Han’s and Leia’s suffering. She bit her lip, glad for once that they were far away and couldn’t see this.
“I heard, once,” she said carefully, “that through the Force, you can see other things—the future and the past.”
“From Obi-Wan?” said Anakin. It wasn’t really a question. “I am surprised he would mention it. It was not a strong ability of his, and he was … never inclined to attend to visions.”
His voice didn’t change, except to grow rather flat, but she could feel the sudden fury roiling through him. What vision had Obi-Wan overlooked? One of his own? Or Anakin’s?
“But yes,” he went on, not quite calming, but tamping the burst of rage down into the rest of the anger and pain that she always felt smouldering beneath his other moods and sensations. “That is true. The connections to the future and the past, to the here and now and other horizons, can allow you to travel anywhere without moving an inch, and when nothing blocks you, to uncover valuable information.”
To travel anywhere? That would be even more like freedom, wouldn’t it? She immediately sat up straight and said,
“I want to try!”
“If you simply open yourself to the Force,” he said, “you will have no control over what you see, if anything. What comes may be undesirable, or irrelevant. Reach for it, but hold to a focus point to guide you.”
A focus point. Right. Lucy hesitated, trying to think of something she’d want to see. Something she’d never see otherwise, she decided. Like—her mother! She nodded.
“Are you ready?” he asked, holding himself very still.
“Yes,” she said firmly.
With that, she closed her eyes and reached for the Force. But today was one of the days when the Light Side slipped this way and that, shrinking away from her whenever she tried to grasp it. She blew out an exasperated breath. Maybe it was because Vader was so near, and probably holding onto the Dark, but if so, she couldn’t change that.
Lucy muttered under her breath.
“What did you just say?” said Anakin.
She flushed. “Um. Sorry.”
“No,” he said, “I am not asking … it wasn’t Huttish, was it?”
She frowned at the very idea. “No. Alsaraic. You haven’t—”
Then it occurred to her that Shmi, mild as everyone said she’d been, might still have had occasion to use terms around another woman that she wouldn’t have around her little son. Strange as it was to imagine Anakin as little at all.
“Anyway,” said Lucy. “Let me try again. It’s just that the Light Side is difficult today.”
He seemed like he might give the old response, so she pointed a finger at him.
“Don’t say it.”
Determinedly, she closed her eyes again, and breathed in and out, letting her impatience and eagerness come to mind, but pass through it. Han and Leia sprang to mind—no, she couldn’t do anything about them. She’d act when she could. Her father’s close attention made her anxious, not out of fear, but the desire to succeed, as both daughter and apprentice. But that would happen, or not. He never seemed that disappointed.
Like a shaft of moonlight, she could feel the dim glow of the Light Side, and reached for it, trying not to grasp it tightly but let it flow. Show me, she thought, Mother and Alsaraic and little mingling in her mind before she could focus it the way he’d told her. And as simple as that, colours behind her lids almost instantly coalesced into an image, the world around her vanishing.
A pretty, dark-haired girl, wearing a simple grey tunic over a blue shirt, stood in a shop. She seemed uncomfortable in some way, though Lucy couldn’t see why; the shop looked perfectly ordinary. Then the vision broadened, and Lucy could see that a thin, golden-haired child—a boy—stood near the girl, peering up into her dark eyes.
She said sharply, “You’re a slave?”
“I’m a person!” the boy replied, his tone indignant. “My name is Anakin.”
Anakin? Lucy’s astonishment knocked her right out of the vision, as it had done on Dagobah. That little boy was her father? She’d been looking for Padmé—was that her? The girl had seemed young and small, definitely a few years younger than Lucy, but she still had to look down to meet the boy’s eyes.
My name is Anakin.
Lucy swallowed. She couldn’t—she had to—her thoughts scattered for a moment, the Light Side slithering away.
Oh, no, you don’t, she told herself, focusing again. She had to think of something more specific. With her mother, she knew so little that the first thing that came to mind was her clothes. When had she worn that yellow dress? It was one of Lucy’s favourites.
This time, the vision came in only a glimpse—the same girl as before, now a woman. Sure enough, she wore the yellow dress. But its colours were bright and vivid, and the woman had a ribbon over her brow, her hair elaborately coiffed and curled where Lucy only wore a straight braid. The woman sat in a field, laughing at a man whom Lucy could only see from the back; she couldn’t make out much of him beyond dark clothes and dark blond hair. But Padmé’s entire face was alight. Then she disappeared, and Lucy’s vision relapsed into darkness.
Lucy took a ragged breath, opening her eyes to her father’s mask.
“Your hair,” she said. “Was it the same colour as mine?”
“Yes,” said Anakin, without elaboration. “What did you see?”
She felt vaguely guilty. “I … I wanted to see my mother. I think you were there—it was in a field.”
He didn’t seem angry, but she did feel another burst of turmoil. Then he said,
“Then it probably was.” After a long few seconds, he went on, “There are some images of Padmé you can find. For now, focus your attention on what can be useful to you.”
Lucy sat and thought about it. She’d already seen Leia, and seeing her again would just be painful. She wasn’t sure she wanted to see Han, if the most likely scenario prevailed and he was a captive of the Hutts. It’d be hard to justify that as useful at all, besides. There were Varti and Jerjerrod, of course, but she barely knew the one and had no idea what the other even looked like. Still, she might as well try.
It took a good minute of concentration before she saw anything at all, and then it certainly wasn’t Varti, and she suspected not Jerjerrod, either. Just a man in a brown jumpsuit of some kind, standing on a ladder and painting the Rebel insignia on a ship—a ship that wasn’t any model she knew. A line of stormtroopers marched past him, and the picture vanished as quickly as it had come.
Lucy looked around herself, blinking at the familiar sights of the training room.
“I don’t think that was useful, exactly,” she said, but relayed it anyway.
“A confirmation, at least,” said Anakin. “You have a gift for this.”
“It seems a little … chaotic,” she said, trying not to feel too gratified. People said she was strong in the Force, but she’d rarely felt that way; everything always seemed so difficult.
“The Force mirrors the galaxy,” he replied. “Someday, it will be different.”
She was pretty sure she didn’t want to know what his idea of different was. It had to be unlike hers, at least.
“Well,” she said brightly, “I don’t think I have any more of those in me today. They keep getting shorter and shorter.”
“It can be particularly draining,” said Anakin. “Get up, then. You have more practice to do. Maintain your connection to the Force—if you can.”
Prickling a little at this, she hung onto the Light Side for all she was worth, relieved to find it coiled warmly around her. She ran through the usual exercises: first running, climbing, and jumping, then returning to lift things and drop them, hold them immobile and launch them away. And lastly, when she was tired—unfair, but nobody had ever called him fair—Anakin handed over his lightsaber. Just holding it still sent a little trickle of comfort running through her. Losing didn’t matter; she loved this.
This time, he didn’t knock it away, but instead eventually broke through her defenses, holding his lightsaber at her throat and forcing her to drop the other one. But for the first time, instead of putting both away, he handed her the second lightsaber, the red one.
“Turn it on,” he said.
Uneasily, Lucy flicked the switch and watched the red blade materialize. It made the same sound, and she didn’t think colour should really matter, but it felt—different, somehow. There was no buzz of familiarity, of feeling that this was where she should be and what she should be doing. She quickly turned it off again and thrust the hilt back at him.
“Here. I like the other one better,” she said.
Anakin looked at her, then took the lightsaber and hooked it onto his belt.
“I have done the same things with both of them,” he said, a distinct note of warning in his voice.
“I can believe it,” said Lucy. “But the blue is … I don’t know. Comfortable. It fits my hand better, anyway.”
“You are becoming attuned to it,” he said. “How long did you carry it?”
“Every day for two years,” she told him. “It was useful, and—”
My legacy, she thought. That legacy had turned out darker than she could ever have guessed, and far more complex, but she was a Skywalker nevertheless. There might never be another; she couldn’t imagine having children. This strange blood would die with her.
“Father?” she interrupted herself. “I have a question.”
“You usually do,” said Anakin.
“Yes, well, there’s a lot people didn’t tell me,” she said.
Again, she felt a stirring of anger, but a certain relief, too.
“True.”
“When I was sick, Tisix took a sample of my blood,” said Lucy. “And it turned up as non-human. It was humanoid—obviously—but just outside the possible range of human genetics, or something like that. Mother was human, wasn’t she?”
Anakin fell silent. Then, after a good few seconds, he said,
“Yes. The irregularity comes from me.”
“Were the Alsarai—”
“Also human,” he said shortly.
Folding her arms, she asked, “Was it your father, then?” It occurred to her that he might not want to talk about that.
“I have no father,” said Anakin.
She gave a resigned nod. So it was that. She’d feel the same, in his circumstances.
“Okay. I understand.”
“I doubt that you do,” he replied. “I did not mean that some male I do not wish to acknowledge fathered me in slavery. My mother always said that there was no father, and I felt the truth of it.”
Lucy stared at him. “You just … showed up?”
“Apparently,” he said, aiming for indifference without quite achieving it. “The Jedi thought it meant—that hardly matters. But undoubtedly, the Force had something to do with it.”
“Right,” she said faintly. “The Force is in us? Not the way it connects everyone, but—it’s in our blood? Really?”
She couldn’t wrap her mind around it yet.
“Perhaps,” said Anakin. “Somehow or another, it caused us to be. That is all I know.”
“And that’s the reason my genetic reading was off?” She had never even remotely imagined this. “There’s something just … floating around our genes because of some magical interference that nobody can explain?”
“Yes. You need not concern yourself with it,” he said. “In fact, it is better if you ignore it.”
She all but choked. “You’ve just said that we’re basically demi-gods. I shouldn’t concern myself with that?”
“We are nothing of the kind,” said Anakin impatiently. “The Jedi believed I was chosen for something. Perhaps they were not wholly wrong—there is something we are meant to do, some destiny we must accomplish. I know what I believe it is. You will have to find an explanation for yourself.”
It was one thing to shrug off destiny as plain Lucy. It was quite another with the knowledge that some strange power had inscribed itself into her very genes. Was she meant for something? Or was it simply some bizarre quirk of the Force?—maybe it just did that sort of thing now and then. Who knew?
Lucy exhaled, trying to recover some sense of herself. It didn’t have to change anything; there was nothing present in her that had not always been present. She was the same Lucy she had always been.
Lucy Skywalker.
“If we’re done,” she said at last, “I think I’m going to try studying my book again.”
Anakin considered her, then said, “Go ahead.”
-
Lucy guessed that he suspected she wouldn’t actually go back to reading, but in fact, she marched straight to her bedroom, barely noticing the absence of the usual guards at her door. Then she sat on the edge of her bed and picked the book up, opening it to where she’d left off. But she’d barely slogged through the next sentence when her thoughts returned to the last revelation. Anakin had been formed by the Force? Nothing else made sense. But that didn’t make sense, either. He’d been created in order to become this—this suffering creature who inflicted untold suffering in turn? She cared for him, she truly did, but she couldn’t deny what he was.
My name is Anakin—
What did it mean for her? Was he right, and she was meant to share his fate? Or maybe she was just incidental to it, inheritor of his semi-human genes but nothing more. Or maybe—
She had no idea. Lucy uncurled one of her hands from the edges of the book and laid her fingers out on the page, staring at the blue veins under her skin. Just what was in there? Had Padmé known?
If so, she hadn’t cared. In that moment that Lucy saw, she just seemed utterly charmed. A founder of the Rebellion, charmed by the man who would become Darth Vader. But he’d been young then, just Lucy’s age. Hadn’t he said that he’d been like Lucy at her age? Whatever had turned him happened later.
It wouldn’t happen to her, she insisted to herself. But she had to be on her guard. Even now—especially now.
Lucy closed her eyes. Book or no book, she was tired. She wished she could just be Anakin and Padmé’s daughter, Leia and Han’s friend, without any of the rest of this, war and captivity and destiny. Yet she’d never want a quiet life, would she? Yoda was right about that; she’d always wanted more. Had Anakin? Everything talked as if he had. Maybe that was what had led him down this path.
She didn’t know. Right now, she felt like she didn’t know anything at all.
verse: Lucy Skywalker: my f!Luke AU, following from The Adventures of Lucy Skywalker and The Imperial Menace
characters: Luke/Lucy Skywalker, Anakin Skywalker; Padmé Amidala (background); Anakin/Padmé
stuff that happens: Anakin has Lucy seek visions, and reveals another uncomfortable truth.
previous sections: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen
CHAPTER NINETEEN
With the sacrificial bestowal of life force, renewal of cellular formations becomes possible, particularly when it comes to disjunctures of flesh, though this is limited to renewal and not, for instance, the total regrowth of a limb or (in most cases) an organ. Bacterial and viral conditions, on the other hand, create especially complex difficulties—
For the fifth time that morning, Lucy nearly nodded off. Whatever else she might have expected of access to forbidden Jedi knowledge, she hadn’t imagined being bored out of her skull. The sheer level of gobbledygook made it both a struggle to understand and petrifyingly dull. It had so many explanations, and so few of them were about what she wanted to know.
She’d at least figured out that the book, or this section of the book, was about using the Force to heal. The idea struck her as enormously useful, and impressive, too. If she’d know she could do that back on Tatooine—
Of course, she couldn’t do it back on Tatooine. Or now, for that matter.
Lucy scowled at the book. The thing she still didn’t understand was how you went around sacrificing your life force at all. Did it magically happen when you wanted it to? Did some people have the ability and some people not?
With a sigh, she flopped back on her bed, half-frustrated, half-luxuriating in solitude. Ellex still came to Lucy’s lessons sometimes to shoot things at her, but she seemed generally busy with whatever it was Ellex did. For several days, Lucy had slept with no one watching her. That was something, anyway.
She checked the timepiece above her bed; it was nearly noon, when she’d be due for whatever training was in store for her today. With Anakin, you never knew what might be coming. If he believed in anything—other than the Force—it was the value of unpredictability. She couldn’t say she disagreed, but she very much preferred it when she was the one helping recruits than when she was on other side of the lightsaber.
The thought of the lightsaber, however, cheered her up. There was always a duel and usually deflection practice, and she felt more and more comfortable with it, no often how much she lost. Sometimes she never did lose with deflection, at least, even over an hour or two, as long as she could reach the Light Side and hold onto it. That was, in fairness, easier said than done, but it had become so much easier than when she started grabbing at it that she wasn’t inclined to complain.
Lucy tucked the book under her arm and, immediately more alert, ran to the training room, even though she’d be early. The droids along the way barely glanced at her as she passed, accustomed to her oddities.
When she darted through the door, she found an exercise mat from the other side of the room flying towards the table with the metal parts. Lucy watched it hurtle into place right in front of the table, then looked at her father.
“What are those for?” she asked.
“Comfort,” he said, surprising her all over again. Somehow he always managed to that; her consolation was that she constantly surprised him, too.
After slightly rearranging the pile of metal, he pointed at the mat.
“Sit down,” he said.
Lucy eyed him with some suspicion, but obeyed, folding her legs in front of her.
“What now?”
To her even greater surprise, he sat down opposite her, his armour giving a few creaks and his cape trailing on the floor. Their knees were almost touching. Did he have knees?
“The Force,” said Anakin, “binds everything in the galaxy together, no matter what its size or composition.”
Lucy opened her mouth to say I know that, then shut it again.
“You will have felt this—the connections from you to places and people distant from you. You saw the interiors of the ships that attacked us, for instance, from the surface of the planet.”
She nodded.
“You can reach beyond that. If you are truly open to the Force, nothing can stop you from sensing people and events across the entire galaxy—and further than that.”
Putting her vision of Leia out of her mind, Lucy asked, “Further? You mean … into other galaxies?”
“Perhaps,” Anakin said, the idea plainly not occurring to him, “but no, I did not mean that. I mean that it connects both space and time.”
Now, she remembered her vision of Cloud City, of Han’s and Leia’s suffering. She bit her lip, glad for once that they were far away and couldn’t see this.
“I heard, once,” she said carefully, “that through the Force, you can see other things—the future and the past.”
“From Obi-Wan?” said Anakin. It wasn’t really a question. “I am surprised he would mention it. It was not a strong ability of his, and he was … never inclined to attend to visions.”
His voice didn’t change, except to grow rather flat, but she could feel the sudden fury roiling through him. What vision had Obi-Wan overlooked? One of his own? Or Anakin’s?
“But yes,” he went on, not quite calming, but tamping the burst of rage down into the rest of the anger and pain that she always felt smouldering beneath his other moods and sensations. “That is true. The connections to the future and the past, to the here and now and other horizons, can allow you to travel anywhere without moving an inch, and when nothing blocks you, to uncover valuable information.”
To travel anywhere? That would be even more like freedom, wouldn’t it? She immediately sat up straight and said,
“I want to try!”
“If you simply open yourself to the Force,” he said, “you will have no control over what you see, if anything. What comes may be undesirable, or irrelevant. Reach for it, but hold to a focus point to guide you.”
A focus point. Right. Lucy hesitated, trying to think of something she’d want to see. Something she’d never see otherwise, she decided. Like—her mother! She nodded.
“Are you ready?” he asked, holding himself very still.
“Yes,” she said firmly.
With that, she closed her eyes and reached for the Force. But today was one of the days when the Light Side slipped this way and that, shrinking away from her whenever she tried to grasp it. She blew out an exasperated breath. Maybe it was because Vader was so near, and probably holding onto the Dark, but if so, she couldn’t change that.
Lucy muttered under her breath.
“What did you just say?” said Anakin.
She flushed. “Um. Sorry.”
“No,” he said, “I am not asking … it wasn’t Huttish, was it?”
She frowned at the very idea. “No. Alsaraic. You haven’t—”
Then it occurred to her that Shmi, mild as everyone said she’d been, might still have had occasion to use terms around another woman that she wouldn’t have around her little son. Strange as it was to imagine Anakin as little at all.
“Anyway,” said Lucy. “Let me try again. It’s just that the Light Side is difficult today.”
He seemed like he might give the old response, so she pointed a finger at him.
“Don’t say it.”
Determinedly, she closed her eyes again, and breathed in and out, letting her impatience and eagerness come to mind, but pass through it. Han and Leia sprang to mind—no, she couldn’t do anything about them. She’d act when she could. Her father’s close attention made her anxious, not out of fear, but the desire to succeed, as both daughter and apprentice. But that would happen, or not. He never seemed that disappointed.
Like a shaft of moonlight, she could feel the dim glow of the Light Side, and reached for it, trying not to grasp it tightly but let it flow. Show me, she thought, Mother and Alsaraic and little mingling in her mind before she could focus it the way he’d told her. And as simple as that, colours behind her lids almost instantly coalesced into an image, the world around her vanishing.
A pretty, dark-haired girl, wearing a simple grey tunic over a blue shirt, stood in a shop. She seemed uncomfortable in some way, though Lucy couldn’t see why; the shop looked perfectly ordinary. Then the vision broadened, and Lucy could see that a thin, golden-haired child—a boy—stood near the girl, peering up into her dark eyes.
She said sharply, “You’re a slave?”
“I’m a person!” the boy replied, his tone indignant. “My name is Anakin.”
Anakin? Lucy’s astonishment knocked her right out of the vision, as it had done on Dagobah. That little boy was her father? She’d been looking for Padmé—was that her? The girl had seemed young and small, definitely a few years younger than Lucy, but she still had to look down to meet the boy’s eyes.
My name is Anakin.
Lucy swallowed. She couldn’t—she had to—her thoughts scattered for a moment, the Light Side slithering away.
Oh, no, you don’t, she told herself, focusing again. She had to think of something more specific. With her mother, she knew so little that the first thing that came to mind was her clothes. When had she worn that yellow dress? It was one of Lucy’s favourites.
This time, the vision came in only a glimpse—the same girl as before, now a woman. Sure enough, she wore the yellow dress. But its colours were bright and vivid, and the woman had a ribbon over her brow, her hair elaborately coiffed and curled where Lucy only wore a straight braid. The woman sat in a field, laughing at a man whom Lucy could only see from the back; she couldn’t make out much of him beyond dark clothes and dark blond hair. But Padmé’s entire face was alight. Then she disappeared, and Lucy’s vision relapsed into darkness.
Lucy took a ragged breath, opening her eyes to her father’s mask.
“Your hair,” she said. “Was it the same colour as mine?”
“Yes,” said Anakin, without elaboration. “What did you see?”
She felt vaguely guilty. “I … I wanted to see my mother. I think you were there—it was in a field.”
He didn’t seem angry, but she did feel another burst of turmoil. Then he said,
“Then it probably was.” After a long few seconds, he went on, “There are some images of Padmé you can find. For now, focus your attention on what can be useful to you.”
Lucy sat and thought about it. She’d already seen Leia, and seeing her again would just be painful. She wasn’t sure she wanted to see Han, if the most likely scenario prevailed and he was a captive of the Hutts. It’d be hard to justify that as useful at all, besides. There were Varti and Jerjerrod, of course, but she barely knew the one and had no idea what the other even looked like. Still, she might as well try.
It took a good minute of concentration before she saw anything at all, and then it certainly wasn’t Varti, and she suspected not Jerjerrod, either. Just a man in a brown jumpsuit of some kind, standing on a ladder and painting the Rebel insignia on a ship—a ship that wasn’t any model she knew. A line of stormtroopers marched past him, and the picture vanished as quickly as it had come.
Lucy looked around herself, blinking at the familiar sights of the training room.
“I don’t think that was useful, exactly,” she said, but relayed it anyway.
“A confirmation, at least,” said Anakin. “You have a gift for this.”
“It seems a little … chaotic,” she said, trying not to feel too gratified. People said she was strong in the Force, but she’d rarely felt that way; everything always seemed so difficult.
“The Force mirrors the galaxy,” he replied. “Someday, it will be different.”
She was pretty sure she didn’t want to know what his idea of different was. It had to be unlike hers, at least.
“Well,” she said brightly, “I don’t think I have any more of those in me today. They keep getting shorter and shorter.”
“It can be particularly draining,” said Anakin. “Get up, then. You have more practice to do. Maintain your connection to the Force—if you can.”
Prickling a little at this, she hung onto the Light Side for all she was worth, relieved to find it coiled warmly around her. She ran through the usual exercises: first running, climbing, and jumping, then returning to lift things and drop them, hold them immobile and launch them away. And lastly, when she was tired—unfair, but nobody had ever called him fair—Anakin handed over his lightsaber. Just holding it still sent a little trickle of comfort running through her. Losing didn’t matter; she loved this.
This time, he didn’t knock it away, but instead eventually broke through her defenses, holding his lightsaber at her throat and forcing her to drop the other one. But for the first time, instead of putting both away, he handed her the second lightsaber, the red one.
“Turn it on,” he said.
Uneasily, Lucy flicked the switch and watched the red blade materialize. It made the same sound, and she didn’t think colour should really matter, but it felt—different, somehow. There was no buzz of familiarity, of feeling that this was where she should be and what she should be doing. She quickly turned it off again and thrust the hilt back at him.
“Here. I like the other one better,” she said.
Anakin looked at her, then took the lightsaber and hooked it onto his belt.
“I have done the same things with both of them,” he said, a distinct note of warning in his voice.
“I can believe it,” said Lucy. “But the blue is … I don’t know. Comfortable. It fits my hand better, anyway.”
“You are becoming attuned to it,” he said. “How long did you carry it?”
“Every day for two years,” she told him. “It was useful, and—”
My legacy, she thought. That legacy had turned out darker than she could ever have guessed, and far more complex, but she was a Skywalker nevertheless. There might never be another; she couldn’t imagine having children. This strange blood would die with her.
“Father?” she interrupted herself. “I have a question.”
“You usually do,” said Anakin.
“Yes, well, there’s a lot people didn’t tell me,” she said.
Again, she felt a stirring of anger, but a certain relief, too.
“True.”
“When I was sick, Tisix took a sample of my blood,” said Lucy. “And it turned up as non-human. It was humanoid—obviously—but just outside the possible range of human genetics, or something like that. Mother was human, wasn’t she?”
Anakin fell silent. Then, after a good few seconds, he said,
“Yes. The irregularity comes from me.”
“Were the Alsarai—”
“Also human,” he said shortly.
Folding her arms, she asked, “Was it your father, then?” It occurred to her that he might not want to talk about that.
“I have no father,” said Anakin.
She gave a resigned nod. So it was that. She’d feel the same, in his circumstances.
“Okay. I understand.”
“I doubt that you do,” he replied. “I did not mean that some male I do not wish to acknowledge fathered me in slavery. My mother always said that there was no father, and I felt the truth of it.”
Lucy stared at him. “You just … showed up?”
“Apparently,” he said, aiming for indifference without quite achieving it. “The Jedi thought it meant—that hardly matters. But undoubtedly, the Force had something to do with it.”
“Right,” she said faintly. “The Force is in us? Not the way it connects everyone, but—it’s in our blood? Really?”
She couldn’t wrap her mind around it yet.
“Perhaps,” said Anakin. “Somehow or another, it caused us to be. That is all I know.”
“And that’s the reason my genetic reading was off?” She had never even remotely imagined this. “There’s something just … floating around our genes because of some magical interference that nobody can explain?”
“Yes. You need not concern yourself with it,” he said. “In fact, it is better if you ignore it.”
She all but choked. “You’ve just said that we’re basically demi-gods. I shouldn’t concern myself with that?”
“We are nothing of the kind,” said Anakin impatiently. “The Jedi believed I was chosen for something. Perhaps they were not wholly wrong—there is something we are meant to do, some destiny we must accomplish. I know what I believe it is. You will have to find an explanation for yourself.”
It was one thing to shrug off destiny as plain Lucy. It was quite another with the knowledge that some strange power had inscribed itself into her very genes. Was she meant for something? Or was it simply some bizarre quirk of the Force?—maybe it just did that sort of thing now and then. Who knew?
Lucy exhaled, trying to recover some sense of herself. It didn’t have to change anything; there was nothing present in her that had not always been present. She was the same Lucy she had always been.
Lucy Skywalker.
“If we’re done,” she said at last, “I think I’m going to try studying my book again.”
Anakin considered her, then said, “Go ahead.”
-
Lucy guessed that he suspected she wouldn’t actually go back to reading, but in fact, she marched straight to her bedroom, barely noticing the absence of the usual guards at her door. Then she sat on the edge of her bed and picked the book up, opening it to where she’d left off. But she’d barely slogged through the next sentence when her thoughts returned to the last revelation. Anakin had been formed by the Force? Nothing else made sense. But that didn’t make sense, either. He’d been created in order to become this—this suffering creature who inflicted untold suffering in turn? She cared for him, she truly did, but she couldn’t deny what he was.
My name is Anakin—
What did it mean for her? Was he right, and she was meant to share his fate? Or maybe she was just incidental to it, inheritor of his semi-human genes but nothing more. Or maybe—
She had no idea. Lucy uncurled one of her hands from the edges of the book and laid her fingers out on the page, staring at the blue veins under her skin. Just what was in there? Had Padmé known?
If so, she hadn’t cared. In that moment that Lucy saw, she just seemed utterly charmed. A founder of the Rebellion, charmed by the man who would become Darth Vader. But he’d been young then, just Lucy’s age. Hadn’t he said that he’d been like Lucy at her age? Whatever had turned him happened later.
It wouldn’t happen to her, she insisted to herself. But she had to be on her guard. Even now—especially now.
Lucy closed her eyes. Book or no book, she was tired. She wished she could just be Anakin and Padmé’s daughter, Leia and Han’s friend, without any of the rest of this, war and captivity and destiny. Yet she’d never want a quiet life, would she? Yoda was right about that; she’d always wanted more. Had Anakin? Everything talked as if he had. Maybe that was what had led him down this path.
She didn’t know. Right now, she felt like she didn’t know anything at all.
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