A/N: This is an AU featuring Owen Lars who contemplates his relationship to Vader and struggles with the task he is given by Obi-wan. For the purpose of this story, Obi-Wan does not stay on Tatooine after dropping off Luke as a baby. Instead, he decides to hide out on Alderaan.

I've watched all the movies as well as Clone Wars and Rebels. I might decide to add some things from Rebels, but the timelines likely wont match up as this takes place a few years before.

The Little Man

.o.o.o.o.o

With the desert suns settling over the horizon and the stifling blackness descending upon the world, the two farmers bid their mysterious guest farewell as he once again climbed the ramp of the Nubian yacht. Beneath his cowl, the stranger spared the farmers a final glance of... something. Sorrow or pity maybe. The grave tones in which he's spoken and his agonized expression all throughout the explanation made it seem as if he were burdened with the weight of the entire galaxy.

Yes, one would think the galaxy was in shambles and only the righteous Obi-wan Kenobi knew the secret of making it whole again. Hell, maybe he did. Maybe it was all the truth, far-fetched as it was.

Arrogant bastard, Owen mused, The galaxy didn't turn only for the Jedi. How can you come here and expect us to care what's happening up in the stars? The Jedi never put food upon my table, never harvested with me at the close of the season, never kept the raiders away from the collection tanks.

He looked to his wife. In one arm she held the baby, the child they'd been assured was the son of Anakin Skywalker. The other hand was pressed to her mouth in grief and horror, emotions Owen himself had refused to let take hold. As the buyers in Anchorhead often complained, he was nothing if not a skeptic, and Kenobi had spun a grand tale.

Blood is thicker than water, his father had always said. Owen would help raise this child, but not as a favor to some self-important Jedi. No, he would do it for the love he still bore Shmi Skywalker. Owen was not able to save her from the Tuskens, but by the suns he could provide a roof for her grandchild.

"Let's get inside, Beru." Owen said gently to his wife. She had not moved since the infant had been placed in her arms. She stood and stared at the spot of sand where the shuttle had lifted off.

"What are we going to do, Owen?" she whispered, utterly overwhelmed, possibly fearing for her own life and now that of their new charge.

"We are gonna go inside, Beru," he told her, rougher this time, as it were the most obvious thing. He could say nothing else.

.o.o.o.o.o.

The first few years were spent establishing this new "family" of theirs. Beru suggested they pretend the boy was their own. A surprise. An accident. Owen refused, not on the basis that they couldn't pass off the child as their own offspring, but because of the small fact that someone out there might just come looking for him. Despite all that Kenobi had said about the metaphorical "death" of Anakin Skywalker, the boy was no orphan. He had a father, regardless of whether or not the dregs of the Jedi wished to acknowledge it. Owen was determined not to discard this fact.

They boy grew quickly, and no sooner than his first words and first steps, did funny things begin to happen in his presence. Tantrums that cracked plates, items flinging themselves off the shelf, doors cycling open with the release untouched.

The kid had that Jedi blood, Owen supposed. He kept an eye on him like a womp rat near the power lines, treated him like one too. Owen had no love to spare for the child. He was a duty. Another tax to pay, forcing him and Beru back into the well of poverty they had only just climbed from. Tattooine was unforgiving like that. Owen was unwilling to open his mind to any sort of attachment, any sort of familiarity with the child. Better to maintain that cold indifference on the off-chance that he'd have to hand the kid over at blasterpoint. He could plead that he'd only done it under duress, because Sith be damned if he was expected to hold this child's life more important than his wife's and their farmstead. Generations of Lars had lived and died here, and Owen had no plans to disrupt the tradition.

And mind shut tight to any sentimentality, Owen was blind to what a Jedi's kid might just gain him.

It was the night of the most catastrophic raid since the one that took away his sweet and gentle step-mother. His property, like all the properties this side of the ridge were terribly vulnerable to threats from the Dune Sea, sandstorms and Tuskens alike. But the small valley just before the rise of the Jungland Wastes created a trap for the denser, cooler fronts that moved through, and it was no coincidence that Owen and his scant neighbors regularly collected larger harvests than those that lived nearer to Anchorhead or Mos Eisley.

If they don't raid, then the land don't pay, Kettle Lars, the farmstead's founder, had reportedly stated after purchasing the property and several slaves from the previous owner whom had tired of fending off the constant attacks.

This particular raid began at the second twilight, as they most often did. Still under the light of the second sun, the night security systems had yet to toggle on, but any droids or laborers were already safely tucked away inside.

Luke, still a small child, walking but yet incapable of coherent speech, had been agitated since dinner. Twice, Beru had lost track of him and found him in the garage. When they settled down for the night, the boy began to cry. It wasn't a whine for attention, rather it was frantic and frightened. The child was not given to crying, was more likely to get up and attempt to find what he wanted himself, and this puzzled both him and his wife. Beru was unable to soothe the boy and for a long while husband and wife lay side by side in their bed, listening to the yowling child in the next room.

Owen rose from the mattress, figuring that if he was unable to sleep then he could at least go repair the landspeeder's left thruster whilst the boy cried himself hoarse.

His tools were already scattered about the garage from where he'd given up earlier. Walking over to where he'd left the hydrospanner, he reached down to pick it up when he realized something wasn't right. The room was not as it ought to be, somehow too dark. Straightening, he looked over his shoulder to a darkened monitor that usually displayed a live feed of the vaporators upon the farmstead's perimeter. It was not off, only across the screen were the bold words: SIGNAL LOST.

Very strange. There seemed to be no damage to the wires coming into the console, and even if one camera had malfunctioned, the screen would continue to show the feed from the others. A glitch in the system, then? Upon running a diagnostic, Owen felt his face darken. The video lines had been severed and the system compromised. It could not be an accident. Working quickly, Owen booted up the auxiliary system and changed the input on the monitor to display feed from the backup cameras.

His body went cold when the silhouetted image of a Tusken sauntered across the focus of the lens. Other shapes shifted behind him, indicating that this was no curious wanderer out on his own. Owen swallowed, numb in that moment, but already knowing what it was he must do. When he found his legs once again, he fled the room and barreled into the courtyard pit to enter the tunnel that would take him to the power generator. He slammed his palm upon the alarm as he darted beyond the entrance. The klaxon was jarring, but Beru would hear it from the bedroom and immediately reach for her blaster riffle.

It was impossible to tell how far in the Tuskens had intruded, but in those numbers it would be difficult to fight them off with just himself and his wife. He would have to activate the failsafe, wherein the vaporators could be used as conduits to channel a powerful energy web between them. Any Tuskens within would be trapped and their bodies fried. Any outside would be repelled. By doing this, however, Owen would have to overload his own vaporators, and put them out of working condition for a week at least. As well, the massive amount of energy that the failsafe required would ensure the farmstead was without power for several days.

He would lose valuable collection time, but it was better than having his home overrun with Tuskens.

Overrides inputted, Owen stepped back and listened to the fizzy hum growing in pitch as would-be raiders met their doom.

The doors hissed open and Beru stepped into the room, little Luke upon one hip and her riffle in her hand. The boy was silent now. Awake, but no longer crying. Owen realized that he owed this child a debt, for what might have happened if he'd have gone to bed like any other night? He went to his wife and wrapped her in an embrace, enfolding the child along with her. He would never say it out loud, but an incident like this reminded him just how easy it would be to lose her. How easy it would be for his loyal, soft-spoken wife to suffer the same fate as Shmi Skywalker. They were so very alone out here, in the middle of nothing, surrounded by hostiles and the terrible heat of the suns and the sandblasting winds.

"It's over, Owen," Beru said soothingly when he held her for a long while. In the morning. the neighbors would come with food and a spare generator. Perhaps if the day was cool enough they would stay to help repair the damage, just as Owen had often done for them. The cycle was relentless.

"It's never over," he whispered against her neck.

.o.o.o.o.o.

The years slipped by and Owen had held onto a bizarre hope that the boy's father, or Kenobi would come back to claim him. It was not a desire to be rid of the child, rather, it was a desire not to fill a role in the boy's life when by all rights that duty belonged to another. It was a desire to not become attached to something that was not his own.

Though as time passed and no one came, Owen slowly felt himself slipping into that gap that had been left in the boy's life.

The questions came when Luke was old enough to realize that his aunt and uncle were not his parents. After a heated argument between Owen and Beru, they agreed to create a lie to feed the child. Owen's brother, Anakin had been a navigator on a spice freighter, he'd met his wife on Naboo, where they married. She died in childbirth. End of story, no embellishments.

"I don't like this, Beru. It doesn't feel right," Owen had said after they'd told the lie that first time. "A boy shouldn't grow up knowing only falsehoods about his father."

"It is for his own protection, Owen. You heard what Kenobi said. He..." she hesitated.

Anakin, Owen wished to supply.

"...Vader killed his own wife. That pretty Nubian girl."

I don't buy it. Not for one second. Owen refused to accept it in his mind. Skywalker had seemed a good kid during that singular, short visit just before the Clone Wars had broken out. Owen recalled when he'd first formed that opinion. They'd all been seated around the table, himself, Beru, Cliegg, the Nubian woman, and Skywalker.

"Where are you going?" Owen had asked when the boy stood suddenly.

"To find my mother," he'd answered sullenly, leaving the rest of them in awe. Had not Cliegg just recounted the story of how a party of thirty did not manage to keep their lives in a rescue attempt? Skywalker was one kid, what could he do out there alone?

But by the stars, he'd been serious, and when he'd returned with the body, Owen could not help feeling impressed by his duracrete resolve.

He'd been a bit prickly toward all of them, arrogant at times, but Owen had seen past all of it. He was a kid grieving for his mother, placing the blame partly upon Cliegg and his family for not ensuring her safety, and they'd all failed her, there was no doubt in that.

But the boy had also been jealous. Jealous of their family that he realized he was not part of. Nostalgic for his home, and angry at himself somewhere deep down for leaving it all behind.

Nonetheless, he'd had his heart in the right place. It was evident that he'd cared deeply for his mother. Also, he'd repaired the sensors on the third vaproator on the south ridge for no other reason than family. Any guy like that was alright in Owen's books. To backpedal on all his own conclusions would mean having to admit that he was no good at judging character. And Owen knew he'd always been a good judge of people.

That Kenobi Jedi had seemed a man of more complex thought. A politician in his core, with a life forged of sacrifices and compromises. A man like that was good at deluding himself, capable of making himself feel as if he fought for a noble cause long after it had stopped being noble. A man like that could spin a truth on its head whilst it still remained a truth.

It wasn't that such men were untrustworthy, only that you couldn't always take their words at face value. So it might be true that the Nubian girl was dead, maybe she was murdered, and maybe it had to do with her husband, but it couldn't possibly be the whole story. It was like being told to get in a speeder and being assured it would drive, even though you held the ignition coil in your hand.

Luke was in the next room, sitting on the rug below the dinner table and pushing around one of his toys, a model T-16 Skyhopper that Owen had purchased in Anchorhead. Fully engrossed in his own, imaginative world, the boy made small zooming noises as he forced the toy into tight turns limited only by the bending of his wrist.

Owen watched him and wondered what has possessed him to buy a toy Skyhopper. If he'd been smart he would have bought a toy water hauler or a hydraulic drill. Rather than filling the boy's head with a desire for shooting and aerial dogfights he should demonstrate the joys of working on the farm, such as using a rover to haul gravel and drainage hardware to distant vaporators.

He sighed to himself, already knowing that the poor kid would never take to farming, but that it would be his job to force him into it.