Title: "Presque Vu"
Rating: PG
Characters: Luke Skywalker, Threepio, others
Timeframe: A few years post-RotJ
Keywords: Luke, Jedi, introspection, character study, Tatooine

Presque vu: [F., nearly seen] a feeling that you are on the edge of grasping something very, very important.

Summary: Luke, Vader's legacy, and what remains of the Jedi Order.

I.

The Qanar who'd led him into the forest fluted something, waving long fingers as Luke paused. Luke looked at Threepio, who'd fallen behind, tangled in the soft drooping branches of the shaded green-violet vegetation.

The Qanar spoke again.

"Threepio," Luke said.

"Master Luke!" Threepio always sounded grateful to be addressed, Luke thought; strange, considering the places, ill-suited to his clumsy design, he was forced to follow his more flexible counterparts. The droid pushed through the last of the hanging vegetation, tilting his golden head as he stopped attentively by Luke.

Luke turned his attention to the Qanar. After a moment, Threepio said, "Oh!" and turned, addressing the Qanar in flute-like tones. The alien – though, it occurred to Luke, this was his world, so surely Luke was the alien here? – seemed to be listening to Threepio, head tilted forward, but Luke thought there was some amusement in his body language. An indulgence on Luke's part, probably; what did he know about Qanar expressions? Even their names were unpronounceable to him.

"I believe he wants you to continue on," Threepio said.

"You believe?" Luke queried. Threepio was prone to hyperbole in other areas, but in translation he was usually precise.

Threepio grew flustered. "As I told you, Master Luke, there are significant language differences between cultural groups of the Qanar, and much of their communication is by means other than verbal…"

"It's fine, Threepio." Luke looked at the Qanar, who tilted his head forward, small dark eyes on Luke. He said something, soft amid the rustling sound of the leaves around them.

Threepio answered, and the Qanar spoke again, and then turned and regarded the shadowed forest.

"He will not continue any further," Threepio said. "I believe this may be something of a sacred space within their belief system. Or perhaps a prohibited area."

"But it's all right for me to go on?"

Threepio turned to the Qanar, turned back to Luke. "His words seem to indicate so."

The Qanar, by all human standards, seem quite at ease. His intricately layered clothing, light shades of stream-gauze, rippled in the wind. Luke caught his eye, nodded. The Qanar tilted his head. From what Luke had observed, this seemed to be a positive gesture.

He turned and set off toward the sheltered grove he could make out through close-growing stands of vegetation. There was an outcropping of rock in the small clearing, before which lay an area carpeted by soft, low-growing plantlife that sank and retained the imprint of his boots.

He paused, taking a moment to breathe in the leaf-rot scent of the vegetation. Something wisped under that scent, a sensation half-alive, half-remembered. For a brief instant, less time than it took to blink, he saw dead earth instead of forest, bodies instead of ground-clinging vines, a burnt sky. Blood against the rock.

He wondered how old the forest he stood in was. His familiarity with such terrain was limited; it still felt a little alien to him, so much life, sucking in moisture. But this forest had none of the density and age of the forest on Endor's moon, or of Dagobah's swamps. He guessed it to be only a few decades old, grown on the bones of an older landscape. Fed on bodies strewn like dirt.

He crouched in the soft pale ground-covering, staring at the rock, looking for bloodstains long since worn away by wind and rain. Had death been short, sudden, a gasp and a flare, or was it long, hunted and lingering?

Luke stood and returned to Threepio and the Qanar. Threepio waited, patiently attentive. The Qanar turned as Luke approached, regarding him with filming eyes. He fluted something, low and long.

"What?" Luke said, caught in the emotion in the voice.

"I – I'm not certain, Master Luke, I can't seem to – " Threepio was flustered again.

"Never mind," Luke said. He realised it was more song than words, and remembered the Qanar were empathetic. For the first time, he understood that it didn't enhance their communication, it formed the basis of it; everything else wove in and around.

He wondered if they were sensitive to the history of the grove, whether they felt the burnt-in scar of the unknown Jedi's last moments. It was only a faint whisper now, but perhaps it was stronger, once.

He wondered if they knew what death felt like the way he did. Maybe that distant cry long in the past only called to him because he'd known so much death, like to like.

As he returned his gaze to his Qanar guide, he wondered, uneasily, what his emotional state might be telling the Qanar, and whether the Qanar understood him far better than he could understand their attempts at conversation. Luke habitually held himself closed to stray emotional impressions from others, both out of courtesy and for self-preservation; without such safeties the emotional impressions could be overwhelming and confusing, melding with his own feelings until it was difficult to distinguish what was truly his own. He had no idea if it was even possible to prevent the flow in the opposite direction, to stop his own feelings from being detected by another with Force talent or high-developed empathetic skills.

The Qanar blinked, eyelids coming together vertically. He fluted something in a different tone. "He says ghosts are everywhere," Threepio said. After a moment, Threepio amended, "I believe he says that. Perhaps – the dead? Are alive? I'm afraid I don't understand. The structure is imprecise…"

The Qanar leaned forward, looking at Luke, then turned and led the way out of the forest.

II.

The cabin was located at the foot of a mountain, far away from the bedraggled town where Beltite natives ducked their chins and called him "Officer," avoiding eye contact. He had tried to explain he wasn't Imperial, but news of the New Republic had barely penetrated this far out. Their grasp of Basic was better than the few muttered responses he'd been able to cajole from them would indicate, he suspected.

His breath fogged in the air as he came to a stop before the lone building, hunched forlornly under the height of the looming mountain. It was in a sorry state. More so than the dry, cold air would suggest. There was violence in the splintered rough wooden posts, in the charred dirt littering the broken doorway. It was overkill from an Imperial perspective, lacking methodical focus. Luke suddenly saw the lowered eyes of the natives in a different light. Guilt had a long memory. What lengths would they traverse to prevent Imperial wrath falling upon them as Jedi sympathisers?

His boots crunched on the frost-covered ground as he crossed to the cabin, ducking through the ruined doorway. Inside, the signs of violence were plainer, and desperation hung on the air. He'd seen devastation with intent, and this wasn't it. This was panic and fear and misdirected hate. A fire had been lit at some point, but had burned itself out. The blackened walls and floor and faint, old acridness in the air set his hair on end for reasons entirely personal.

Had the Jedi who had lived here, died here as well? He didn't think so. The cabin was well-situated – not by chance, he thought – and the Jedi who had lived here would have had warning of the approach of a group such as perpetrated this violence. Unless the Jedi was very old or very young he or she should have been able to flee.

She, Luke thought, for no reason he could name in words, as he touched a charred scrap of what must have been fabric at some point, and it fell to ash. It was a female Jedi who lived here, who inhabited this space for a while, possibly until her death.

He had no idea if it was the Force telling him that, or if it was those personal reasons again. Truth or not, did it matter?

He set about searching for remains – any remains – amongst the ruin. The faint light filtered through the thick sky-haze outside dimmed to night as he sorted through the broken items, room by room, his fingers becoming coated in ash and dust.

He stilled as he lifted aside a part of a broken table in the second, smaller room, and found a child's toy, a roughly-made soft doll. It was partly burned, its face half blackened, its smile askew.

He picked it up carefully. He had wondered, in the past, why more of the Jedi who escaped the initial purges had not settled into communities instead of remaining separate as almost all seemed to have done. Why they hadn't partnered, had children. Perhaps they'd stayed true to the code of the Jedi Order, if such a code had existed and if it had covered families and children. Perhaps they felt it would not be fair to put innocents at risk through association. Perhaps they didn't wish to bring children into a galaxy they must have seen as hopelessly darkened and diminished.

Perhaps this toy meant there was one Jedi who had chosen differently. Or perhaps it was a cherished remnant of the Jedi's own childhood – maybe far away, or maybe not so many years ago – somehow retained through the horror of being forced to flee the destruction all she had known and loved.

He wondered, if there had been a child, what had become of that boy or girl. Killed with his or her mother as the progeny of a tainted line? (By Vader, probably; Luke had over the past few years lost all innocence when it came to what his father had been capable of). Fostered somewhere secretly?

He replaced the doll gently, and continued his search. It was dark enough to be deep night when he finished, though the hours of sunlight were so short he couldn't be sure of the true time on the planet. He found some items of potential utility: a datapad, currently inoperable, but perhaps with salvageable information somewhere in its banks; a shattered crystal and some broken tool parts he tentatively recognised, but would need to look at in better light; a few smaller items which didn't seem to be wholly ruined.

It was too dark to attempt to find his way back down the slopes and through the skeleton forests, but he didn't want to stay a moment longer than he had to in the ruins of what had been a home once, however humble and temporary, surrounded by the stench of char, making the back of his throat ache. He went into the cold air outside, found a sheltered area in the darkness, and pulled a cloak and blanket from his pack. He lit a fire against the cold and any predators that might chance to wander his way, but turned his face away from the smoke.

When he slept, he dreamt of silence, deep, bone-aching silence, an emptiness that stretched and consumed, absence gnawing at the edges of the mind. For him it was a normal state, a natural thing, accepted, but in the dream he caught the edges of something else that could have been, that once was. It was bright and muted and strong, ten thousand voices at the borders of thought, spread across the galaxy; a welcome warmth at the back of his mind, a joining and a belonging only ever a breath away. He woke befuddled, infinitely bereft, but couldn't track the threads of dream as they slipped away.

The fire was guttering, so he fed it some more of the tinder he'd gathered earlier. It was still dark. His eyes felt gritty with lack of sleep and with the unclean air. The sky was black; no stars had been visible here for many years. He coughed to clear his throat, and watched the fire flicker.

He found his thoughts turning to his mother as he sat in the cold. He wondered if she had known his father as Anakin, Jedi Knight and hero of the Clone Wars, or if she had only known him as Vader. If she'd loved him, been loved in return. If she'd seen the malformed parts of his soul that would turn him to ruin and to darkness. If she'd hated him in the end.

What she had thought of Luke.

He had no memory of her. His father had always been there, even in his absence, words to fill the spaces, and where there were gaps Luke had been able embellish the pieces Beru and Owen had given him to make a complete picture in his own mind. Ben's explanations were easy to accept because they confirmed the image he'd built, the idea of a man who was great and powerful and unusual. His mother had only ever been silence.

Leia spoke of their mother as kindness and gentleness and sadness. Her eyes softened when she spoke her memories, for they were plainly cherished things. She hadn't understood Luke's reluctance to share them, anymore than he could really justify it to himself. He'd allowed himself to be persuaded a few years ago, and Leia had opened her thoughts to him tentatively. Through the sheen of her shifting thoughts and feelings, tangled in scent-memory and sensation-layered meaning that echoed faintly through Leia's perception, he'd finally glimpsed a woman dark-haired, like Leia, with dark eyes and a modulated voice. Leia's love and grief were threaded through the memory, coiling around the woman, but Luke –

Luke felt nothing, himself. No instant connection, as there had been with his father, with Leia. No sense of yes, this is true. Just a distant woman with pain in her eyes.

It was then that he first formed the notion that the woman was Leia's adoptive mother, Bail Organa's wife. It was a relief when the idea occurred to him, because the alternative was something he'd always dreaded. Had his mother looked at the child he'd been and feared one day seeing Anakin, seeing Vader? Had she seen spent dreams, lost hope, something darker and crueller? The saying was 'father's son', not 'father's daughter', veracity unsound but resonance certain. That legacy might have been a curse unbearable in her eyes.

He didn't tell Leia of his suspicion. Whether she had a memory of their birth mother, or thought she did; it didn't really matter, and he didn't have the right to take it away from her, either way.

The darkness around him was lightening, the edges of the sky touched with a grey-brown haze. He threw dirt across the fire, dousing it, and rose.

Before he left, he re-entered the cabin a last time, knelt and picked up the burned doll. He put it with the other items he'd salvaged, and left without looking back.

III.

Mos Espa had been the capital of Tatooine in the days of the Republic, when the Hutts ruled the planet unchallenged. After Tatooine was absorbed into the Empire, Mos Espa's prosperity diminished. Mos Eisley, with its larger space port, became the main focus of trade.

This much Luke knew from the scattered records he'd been able to find through the HoloNet. He'd never been to Mos Espa in his youth on Tatooine, and knew very little about it. Local history in the area around Anchorhead had been passed orally, and concerned local families only; few on Tatooine had energy to spare for greater detail.

His first impression of Mos Espa, then, was curiously disjointed, two pictures overlain. By Tatooine standards, it was a large city, almost the size of Mos Eisley, which had always intimidated him on his few visits as a boy. By galactic standards, it was barely a town, hopelessly unsophisticated, dusty ancient streets and shambling awnings over worn buildings.

A laborious HoloNet search he'd recently completed had finally turned up reference to his father as a child, competing in Mos Espa in a podraces. The partial source he had located indicated Anakin Skywalker lived locally, and was something of a hero for winning a competition few humans ever survived.

Luke tried to imagine his father as a child, and failed completely. Had he been happy here? Had he been restless, like Luke had been as a boy? Had he known love as a child, been raised in a caring family? Luke worried about the podracing, because what parent would allow a child to enter a race that killed most of its competitors? Perhaps he had been abused. Neglected, mistreated, abandoned. Perhaps he'd had no family, lived out of the streets and dumpsters. Perhaps he was an orphan.

Luke traipsed through the dusty streets, feeling his body fall back into the familiar posture of a Tatooine farm hand: shoulders a little hunched to fend off the heat, head bent slightly. Personal space was granted widely between strangers on Tatooine, but narrowly amongst family: perhaps a by-product of the space and emptiness everywhere around. Despite the clothes that subtly marked him as strange, as an offworlder, few people gave him a second glance.

The buildings were all near-identical with the familiarity of Tatooine sandstone architecture, designed for maximum ventilation. He crossed through the market area, almost deserted in the heat of the afternoon. Stallholders ignored him, sitting gossiping together in the filmy shade of tattered awnings. Luke stopped to examine some beadwork, thinking of Leia. After a few minutes, the stallholder wandered over, extended an offer to barter for the piece Luke was looking at. Luke declined, and the stallholder went back to his seat. A man in merchant garb reminiscent of Mid Rim worlds entered the street, and the marketholders came to attention, noisily calling offerings of their wares. Luke took the opportunity to engage the stallholder over a rock pendant he'd chosen, the stallkeeper eager to close the transaction quickly and flag down the potentially prosperous offworlder. Luke tucked the pendant into his worn cloak, and continued.

Sections of the town were desolate, inhabited by dust and the desperate. Luke walked through them as the first sun sank across the horizon. He glimpsed fires in some of the crumbling buildings, smelled food and smoke and heard lifted voices, a woman singing a lullaby in a dialect of Huttese. Luke halted in the shadows, feeling like a trespasser. This wasn't his place. It wasn't his world, anymore, if it ever had been.

He made his way to the outskirts, where the darkness was black and cold, and winds blew up from the Wastes. The stars were as bright as he'd forgotten they could be; standing stark against sky, ribbons of light set in darkness, looking down over the desert.

He wondered what he'd hoped to find here. Some distant vestige of his father? A memory of the child, the man, that had been, before Vader was born? Something he could reclaim from the destruction and the horror he'd uncovered over recent months, the knowledge he could never unlearn, acts of evil that he could never redeem or undo?

There was something irrevocable in the loss of the Jedi, something that echoed all the suffering inflicted across the galaxy in the name of the Empire, a cause that his father had upheld and preserved. The Jedi had died in violence, murdered and betrayed, unmourned. No public outcry met their fate. The galaxy let its collective gaze be guided away, complicit out of fear, just as it later would with the destruction of Alderaan. This was the purpose his father had committed himself to.

Luke wondered, if his mother was alive still, if it would be something he could speak to her about. He'd believed in his father, come to love him, but still struggled to reconcile Anakin Skywalker with the evil of Vader. He'd not fully understood it during the war; Vader's darkness had been present and real, vast and powerful, but in many ways indirect. Facing the remnants of what his father had helped to wreak against individual Jedi, people he had once fought beside, was another thing entirely.

Leia, now, he couldn't possibly speak to Leia. Leia seemed to strive to remind him of the evils Vader had committed. She was subtle, so subtle he almost wondered if she was unaware of it, but she would find a way to mention genocides she'd heard about in the senate as a girl. Slavery of non-humans. Casual killings and torture. She seemed to think he didn't comprehend what Vader had done, as though his childhood in the wastelands of the galaxy had sheltered him from the true and unrelenting nature of Vader's crimes.

He'd had a nightmare, recurring – not often, only once in a two-week period or over the course of a month. In it he saw his father, and knew he was dead, but in the nightmare, his afterlife was not as Anakin but as Vader, clad in evil and darkness, writhing and tormented. Luke was sure in the nightmare that his trust had been misplaced, that his father had fallen short in the end, been less than Luke hoped, unable to make that final step. He'd saved Luke, saved the galaxy, but there was so much more he had done in those long years as Vader, so many vanities and cruelties, both casual and calculated. He told himself that there had been a core of goodness in his father, shining like a beacon by the end; he had done evil, but he'd done good as well, and sacrificed himself to right the horrors he had helped create. He told himself all that. Still, the nightmare continued to unsettle him.

Sometimes he dreamt of his mother, as well. She was a shadowy figure, giver of life, familiar in traits and inheritance, but in all other respects utterly unknown. She was lover to Vader, a man who would be murderer of thousands, whose name would be synonymous with terror and cruelty. She was always distant, neither claiming nor claimed, in his dreams, and he was afraid to reach closer for fear of what would be revealed.

How much did she see, he wondered, and what blindnesses had she borne, knowingly or otherwise? What was she to him, to Anakin? To Vader? Did she love, and have it betrayed? Was she another of Vader's victims, hating the monster in the mask? Would she curse the son from her body for loving and redeeming someone who had hurt her and worse?

Luke wished he knew. In other ways, he dreaded ever learning the truth, for fear the answer would be more terrible than the question.

He imagined her occasionally as someone who would understand what he sought to do, someone who might understand his doubts and his struggles. Who could perhaps tell him about the man his father had been once, the man who Obi-Wan fought beside and who she had loved (because she did love him, in this world Luke wished was real). She would give Luke a memory beyond the death and destruction that kept mounting up beside the small, precious and flickeringly brief time he'd had with his father. She could reassure him that he wasn't mistaken or childish or wrong about his father, that it wasn't an evil thing he did in loving him. She would be a person with whom he could speak of Anakin Skywalker openly, without causing pain.

He felt selfish, then, because he was reducing this woman, his mother, to a sliver centred wholly around Vader. It was unfair, for she must have had her own accomplishments and flaws and complexities, and, if, as was possible, she had somehow been a victim of Vader, it was worse than unfair and deeper than cruel to turn the breadth of her life into a memory of that man.

He wondered for a moment, almost bitterly, if his fascination with his father instead of his mother from a young age was something Ben had encouraged, like he'd teased out and played on Luke's curiosity about his father on the journey from Tatooine in the Millennium Falcon. Luke marked the thought as ridiculous, and set it aside; it had been his aunt and uncle who raised him, not Ben, and they wouldn't have cared about galactic destiny and the balance of light and dark, about shaping him into someone who could defeat Vader. They had cared about survival, and the next harvest, and him, and each other.

A shivering howl sounded from somewhere out in the darkness. A krayt dragon deep in the waste, probably – their calls could travel over great distances. The wind whipped up a burst of sand, and Luke winced and turned his face away. The smell on the air was indefinably that of Tatooine: ancient, dry, deep with shadows. The underlying edge of smoke was, he was certain, purely a product of his imagination. He gathered his cloak and stood.

He found a cantina on the edge of Mos Espa's small spaceport, drank a few glasses of watery ale while noise hummed around him, then slid a credit chit across the bar and climbed down the narrow stairs at the back of the cantina. He chose a room, and fell across the bed fully clothed. The bedcovers were banthahide, rough against his worn cloak, scratchy under his palm.

He dreamt confusing dreams, a young man with wild hair and burning eyes he was sure he knew, but didn't; a boy who seemed familiar. Then he realised the boy was himself as a child, but in another moment wasn't sure. He dreamt of Jedi fighting and dying, hunted and pursued, men and women and children, human and non-human. He dreamt of suspension in fear and darkness, strange and numb, reaching to feel or find anything. He dreamt rage with texture, spilling and spinning and burning, rage the likes of which he'd only brushed against in his own experience. He recognised it instinctively, and was distressed, pulling away, tumbling outward. He dreamt a flicker of warmth he felt he should recognise, dreamt of the desert, dreamt of fire.

He'd been lost in a sandstorm once as a child, an event known more through the stories of others than through his own recollection, which had been confused and incomplete. The sheer presence of the storm had swallowed everything, leaving snatches of memory adrift: sand hurtling like burning needles against his skin, the taste of dust in his mouth. The sensation of his life being worth nothing in that vast impersonal force of blindness and violence and undirected fury.

The dream took him there again, lost and buffeted, powerlessness magnified tenfold. There was hurtling sensation, nothing he could grasp or hold. Direction was meaningless. He stumbled, and suddenly was falling, the reflection of lights plummeting past, shadows all around.

Then the warmth from before brushed him again. It was a familiar sense, like a hand over his, something he should know, warm brown with dark edges, and a flicker he felt would be his name, if it wasn't in a dream and could be spoken.

Luke woke thrashing, fell off the narrow bed, and cursed as he rolled over on the dusty floor in the dimness of the room. "Leia," he said, for no reason at all, and lay back, rubbing his hands over his face, pushing sleep from his mind. His hair was tousled and sweaty, his face stiff and itchy with stubble.

It was mid-morning when he emerged through the cantina, the heat outside hitting him as an almost tangible blow. He tugged his clothing to a semblance of order and set off at random.

He'd decided at some point the previous night that he should treat this like he would any other Jedi. He started conversations with some of the people in the street, and in the market area, a couple of the stallholders, leading in to the standard questions. Had they known of anyone unusual living in the area in the past few decades? Heard any stories of strange powers or abnormal events? Flurries of unexplained Imperial activity focussing on a particular location? Here, unlike in other places, he added one question: ever heard of a local named Anakin, years ago?

Some of them dismissed him. Others laughed and called it an old story, the boy who won the podrace no human could ever survive. One man told him seriously of how he knew Anakin, and in fact, he could sell Luke this broken servo that had belonged to him before he'd made it big in the speeder business selling remodelled swoops. Luke declined.

Somewhat dejected, Luke stopped at one of the side-stalls to purchase gort, bantha meat wrapped in hardened gruel. It reminded him of his aunt, though her steaks, made on special occasions when the harvest was favourable, had been better.

There was a young woman his age by the stall, a child beside her. Luke smiled at her by habit. She returned it warmly. He stepped closer, and she said, "Enjoying that?"

"Definitely," Luke said.

She made a face. "No need to be polite."

"No, honestly." Luke gestured with the gort. "I've been away, and I missed Tatooine food. Meals in the rest of the galaxy have far too much flavour."

She smiled. She was from moisture farming stock, Luke guessed, judging by the beige tunic and dark skirt she wore. The small boy with her peered up at Luke. They were both dark-haired, skin tanned from the suns. He realised she was about his age. If he'd been the nephew Owen had wanted him to be, stayed on Tatooine and taken over the farm, he would have been married by now, probably with children. He might even have been standing by a stall somewhere, son or daughter in tow, bored as he waited for his order to be wrapped, desperate enough for something out of the ordinary to initiate conversation with a rumpled stranger.

The woman tilted her head. "I thought you might have been an offworlder," she said. "But it's usually easier to tell. You act like a local."

"Mom," said the boy. She glanced down.

"From over Anchorhead way, originally," Luke said. "But I have been offworld for a few years." He paused, then forged on. "I've been trying to find information on a local who lived here years ago, a boy who was supposed to have won a podrace…"

"Oh, you mean Anakin Skywalker?" She seemed amused. "I always thought he was a myth the Freed told each other."

"The Freed?"

"Ex-slaves," she said. "He was supposed to have been a slave boy who won the Boonta Eve Classic and was released. I think the Skywalker part was an addition after Luke Skywalker became so well-known. You know how stories pick up bits and pieces."

"Mm," Luke said. He carefully wrapped the gort and tucked it away, then rubbed his fingers on the edge of his cloak. "Slavery – under the Hutts?"

"That's right," she said.

"Mom," the boy said. "He's Luke Skywalker."

Luke looked down at him, startled. His mother did the same, her expression resigned. "Hush, trycka," she said.

"He is, though."

"Ssh, Tren."

"Aren't you?"

"Don't bother the man."

Luke rubbed his head. "Actually, I am."

The woman looked up at him sharply. The boy said, "Told you. I saw pictures in my book. Have you killed lots of Imperials?"

Luke blinked at him, taken aback.

The woman was looking at him. "You're Luke Skywalker?" she said, clearly disbelieving.

"Yes."

"Shouldn't you have a lightsaber?"

Luke pulled back the fall of his cloak, displaying the hilt he'd tucked away.

"Can I see it?" The boy was bouncing on his heels.

Luke eyed him, and let the cloak fall back. "I don't think so."

The woman, meanwhile, was still looking at him, a growing self-consciousness overtaking the wariness in her eyes. "Oh," she said. "You're not what I would have expected."

"I get that," Luke said. The awkwardness factor, as Han would put it, was reaching critical. He gave them both a nod. "Nice to meet you," he said. "And thank you for sharing what you know."

"Wait." The woman's voice was intent, and he halted. She crooked her head, self-consciousness fading. "I thought you'd be older, you see, someone intimidating. You seem like someone who might have faltered, once in a while. A little bit human."

"Entirely human," Luke said.

She smiled, then opened her hands. "Why are you back here? What are you looking for?"

"For – Anakin Skywalker," Luke said. He caught himself, puzzled, and said, "Information on Anakin Skywalker."

"Is…" She paused. "Was he your father?"

"Yes," Luke said. "He was… a Jedi. During the Clone Wars. He was killed by…" He stopped as he heard Ben's voice layered over his own. Truth from a certain point of view, Ben had said, and Luke believed that Ben meant that. From his perspective, he had never lied, not once, not to Luke and not to himself. He'd loved Anakin Skywalker, fought with him and beside him, and Anakin had died. Vader was a separate creature, a thing of machinery and parts, without a soul.

The question was whether Luke accepted that view as his own, and it was really no question at all. Luke had chosen years ago to reject Ben's view, Ben's and Yoda's, and follow his own instincts. Not theirs, not Leia's.

"My father became Darth Vader," he said. "He fell to the dark side."

The woman lifted her eyebrows. "Oh," she said, her face changing again.

"Anakin Skywalker is Darth Vader?" the boy said. "But they're two different people."

Luke looked at him, then looked across the sandy street, at the eye-watering blue of the sky. "No," he said. "They were the same person."

The woman eyed him. "So – you're Darth Vader's son?" She appeared troubled. "That must present you with some… challenges."

"More so while he was alive," Luke said. He rubbed at a fraying patch on his cloak. "He wasn't wholly evil. People think of Vader as this creature… some kind of embodiment of military power and oppression. He was only a man, though. Someone who made bad decisions, and some good ones. He always felt to me like someone trapped somewhere terrible, trying to escape. Like his greatest victim was himself."

He paused, catching the look on her face, the fascination in the boy's expression. After a moment, he added uncertainly, "I don't know, though. He did do some horrible things. Maybe I shouldn't say that."

"It's hard to imagine," the woman said vaguely. She eyed him, up and down. A hot wind blew from the north, whipping the sand around their legs. "Aren't you afraid?" she said lowly. "That it might take you too?"

Luke looked at her a moment, disturbed. "Darkness isn't a disease," he said. "It's a product of choice. Like any evil."

"But someone with your abilities," she said. "And your father's. You have power that others lack."

"So did the Jedi of the Republic," Luke pointed out. "And they were a positive force in the galaxy for millennia. They fought the corruption of the Empire until their last breath, even as they were hunted."

"Perhaps," the woman said. "Now it's you, though."

"Have you got any other weapons?" her son said. "Can you do tricks?"

"I hope you always choose wisely," the woman said. It sounded like a warning, almost, or some bizarre ritual blessing. Luke wondered whether to thank her, or to confess he hoped that as well. He said nothing, and she nodded to him, taking her son by the hand and leading him across the street.

Luke sighed as they left, rubbing the back of his neck. He'd hoped – he didn't know what he'd hoped. Maybe he'd spent too long in the company of ghosts lately.

He stayed another night, but as he walked through the darkened streets of Mos Espa, he found no new insights into his father. He wasn't even sure what he was looking for. He usually searched for knowledge, some residue of the old Jedi Order, anything that could help him understand his path. This was something else, something personal, a search for answers to a question he wasn't sure how to form.

Maybe Anakin Skywalker had been born here. Perhaps he'd come as an infant. He may have run through the streets as a child, he may have risked his life racing pods, he may have met a Jedi – met Obi-Wan? – and burned the ground as he left this place heading out into the galaxy. Perhaps he left as an innocent, out into a galaxy that would change him irrevocably, or perhaps he left as a child with darknesses and shadows that would deepen with time.

The word slave kept returning to him, prickling and burning like the midday suns' light on exposed skin. There had never been slavery in the Anchorhead region, but he'd known it had existed in other parts of Tatooine before being outlawed around the time of his birth. His uncle, normally reserved in most things not touching on Luke's idling habits or the upkeep of the farm, was vehement in his condemnation of the practice. Luke could still remember the quiet, frightening force of his uncle's anger when Huff Darklighter had suggested alien slaves as a solution to seasonal shortages, and Luke had only been ten or eleven at the time.

He wondered what effect it would have on a child to be exposed to that depth of careless and profound evil on so direct, intimate a level, and what distorted value of ownership and possession, of power and its absence, it would stain the mind with. What kind of hurt it would inflict and how those hurts might transform.

He'd seen himself how it had marked Chewbacca. The Wookiee never spoke about his time in slavery, but he had old injuries that spoke wordlessly of the kind of violence that had been inflicted upon him. As did his furious response to any attempt to curtail his freedom or to belittle him.

The thought of a child being subject to that enforced dissolution of freedom and identity was particularly horrifying. Luke opened and closed his hands. His anger, for the moment, was frivolous, useless; even dangerous. Evils done in the past, he couldn't control. And the slavery that still occurred in the galaxy was best fought through the new government, removing the disease, not its individual spores and symptoms.

Anger and helplessness over damage inflicted on his father as a child wouldn't bring Luke any closer to him, either. He closed his eyes.

In the morning, he hired a speeder and supplies and journeyed out to the hut that Ben had lived in, avoiding the Lars homestead along the way.

A thick layer of sand had settled across the floor of Ben's hut, blown in through the partially-open door. Jawas had been inside, judging by the gaps where a processor and a water converter had stood. Luke walked through at random. He'd searched for useful artifacts here years ago, and had found little: some tools Ben had adapted for repair work, fine enough to be used for a lightsaber; a datapad with basic information on lightsaber construction and maintenance and a few other skills. There was surprisingly little of Ben as a man or as a Jedi in this space. Even his presence was diffuse, suggesting a hint of sorrow every now and then, a weariness, a great and implacable strength. The sensations were old and deep, but were difficult for Luke to properly pin down, like a story told in a language he barely understood.

Luke sat in the dimness in the hovel from which Ben had watched over him. He felt no great powerful answer, no solution to the problems that plagued him. Just the sound of the wind outside, and the faint noises of the building settling in the heat.

The answer, he supposed, was what it always had been: no epiphanies, just the truth. He could honour the Jedi who had died for their beliefs by living those same beliefs himself. The new order he would somehow, someday create would be their legacy, rather than the death and destruction that had been their recompense for devoted lives of sacrifice and service. And in some way, he thought, it would honour his father, too. If Vader – Anakin – his father – had not given his life for Luke's, the Jedi would be gone. Luke had to balance that sacrifice, that great and shining redemption, against the atrocities that had come before it; the darkness couldn't win out, he believed, because he had to believe so.

He also believed he had the right to mourn his father, whatever others thought. Perhaps one day he would be able to do so without dissembling, but it didn't matter if he couldn't. Grief was a private thing.

He was perhaps the only person in the galaxy who could mourn both the Jedi, collectively and individually, along with the man who had betrayed them.

He had thought to spend the night in Ben's old hut, but after an hour there, decided to leave. There was nothing for him, and Ben had been more than that humble abode in seclusion.

Luke closed the door after him, pulling it shut against the dirt. He drew a breath that tasted of burnt sand and heat and loneliness, and crossed to his speeder.

His search for information on the Jedi could continue, and would, but for now, he missed Han and Leia.

Luke set course for Mos Eisley, with her spaceport, and her promise of a way home.

-end-