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Chapter Text

Ben hadn’t always been happy with his situation at uncle Luke’s Jedi Academy. The students would point and whisper at him no matter what his uncle did to diffuse it. As Luke had explained, children were wont to being children and Ben had the misfortune of being too mature for his years. Mature enough to notice it and resent it. He was different and being different was a way to get unwanted attention.

Excursions were one of the few times Ben could float away from the other students and pretend, just for a little while, that they weren’t so petty and obstructive. This one was close yet far from home. Ben couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but there was something wrong about this place. One of their youngest found a vent in one of the side laundries that led to a basement. The basement in turn had flights of poorly maintained, crumbling stone stairs. Naturally, the students and their master set about repairing those before they made the descent into the caverns beneath their home.

Then in they went. Down and down, spiralling the whole way. Artoo was logging the whole time and his depth counter was plummeting. Ben really wasn’t looking forward to heading back up, but at least everyone had packed appropriate supplies and a notice of their location was left with Ben’s mother.

Ben’s mother who never knew what to say and that only caused another surge of resentment. His uncle was almost the same… but at the same time he wasn’t the same at all. Luke had a Sith Lord for a father and Ben had one for a grandfather. He had to know what it was like, right? To try to work out why their ancestor had been a Sith? To know what made it happen? To find the cause? Ben’s mother couldn’t care less about Anakin Skywalker and his uncle’s sad smiles spoke of nothing but pain.

But why was there pain? Why did no one talk about him? He was a war hero in the Clone Wars! He saved countless lives. Did being a Sith Lord really undo all of that work? Undo all of the lives saved? His mother and uncle had exchanged a terse look between each other when Ben had asked these questions.

“We don’t know, Ben.” Luke had been the one to answer. “Your grandfather was erased from history by the Empire as both Anakin Skywalker and Darth Vader. How he went from being a war hero to a war criminal isn’t an answer we have on the records.” At least Luke wasn’t lying about his lack of knowledge. It was well known that Luke’s upbringing hadn’t exactly fostered a deep interest in library and archive learning and that was years lost of valuable time. It also meant many archives had ceased to be by the time he had those skills.

Ben had been shattered anyway. “You… you never asked him?” Never asked his own father something that important? How could he not?

“Father was never on speaking terms with your mother and he was only on speaking terms with me not long before his death,” Luke sighed while Ben’s mother stood to the side and nodded, half in the shadows. “There wasn’t even any time to find out where mother was buried, let alone how his Fall happened.”

And that was all Ben had to go on. Luke was trying, he really was, but both Anakin Skywalker and Darth Vader were ghosts. No records. No one who wanted to talk about them. No one who wanted to risk talking about for fear of being associated with a long memory. Mother outright refused to acknowledge that her father existed, even though she had clear knowledge of the man that neither Luke nor Ben knew about it. It came back down to politics like it already and always did. Ben liked to hope that his uncle was just as frustrated by the prospect of mother withholding information from them. It wasn’t a kind thing to do to either her brother or her son.

And that only made Ben broil more. The whispers in his head, the ones that had always been there, egging these thoughts on, were strangely muted during the descent. Ben couldn’t hear them at all and only felt a surge of pity instead of rage at his uncle’s abandonment by his sister. There were so many questions that she could have helped them answer. But no, she only cared about politics and dumped her son off with her brother when it became too much for her. It didn’t matter if she had no idea how to help. The problem was that she never tried to help. Not in anyway Ben appreciated.

If Ben’s mother was bad in that regard, his father was in a league of his own. Couldn’t settle down. Couldn’t stick to one planet. Couldn’t handle politics. Couldn’t refrain from criminal acts even while his wife attempted to restore a functioning government. Couldn’t hang around to raise his own son. Ben had a lot to say about Han Solo and absolutely none of it was flattering. There wasn’t anything really to know about apart from how he’d dumped his wife and son to shoot off into the wild black yonder without another thought for any of them. Luke was so much better than that for all his flaws.

It stung, it really did, to be so unwanted. To be the cause of his family’s splintering and Ben tried to contain it. Luke never said the feelings themselves were wrong, but even Ben at the tender age of twelve knew that having them in the middle of a suspicious ancient temple wasn’t a great idea.

“This was a terrible idea,” Luke echoed from behind Ben. “This appears to be a Sith temple of some sort.”

Ben did a double take. “A Sith temple? But… we’re below our temple. How can there be a Sith temple here?” Ben’s fellow students, with the subtly of a raging bantha, crowded in to listen to the discussion. For once, Ben couldn’t blame them. Dark Side temples were bad news at the best of times. Finding one somewhere beneath where you slept was something else entirely. It was also terrifying. These temples influenced people.

“That is a very good question, Ben.” Luke made hummed and scratched his beard. “I don’t sense anything overt down here, though the patterns are most definitely old language designs from Sith temples I’ve seen previously.” Luke spent much of his time cannonballing from temple to temple. Ben would expect him to know at least a little of their designs.

“Master… but why would the Jedi build on top of it? Sith temples are loci for the Dark Side.” A young togruta, though still older than Ben, stepped forwards. “Surely they would have known about the temple’s placement.” Alarnaa was one of the smartest of Luke’s students. She didn’t gossip, unlike many of the others.

“Not necessarily.” Ben’s uncle was shaking his head. “I’ve seen this before on Coruscant, or, the Imperial Center as it was once known. The Jedi temple there was likewise built on the remnants of a Sith temple.”

A rush of whispers went through Luke’s twenty students. “Really?” Jacen commented from behind Ben.

“Yes, it’s why I never settled there in spite of the convenience. It was one of Darth Sidious’ favourite stomping grounds.” Luke grimaced. “The old council room was his main place of business during the Empire’s reign.” His nose twisted unpleasantly. “His stench rather more stuck to that room. The deaths of all of the Jedi during the Purges echo through the halls as well.”

“How… how would you know?” Ben asked, dreading the answer when Artoo whistled sadly into the gloom.

“I was part of the sweeping team,” Luke confirmed, “I was there to help clear the place of any unexpected surprises before it was converted into a memorial.” Had his uncle slept there surrounded by ghosts? There was something about his uncle that felt aged.

“So much death because of one ego maniac. Well, come along.” Luke shook his head and they progressed further down the halls.

These halls were much brighter, red paint still showing on the walls where delicate traces of tongues ran in lines. His uncle’s green blade was held up to them, reading as he went.

“Be careful,” Luke called back along the line of students. Ben was almost pressed against him, the walls felt like they were closing in as the corridors narrowed. “This is an old Sith temple. Older than the Banites,” Luke added, almost to himself.

Banites. That sounded familiar. Where had he heard that before? “Banites, uncle?” Was it whispered in a dream?

“Followers of the Rule of Two. After Bane was the last of the Sith he resolved to only train one apprentice. There would only be two and the Apprentice could only become the Master by killing him.” Luke shrugged. “Not that it did much for them when Sidious was hurled into a reactor shaft by his apprentice who decided to retire from being a Sith after that was said and done.” It was mentioned so casually than Ben almost tripped over his grinning uncle.

“Wait, what? The Sith retired?” An outraged voice echoed from somewhere behind Ben. It sounded like Mara. She was one of the oldest of the students and most indignant.

“That would be Darth Vader,” Luke called back down the corridor.

“How did he just give up? I thought Sith Lords were fuelled by hate and suffering,” she argued through the echoes of the hallway.

“He allowed me to kill him,” Luke said quietly but it carried. Ben almost tripped over again. Luke… killed his own father? “He gave up and was too ill to continue. He didn’t want to suffer anymore.” Luke sighed.

For a few minutes, everyone was struck dumb. Ben included. Especially Ben. His uncle who killed his grandfather… his grandfather who wanted to die? That wasn’t what the whispers said. The whispers said Darth Vader was weak for turning back to the Light, but Luke was too morose, too empty for it to be anything but the truth. Darth Vader had given up with the death of his master. Both the Dark and his life. He persisted for so long, suffering the whole time, for what? For his master’s death? For his son to live? Ben had never been so at a loss and he really doubted his mother’s help here.

“Luke…” Alarnaa’s voice was unusually subdued. “Does that make you the current Sith Master?”

One beat. Two beats. Three beats. Then Luke couldn’t handle it anymore. Ben watched his uncle explode into a fit of cackles. “Me? The Sith Master?” Luke howled with genuine belly laughs, holding on the side of a wall as they made their way towards a red light. “Well, if all you have to do is kill one to take their title then I suppose yes I am.”

If one of his fellow students had called Ben slack jawed, he couldn’t have refuted it in the slightest. Not that they could accuse him when they were also dragging their jaws along the ground as they walked. Alarnaa herself was the most taken aback.

“Does that make us all Sith apprentices, then?” Jacen snuck in and Ben could hear the smirk.

“Just don’t introduce yourselves like that, it might caught a panic,” Luke chortled as they entered a square chamber.

In the middle of it sat a pulsing pyramid, glowing a soft red.

“That doesn’t look good,” Ben murmured. A Sith holocron? Maybe some other relic? It didn’t feel dangerous, but his uncle had told him previously that these artefacts like to reel people in.

Not that this one seemed to want to bother with those pretences. The moment the rest of the students and Artoo had entered the room, it exploded with a blast of red light.

It was too bright. Stars spotted his vision and Ben groaned. Artoo was whistling wildly which only made the sensation worse.

“Is everyone alright?” Luke was calling and there was an answering collective groan that Ben happily joined. “Yes, I thought as much.” The master of the new Jedi Order groaned with them. “Did anyone see what happened?”

“That thing exploded.” That thing that was now missing from its pedestal. Ben just knew that was going to come back to bite them.

“I’m starting to think Sith relics do nothing but explode. It owes me new robes,” Luke grunted, the slap of boots on stone as he climbed to his feet. “Let’s get everyone up.”

It was twenty minutes before everyone recovered enough to stand up.

It was forty minutes before Luke discovered a stash of robes and blood coloured lightsabers that weren’t there before.

It was an hour before Luke made a gesture and stomped back up the stairwell with Ben on his heels. Alarnaa and Artoo were left in charge of the others.

It was another hour before Luke, with Ben at his back, made the unpleasant discovery that attempted human traffickers had setup shop in the temple above, which was very much not their home. At least not anymore. Not with a holo blaring in what should have been a room for meditation. The architecture was the same, but the decor and everything else had been replaced by archaic, typical smuggling gear that… that they’d already removed the traces of years beforehand. What happened?

“Ben, I don’t think we’re at our temple anymore,” Luke calmly noted, levitating a slaver out the front door.

“I agree, this technology is so old.”

“Pre-Clone Wars old,” Luke nodded, tossing out another burnt corpse with less care. No one at the Academy had a terrible lot of fondness for slavers, least of all any heads of operations. Thankfully there were no slaves, at least. “I remember tossing out an old generator of that exact model out when he we were first clearing out the place.” Ben followed Luke’s hand to a sparkling new generator and was struck by deja vu. “In the exact same spot too.”

“Luke… do you think…?” That we’ve gone back in time, Ben silently finished.

His uncle was frowning. “Only one way to find out!”

Together, the both spun and marched back to the room with the blaring holo. Two voices stood out, even before they were in viewing range.

“The Jedi Council has been most insistent that the Trade Federation seek a peaceful resolution to their dispute over tariffs, but we all know how likely that is to conclude peacefully.” A male voice was snidely remarking. “When is the Republic going to do something about these brazen attacks on the freedom of Republic worlds?”

Ben and his uncle exchanged wide eyed expressions.

“There’s even been rumours of assassination attempts against the current Senator of Naboo, Padme Amidala and that she is seeking protection from the Jedi until the threat is resolved…” It was there Ben’s brain tuned out.

“We’re before the Clone Wars,” Ben said, feeling like he was about to faint.

“We’re only just before the Clone Wars,” Luke corrected, rather pale the whole time.

“I can’t believe it.” Before the Clone Wars. Before his grandfather’s Fall, before the Empire, before everything!

“Guess we don’t need to ask your mother about what she learnt in history, after all,” Luke blinked.

“Wait, what? Ben spun to stare. He wasn’t seriously suggesting that they take a romp through the past, was he? It was too dangerous!

“Please, worrying is Threepio’s job,” Luke waved a hand and Ben winced. That wasn’t fair. “You noticed it too, didn’t you?”

Yes Ben had noticed it. “There’s no artefact.” No way to go back. He’d never see his mother or father again. He’d never hear… the voices again and Ben felt his back straighten. No more voices!

Luke, oblivious to Ben’s thoughts, nodded with a far off expression. “No artefact, no way to get back. We’re going to have to leave sooner rather than later for supplies and our slaver friends left us so many ships that we can borrow.” More like they’d been relieved of their ships, not that Ben felt particularly sorry for them.

“We’re Jedi, that should count for something, right?” Then again, the Jedi had been Purged by grandfather for a reason. What was lurking in their history for that to happen? What was unfolding right now for grandfather to turn on them?

“We can’t be Jedi in this time period,” Luke lamented, watching the bootleg holo with more dismay than Ben had ever seen from his uncle.

“Why not?” There was going to be politics, wasn't there?

“Because the Jedi are keen on the idea that the only acceptable Jedi are their Jedi and I haven’t exactly been training all of you to old school standards,” Luke admitted in a rush. Not that Ben was surprised. If Luke had been an old school Jedi, he would have been kicked out of the temple in an instant.

“Why?” What was wrong with the old Jedi? Ben knew there was something else to it, but Luke himself was having problems with articulation that were clearly visible.

“The old Jedi weren’t big on emotions, or attachment. Or objective truth,” Luke added as an afterthought and Ben knew there was a story behind that one. He’d have to hunt for it later, when they weren’t at risk of starving to death.

“We can’t be Jedi… because they wouldn’t think we’re real Jedi?” Ben clarified.

“Precisely, we’re too emotional to be real Jedi as far as they’re concerned,” Luke was frowning and Ben had a sensation of Force unrelated dread. “Emotional enough that we might be mistaken for Sith…” Only there was no disappointment in that statement. The cogs were turning in a way they usually did when his uncle dropped in at unholy hours of the morning for surprise exams.

Not that it took long for Ben to realise that his uncle’s statement was more suggestion than speculation. “The robes and lightsabers below…” Ben allowed his sentence to carry.

“Perfect for a burgeoning new Sith Order, don’t you think? Palpatine has easy access to the Jedi and their information in his current position, which isn't something we want. So maybe it's best if we don't call ourselves Jedi this time around.” Neither of them should have been should have been smirking. It was deadly serious. But in light Alarnaa’s comment, Ben could find his uncle’s humour. So much for not being a Sith Master. Ben wasn't sure what being a Sith really entailed, but the Jedi Order mustn't either if Palpatine was running the Republic.

“Now what do we do?”

“Tell the others.”

And naturally, that went about as well as either of them expected. After being led upstairs with a pile of the robes and weapons found below, Luke gave the rest of his students the news while Ben kept a straight face.

“Cool!” Jacen shrieked.

“Idiot. We’re never going home again!”

“Who cares! This is more exciting! There’s old Jedi here!”

Artoo made a concerned whistle that almost broke Ben’s composure. Almost.

A flurry of whispers excitedly made their way around the room and Ben didn’t have the heart to correct them. He’d already discussed with his uncle what was to happen and he had to admit, it was an insane plan.

“We can’t associate with the Jedi because they see other Force users as heretics,” their grandmaster explained. “And if we go in as Jedi, they might roll over us under the suspicion of us being particularly stupid Sith.” Luke's Jedi weren't the same as the old Order's Jedi and that was painfully obvious from the pompous newsreel they'd just watched.

There was a collective groan that Ben didn’t participate in. There was a thrill of anticipation running through the air that not everyone had quite caught yet, but they would. What better a way to understand something fully, other than from an outside point of view?

“Then what do we do?”

“We give them what they want,” Ben spoke up. “The Jedi in this time period were already looking for a Sith, not a whole Sith Order.”

As expected, the discussion slid to a halt for precisely one second before it exploded. “We’re going to role play Sith Lords?”

“Kriffin’ hell.”

“Language!”

“Sith Lords use language!”

“No they don’t! Sith Lords are more pretentious than that!”

“Sith Lords just kill people. How are we going to work around that?”

“Some things are worse than death. We could always go the cruel and unusual route.”

"That's not good either!"

Luke took that as a cue to cheerfully hand out a bunch of the robes and and lightsabers to the group, only for them to recoil from the blades.

“Yes, I know they’re not pleasant to hold, but we’re going to have to get used to the overwhelming aura of pretentious evil overlords if we’re going to sell this to the Jedi and Palpatine.” Luke flicked open his own red blade. Yes, this show was mainly for Palpatine and the Jedi Order’s benefit. There was no way they could just tell them what was going to happen and they might not even need to do that much. So long as they were on alert. “Come to think of it, I think this one must have belonged to a Sith Master.” It was certainly emitting enough distilled evil for Ben to think so and enough to cloak Luke’s presence with an oily haze.

“Are you sure they won’t believe us about the future?”

“Of course they won’t. They’ll just think we’re crazy!” Or a threat to them, was the other unvoiced possibility, but if they were going to be seen as a threat, then they had to be seen as a threat with enough street credibility to keep everyone off their backs. It was in times like this Ben was thankful that his fellow students weren’t idiots, even if their behaviour sometimes left much to be desired.

"Well, looks like we're all Sith Lords, now. I hope you've all been practicing your most menacing laughter for our first run in with the Jedi Council.” Luke sounded entirely too gleeful about that prospect. His father and grandmother were still alive, so Ben guessed that was reason enough for him to be happy, even though he was inadvertently following his father’s discarded wishes. Maybe that's what he was really laughing about.

Still, Ben could only sigh and raise a distasteful eyebrow at the cross shaped, red lightsaber he was given. Down the line other students were also handling their new weapons and robes with a raised eyebrow. How on earth was he meant to hold this thing? Where was the grip and how was he meant to use this without taking his own arms off?

"Really, uncle?"

"Really. I don't want to compete with the local Jedi population. Sith are exotic, so let’s work with it.” If Ben died because of this idiotic lightsaber design, he was haunting his uncle to death and after.

Why did Jedi politics and time travel have to be so difficult?

A week of coaching later and Ben felt he had enough contempt on command to pass as a disinterested Sith apprentice. Alarnaa was left in charge, while Luke, Ben and Artoo piled onto a borrowed ship and made their way to Tatooine for what Luke referred to as the easiest and most moral source of street cred available. Masked and robed up, Luke certainly would have passed as an old school Sith Master to anyone unfamiliar with him. Unlike them though, Ben knew exactly what those slight tremors were in reality.

“We’re going to march into a Hutt’s palace and demand that he be a good boy?” Ben stared. Had his uncle always been this crazy? Or was it the temple? It had to be the temple. Luke wouldn’t have made it to adulthood if he was always this crazy.

“Of course we are,” Luke said superiorly, “Then, when he says no and attacks us, we can defend ourselves with extreme prejudice in the ensuing aggressive negotiations.” Luke patted his new lightsaber. “We’re Sith Lords, not savages.”

Ben blinked. “This is the most insane plan I’ve ever heard of in my entire life.” It really was. Was this what his mother, father and uncle had been doing in the Rebellion?

“It worked the first time around.” He did this before? Who was Ben kidding? Of course he had. This idea was his after all.

“Have you even picked a Sith name yet?” Last Ben had heard, his uncle was still undecided.

“I was thinking Darth Vader. Nothing quite like making Palpatine’s life more difficult." Ben’s uncle beamed and Ben had the feeling strangest feeling that the Force itself was laughing at him.

Anakin Skywalker bolted awake in his room at the Jedi Temple, the flashes of his mother’s screaming face were pushed out of his mind by a weight in the Force. A weight so pressing that Anakin was left gasping for air as it gleefully shot past him to places unknown.

Moments later, his master charged through the door. “Anakin, did you sense that?”

“Yes, master.”

Anakin wasn’t quite sure how to tell Obi-Wan that it felt suspiciously like the Force was laughing at him, so he kept his mouth shut while his master paced and postulated.

He had a feeling the Council would be discussing this in intense detail and sighed.

Chapter Text

Cliegg Lars didn’t know what to think when there was an insistent and furious knocking on his front door. There was tonnes of sand blasting the air at near sonic speeds. Who the hell was crazy enough to step outside let alone visit farmland? Even his neighbours weren’t that lacking in sense. At least it sounded civilised, even if it was in the middle of a sandstorm. Civilised but clearly also crazy. Still, with his rifle in hand he threw open the door in a splash of sand to find a masked man entirely in black. Around him was a pocket of air, as if the sandstorm had come to a temporary halt in the figure’s immediate vicinity. Cliegg gulped.

“Cliegg Lars?” The figure inquired, its deep, rasping tones nearly making Cliegg soil himself. Never before had Cliegg felt such overwhelming wrongness from a sentient being. And never so quickly, either. Even the bounty hunters at Mos Eisley didn’t give crawler vibes like this guy did.

“Yes,” Cliegg squeaked at the sentient appearance of Death.

“Excellent. I found your wife.” Without another word, the figure stepped to the side, revealing another, far shorter, cloaked and masked figure. Standing next to that figure and huddled partly in their robes was his wife. Battered and bruised, but his wonderfully alive wife.

“Shmi!” Cliegg lunged forwards. They made no effort to stop him.

“Cliegg!” Shmi called, but she didn’t move? Maybe the second cloaked figure was holding her up? “You’ll have to come to me, they did what they could.” Hells, she was still alive and that was good enough for Cliegg. They could worry about her injuries after they were away from the suspiciously still patch of sandstorm.

After lifting her far too light body, Cliegg had a sickening idea for an educated guess that he was going to keep to himself. No, he was going to bury it and never think about it. Still holding her, he made his way back to the doorway of his house.

“I’d advise for you to take your wife to a skilled physician. Here.” The masked figure tossed a credchip to Cliegg who fumbled and yanked it from the air. Before Cliegg had even registered to what was happening, Shmi was left in his arms and the two figures were stalking back into the sands.

“Who are you?” Cliegg shouted back to the retreating figures. No one did this! No one! This was Tatooine. This level of charity didn’t exist. The least Cliegg could do was spread the good name of his wife’s saviours.

There was a chilling, hacking chuckle that made Cliegg’s blood run cold. “Lord Vader, at your service,” came floating back across the winds. And they were gone in the sands, the bubble popping back into a full blown storm as they left. Cliegg slammed the door shut after them.

Cliegg stared between his shut door and his wife. “What happened?” How was she rescued by whatever the hell those things were?

“He appeared out of nowhere. At first… I thought he was a Jedi, but he had a red sword,” Shmi whispered. “I don’t think they’re Jedi, Cliegg.”

Cliegg shrugged. “Whatever works, I guess.” Cliegg didn’t know much of anything about Jedi and did it matter if Shmi was alive and well? He should really tell his son, come to think of it. “OWEN, YOUR MOTHER IS BACK!” He heard his son’s surprised shout echo back through the house.

Whatever those two were, they couldn’t been too bad if they took on an entire village of Tusken Raiders, won and didn’t sell the hostages straight back into slavery. Definitely better than the Hutts. He, at the very least, owed his Lordship a drink if he ever saw him again.

Ben couldn’t believe what he’d just seen. “What in the Correllian Hells was that?” Ben himself was emptying out a boot full of sand into the floor of the cargo bay in their appropriated freighter. How he hated sand. From his uncle’s intense boot emptying and mumbled profanity, he wasn’t alone in it either. Artoo chirped happily at them while they desanded.

“I was channeling my best Darth Sidious,” Ben’s uncle stated with royal prim and properness. “I was struck by inspiration. Palpatine had the best evil laugh. Father never laughed so I can’t use him as a model for that.” Well, that was a new point of information. Becoming a Sith Lord after being a Jedi killed your sense of humour in addition to your entire Order. Who knew?

Ben continued to stare, the incredulity only mounting. “You were delivering a hostage back to her family. Did it even require an evil laugh?” Was there a form of Sith etiquette for malevolent laughs? Did the Sith Code cover that? Did his uncle even care about the Sith Code? His uncle’s just felt unnecessary and mistimed, but Ben hadn’t actually met a Sith Lord before so maybe his uncle had knowledge he didn’t. Ben really doubted it, but there was a tiny possibility that his uncle simply knew more. It was that or that knock to his head did more damage than anyone thought.

“Ben, we just wiped out a camp full of sadistic and morality lacking nomads who tried to torture a woman to death for fun.” Luke stuck his head up dramatically, his chest puffing out. “Of course it was required. All good Sith laugh and bask in the gratitude of their lessers. It’s why we’re in this galaxy. To lord over our inferiors!” That was just ridiculous. Luke had to be making that part up. At least Ben vaguely knew why they’d stopped in the first place.

They were drawn to the camp. Not that Ben even knew why they buzzed to it like moths to flame. Ben had’t even landed before Luke gleefully leapt from the ramp like a flying aspect of death and descended upon with the nomads with gusto. Maybe that was because they shot at him first and all bets were off.

“That woman was also your great grandmother and we need to set a good impression for when she talks to your grandfather.” Luke added and Ben’s brain slid to a halt. “If we’re going to change things here, we may as well be thorough about it.”

“THAT WAS SHMI SKYWALKER?” Ben yelled at his uncle’s shaking back as Luke dislodged another mountain of sand from his robes.

“Yes, uncle Owen always said she was a lovely person.”

Ben’s head was wonderfully empty. “Uncle,” Ben asked with more serenity than he’d ever experienced in his short life, “how is emptying an entire camp full of Tusken Raiders a good first impression for grandfather?”

“Come to think of it, it’s probably not. Father mass murdered all of them as a recreational past time.” His uncle frowned. “I let the women and children flee. Let’s leave that part out when we tell this story in future, yes?”

Why would grandfather be impressed by a mass murder? “What was grandfather even like as a Sith?” Ben queried and his uncle snorted.

“Absolutely terrifying. If you were on a mission and he appeared, you got the hell out of there as fast as possible. Usually down a limb with him one ship length behind you, all blasters blazing. Ah, so many near death experiences,” Luke sighed contentedly and Ben’s ongoing concerns about his uncle’s mental health weren’t improving.

“But what was he like?”

His uncle blinked. “Oh ho, I see.” Well, it was the easiest solution, wasn’t it? If Luke was modelling himself on Palpatine, then that left one Sith for reference where Luke could help craft an identity. “Serious, committed to the Empire and always prepared with a pre-mortem one liner for those who failed him. He didn’t have time for politics or excuses or incompetence. He wanted the sort of peak performance from his men that he himself exhibited.” Luke was nodding. “He was also fanatically loyal to Palpatine as the old coot was the only thing father had left.” There was a healthy pause. “Then I came along and he straight up murdered the old bastard.” Luke shrugged and Ben held his head in the hands. He would not turn to the Dark Side because his uncle was touched in the head. He would not. If his mother had managed both her husband and her brother, then Ben himself could at least handle the latter.

Ben clasped his hands. “That should be simple enough. If you’re Sidious, then can I be Vader?”

Luke sneezed, showering Artoo in a flood of sand. “The Vader to my Palpatine, my young apprentice.” Ben watched his uncle draw himself up… or at least attempt it, before he fell apart with a motion that was halfway between a giggle and expression of revulsion. “That just feels wrong. Let’s do a deal. I won’t think too hard about being Palpatine and you don’t think too hard about being your grandfather. Deal?”

Ben shrugged.

The freighter came to a halt just out of the viewing distance of Jabba’s Palace and Ben rolled his eyes.

“So how are we going to do this?”

“We’re going to march in and demand that Jabba be a good boy or else.”

That wickedly curving grin on his uncle’s face was much more befitting of a Sith than any Jedi.

Anakin just had a feeling that today was going to be one of those days. He’d hardly stepped out the shower before Obi-Wan strode into the room with the grimmest expression Anakin had seen on his face. Well, not since that one time Anakin had accidentally used his master’s shaving cream as shampoo. That was taking him back.

“Anakin, we’ve been summoned by the Council,” his master gravely stated.

Anakin frowned. Nothing felt unusual in the Force. Maybe it was just the Council fussing again as they did. “Did they say what for?”

“Sith have been observed on Tatooine,” Obi-Wan nearly whispered and Anakin wasn’t sure what he felt. Part apprehension, part remembrance of Darth Maul and part horror when he remembered the dreams of his mother on Tatooine. Dreams that had abruptly stopped a few days ago. Anakin’s stomach sank. What were the odds of it being Tatooine of all of the spots in the galaxy?

“Sith! From where?” Anakin hissed back as they both skidded out the door, nearly sprinting to the Council Chambers. Anakin had known that there was a Sith Master left running around, by why expose themselves now of all times? Why Tatooine?

“I don’t have the full details. Presumably we are both being summoned because of our prior experience with them.” Not that Anakin had much experience beyond seeing Maul and feeling that slick, oily taint of the Dark Side around him. Nope, it was pretty clear it was mainly Obi-Wan who was being called and Anakin was there as a courtesy. As per usual.

They screeched to a halt in front of the Chambers, with an apology to a nearby cleaning droid for the scuffs, and made an attempt to at least appear presentable before they entered. Mace Windu was the first to greet them as they entered.

“Knight Obi-Wan, Padawan Skywalker.” Mace inclined his head, giving Anakin the distinct impression that he was eying bugs. “I see you’re prompt in your arrival.”

“Yes, Masters,” Obi-Wan intoned and Anakin nearly rolled his eyes. Why couldn’t they dispense with the pleasantries and get to the point already? “We came with haste due to the sensitivity of the subject.”

“Wise you are, Obi-Wan. Shifted, the Force has. Unveiled are the Sith,” Yoda’s unnaturally drooping ears said more than his face ever would. Mainly because Yoda’s face never seemed to change ever. “Evidence of the Sith, brought to our attention it has been.”

“You’ll find it speaks for itself. Play the recording,” Mace ordered and Anakin and his master stepped back to observe. “One of the patrons had their droid make a recording of this meeting between Jabba the Hutt and two unknown figures. We’re lucky this even came to us. We thought Padawan Skywalker would have some views given it's his homeworld.” It wasn’t quite a compliment, but it was the closest thing Anakin was going to get from Mace.

Blue images flicked into being. Two figures, robed and masked strode to stand before the Hutt, lightsabers hanging openly and freely from dark robes (though one lightsaber was oddly shaped in a way Anakin hadn’t ever seen before). One was taller than the other, but both wore the same stance. Their masks were elaborate, even if Anakin couldn’t determine their colour. He’d bet credits he didn’t have on them being red though. Sith were big on red and black.

“Jabba the Hutt,” the tallest hissed in a way that sent chills down Anakin’s spine, “I am finally pleased to make your acquaintance.” Affable, but at the same time not. The words were pleasant, but the tone was anything but friendly. Standard negotiation with a Hutt then.

“Who are you to intrude upon my palace?” Jabba demanded in Huttese, wobbling violently as he did so. Anakin rolled his eyes.

“I am Darth Vader and this is my Apprentice.” Vader hardly lifted a hand and his Apprentice inclined their head in the most minimal acknowledgement Anakin had ever seen. But both understood Huttese it seemed. Unusual or were they speakers of many tongues? “Your weak willed insect of a majordomo invited us in. How very kind of him.” Ouch. That level of disrespect had to sting. Jabba wasn’t used to people marching into his front door, mind controlling his staff and insulting him. If Jabba wasn’t such an unrepentant monster, Anakin might have felt slightly more sorry for him. Instead he was admiring the Sith Master’s technique from afar. Upsetting Jabba that quickly had to be a record.

The tentacled majordomo in question was still standing behind Jabba. “Fool, you have invited in Jedi!” Jabba shrieked at his majordomo who… took a prolonged gasp and collapsed to the ground. As if invisible strings had been snapped and he lay there like a broken puppet. That was another point to the Sith Master who was doing a great show of examining his gauntleted fingertips while the drama played out.

“Now, now, Jabba, the puppet was only doing as he was bid.” Anakin could almost hear the smile and was taken aback that Sith let the Jedi comment slide. “Perhaps the flaw is on you for retaining the weak willed and expedient instead of the forceful and competent,” the Master spat in a rushing hiss. No, Anakin took it back, the Sith was definitely insulted by the Jedi comment. Immediately, numerous blasters raised.

“I should kill you where you stand!” Jabba roared, only to be halted in his tracks by a rasping, menacing crack of laughter. Anakin half expected paint to start peeling from the walls of the Council Chambers from the coarseness of it. That was impressively evil sounding.

“As if you could, Hutt. These fools are too stupid to do away with you for fear of your imbecilic family, but rest assured that I have no such restraints.” It was a gentle caress of a whisper but it carried. Carried enough for the whole room to shudder. Jabba froze like a statue. “I suggest you think carefully with that bloated brain of yours.” Anakin had to hold back another tiny thread of admiration for the brazenness of this Sith Lord. The Sith had a point. Jabba survived because of a fear of retaliation… but if a threatening party had no fear then it was the end of the line. That was of course if the Sith could handle the entire room of bounty hunters. Anakin’s money was on the Sith. Not for any particular reason other than him disliking the Hutt far more than the mystery Sith. For now.

“What do you want?” Jabba instead demanded, his jowls trembling with had to be suppressed rage. If the Sith kicked in the front door looking for a fight, then he was doing an excellent job.

“I want a great many things, Jabba the Hutt,” the Sith Master inclined his head and slowly paced forwards so that his feet stood just over the trapdoor. The Apprentice was two steps behind him. “But first you are to call back your fleet of slavers, bounty hunters and miscellaneous filth from my systems, then we can work from there.” There was a troubling finality in the Sith’s words that raised the hair on the back of Anakin’s neck. Systems? The Sith already controlled whole systems? When the hell had that happened? All the while a tension was building in the room that felt too small for the Sith and Jabba alone, let alone Jabba’s court and the watching Jedi audience.

“You dare to tell me what to do with my assets?” Jabba roared, a lever was pulled and Anakin could have sworn he saw a spiderweb stretch across his vision. “Kill them!”

A trapdoor opened just after the Sith Master stepped back. The room doubled over in agony. Jabba the Hutt gracefully floated upwards from his dais without a single gesture and hung suspended over his own pit. He foamed and thrashed at the mouth, while the Sith Master inclined his head.

“Fool. Only now, at the end, do you understand.”

Then Jabba was slam dunked, screaming the whole time, straight into his rancor’s pit. The recording rocked and shrieks filled the Council’s Chambers. Anakin watched the Council’s collective wince, even though they had to have watched it before either Obi-Wan or Anakin arrived. Anakin had to hold in a whoop, because Jedi were detached. Jedi did not take joy in a slaver’s misfortune. Jedi most definitely did not approve of a Sith Master’s actions, which at an objective level, were a fundamental benefit to everyone. No he did not.

After a moment, the bounty hunters came to, lifting their weapons. Four of them were immediately sheered in half by a spinning blade Anakin hadn’t even seen the Master throw. Three more went down with vicious hacking motions from the Apprentice’s cross shaped blade. A mass of bodies attempted to flee, but were caught by an invisible hand that clawed them into the rancor’s pit after their employer. The Apprentice casually swiped with his blade at the fingers of the few that managed to grip the lip of the pit. Then they too fell screeching.

In total, it had been a minute and ten seconds since the Sith had entered the room. A minute and ten seconds was all it had taken for Jabba the Hutt’s entire court to cease to exist. The Sith Master casually spun his (red?) blade.

“I believe this concludes negotiations,” the Master spoke to the Apprentice. Anakin personally thought the Sith Master hit a diplomatic bullseye in more ways than one.

And the recording ended.

Anakin didn’t think he’d blinked less, even during the Boonta Eve Classic that he’d won. He turned to face the Council, forcing down that same whoop from before. Calm. He would not fist pump for a Sith.

“Well, Skywalker. What’s your opinion on this?” Mace asked, leaning forwards. “What could a Hutt do to upset a Sith Lord?”

Anakin knew he should have put more thought into his answer, but the answer itself was so straightforward Anakin really didn’t know how else to put it. “Do you want a list… or?”Anakin trailed off.

“Take this seriously, you should Padawan.” Yoda sternly waved his stick. Anakin heard Obi-Wan’s moan from behind him. "Not to be trifled with, the Sith are."

“Well masters, do you mean the slaving, bounty hunting, drug dealing, smuggling and other associated wrongs committed in the Sith Master’s territory? Or do you mean the Sith Master’s clear displeasure in sharing the same air as Jabba?” Anakin was trying, he really was, but he’d be dead of old age before he even got through a full list of Jabba’s potential wrongs.

“You think Jabba interfered with the Sith Master’s business?” Obi-Wan raised in a genteel manner.

“No master, I think the Sith Lord just didn’t like him and was looking for an excuse,” Anakin answered so bluntly he saw a Council member facepalm in the corner of his eye. That shut them up. Did the Council forget that Sith were all about passion? It’s not like Vader needed a reason with the power of pure evil fuelling him.

“And you, Obi-Wan?” Mace asked.

“Anakin’s suggestion is not without its merits. Sith are beings of passion and the Sith might have elected to dispose of him to fuel that passion. The Republic hasn’t detected any usual criminal activity from Jabba that would indicate a business relationship with new parties on any sort of grand scale,” Obi-Wan hummed, while rubbing his beard. Anakin basked in the praise.

“Investigate this, we must,” Yoda insisted.

Anakin perked up.

“To you two, this duty will not fall, for now.”

Then deflated. Of course it wasn’t going to be them. It’s like the Council was actively set on stopping Anakin from checking on his mother. Did they have any idea how rare it was for holo receivers to even last on Tatooine before they were stolen? Even the ones welded down didn't last a full day.

“Thank you for your time,” Mace said with finality.

Anakin and Obi-Wan bowed and left.

The moment the door closed behind them, Obi-Wan spoke. “You may as well get it out of your system, Anakin.”

“Really, master?” Jedi weren’t big on feelings. Was it a trap?

“I won’t begrudge you it. After all, it’s one less slaver in the galaxy.” Anakin spotted a curled lip somewhere in Obi-Wan’s beard.

Whooping would be unbecoming of Anakin in public, so instead he skipped the whole way to the Archives, followed by a flock of likewise skipping younglings. Well, Obi-Wan didn’t exactly specify how it was to be expressed, did he?

“Well, I think that went shockingly well!” Ben watched his uncle hurl his mask aside and drain a full flask of water.

“You dropped Jabba the Hutt into a rancor pit,” Ben found himself repeating for the fourth time.

“Correction. I slam dunked him into a rancor pit. Last time your mother strangled him. With a chain,” Luke nodded intensely. “And after tossing Boba Fett into a sarlacc pit we blew up the sand barge with its own main gun and called it a day.”

If Ben’s jaw sagged any lower it was going to fall off. “Mother… strangled Jabba the Hutt with a chain.”

“Yes,” Luke said, scratching his beard, “it does seem to run in the family, doesn’t it? She accidentally blew up a planet too as well. Not that I’m not accidentally to blame for that one as well.”

“My mother accidentally blew up a planet,” Ben found himself faintly repeating. “You helped accidentally blow up a planet.”

“To be fair, it was more the Partisans than her or me, but she got given the credit anyway.” Luke shrugged as if an entire planet ceasing to be was an everyday occurrence. From the angry muttering from the politicians Ben had met, there was more than one planet that had been blown up during the Empire’s war with the Rebellion. He just hadn’t know one of them was his mothers idea and felt his personal bubble flex.

“Our entire family is insane.” Who were these people and how did he end up related to them?

“Of course we are,” his uncle indignantly shot back. “If we weren’t none of our plans would ever work! It's not like I blew up the Death Star with any solid grasp of common sense or rationality.” Luke abruptly paused, as if he’d just thought of something. “Oh, Artoo, how did the message delivery go?”

Artoo spewed out binary indicating that yes, his recording of the Hutts had indeed been forwarded to the Jedi Council. They had probably watched it several times as of this conversation. More proof of his uncle's loss of touch with reality. They wouldn’t have any time to prepare for dealing with the Jedi with them becoming aware so soon!

“Relax, this is Tatooine.” Ben felt the impact from his uncle’s back slap as if it was from a planet’s length away. “We’ve still got work to do!”

“Like? Are we killing more gangsters in self-defence?” It was really looking that way.

“Of course not. Tatooine’s part of the Republic. We need to establish a formal government and elect a Senator!”

“I have a bad feeling about this,” Ben intoned out of habit. His uncle establishing a government. On Tatooine, the galaxy's largest hive of scum and villainy. What could possibly go wrong?

“You would. I’ll be running for Senator,” Luke chirped and skipped from the room. "Gotta keep my Palpatine impression authentic!"

Ben turned to Artoo. “Has he always been this devoid of sanity?”

His father was much worse, Artoo beeped back and Ben felt any respect he had for his grandfather melt away.

Crazy. Ben was the only sane man in a family full of lunatics.

Meanwhile, in Chancellor Palaptine's office, if any of his guards heard an inarticulate howl of rage, they ignored it. It must have been the holo. The Chancellor's voice wasn't that high or raspy.

Chapter Text

Anakin didn’t think he’d ever been so glued to the holo in his entire life. It wouldn’t be long now. Any hour, quite possibly. It was coming. Anakin knew it was coming.

“Anakin, you’re late.” Obi-Wan’s voice tutted from the doorway.

“It’sTatooine’selectioncoveragemaster,” Anakin felt rush out him without averting his gaze. If he looked away he’d miss it. He’d miss the candidate.

“Tatooine’s what?” Obi-Wan repeated, stepping into the room with Anakin. Slowly but surely, Obi-Wan’s expression morphed from taut impatience to flat face surprise. Then he too paused in front of the holo.

“Election coverage, master. Tatooine is electing a Senator for the Republic.” It was surreal to think about it let alone explain it. Not only had Anakin’s nightmares about his mother abruptly shorted out, but the news from the Outer Rim was pouring in. The Hutts, in addition to being no more, had been replaced with what appeared to be a benevolent dictator. For now.

A new system government was seeking to be elected after mopping up the mess the Hutts left behind. From the reports submitted to the Council, it was an extensive and extremely thorough mopping that left some of the most vicious crime bosses taken aback. Tatooine’s new candidate hadn’t just wiped out Jabba, but seemed to be perfectly content to provoke the wrath of the rest of the family as well. Then systematically slaughter them as well as they lined up at the Sith’s front door.

Provoking the rest of the family, picking fights with every other criminal in the sector, kicking the teeth in of those very same criminals and, most impressively, sauntering away from it without a single description of the sentients involved. Total annihilation of every single antagonistic party that mildly sneezed in their direction. It was very very impressive. Extremely violent too, but it was a Sith Lord. Presumably. It wasn’t like anyone could confirm it was a Sith Lord, but Anakin’s more wild experimentation left little doubt over what had happened to some of those boarded ships. Not that there was enough left of them to call them ships.

“So this is what you’ve been up to all week,” Obi-Wan remarked, his eyebrows raised. “I still can’t believe it’s happening.”

“I can’t believe Tatooine was freed by Sith Lords.” Uh oh, was that too blunt? Best not make it too apparent that the Sith trumped the Jedi in a major way. Complimenting Sith methodology tended to attract overtly interested inquiries from Jedi Masters. Anakin would, of course, deny everything, but he really didn’t need that in his life right now.

“You and the rest of the Council, Anakin. We’re still not sure it’s freedom, so much as a change of management.” Stroking his beard, a frown was set in his master’s face.

“Depends on how you define freedom then, since all of the slaves had their trackers removed according to the Senate election watchers who were sent out.” Casual. Keep it casual. No need to let Obi-Wan know he was… maybe a little bit too invested in the election. But hey! History was being made! Even if it was being made by a Sith Lord who clearly took a great deal of pleasure in his chosen profession of being a mass murderer. At least it was only the Hutts. For now. Maybe the Sith Master was open to dismantling other forms of criminal enterprise?

Obi-Wan did a double take. “Really? How remarkable.”

“The Sith Master also has a ninety-five percent approval rating,” Anakin casually added.

“You have been following this closely, haven’t you?” Anakin wasn’t sure if he was hearing a judging tone, but waved a hand to a towering stack of datapads currently holding up Anakin’s kaff table. The missing leg had gone to a better and far more useful place.

“I’ve been taking notes, Master. I have a suspicion that the Council will ask us to investigate.” At which point, Obi-Wan’s negotiating skills would spectacularly fail, lightsabers would be busted out and they would both be killed by the planet’s population in a fit of rage. Yep, sounded like a job for them alright.

“Your suspicion is correct.” Stroking his beard, Obi-Wan moved back towards the door. “The Council is considering sending us to supervise whoever takes government.” Whoever? There was only one candidate in the election. No one else had bothered to apply. Typically Tatooine, but concerning perhaps for the Republic. “It’s rather convenient that your research has been so thorough.”

Anakin resisted the urge to jump for joy. “I do know the planet better than anyone else in the Order.”

“So you do, my Padawan, so you do,” Obi-Wan mumbled. A compliment? Anakin was taking that as a compliment.

Anakin was struggling down a smirk in the meantime. If Anakin knew Tatooine’s underworld, and he at least knew its troublemaking remnant, after the election day itself was going to be an unmitigated battle between the old guard and the new rulers. For now the old hands would bide their time from the shadows, then it would erupt into a new conflict and the Sith would be fully exposed for all to see. What happened to Tatooine after that only the Force knew, but Anakin couldn’t see the Hutts standing much of a chance against the Sith Master.

Above it all, there was Obi-Wan, about to plant both of them right in the middle of it. Anakin nearly skipped from their quarters, his mother on his mind.

There was going to be a large scale war by the end of this election campaign. Not for the first time was Ben relieved that lightsabers had no physical blade to clean, because the amount of gore left on a physical blade would have rendered the blasted thing useless. How many people had they mowed down in the last month? It had to be in the thousands as an approximation. It’s not like anyone was really keeping count at this point.

“You’re still going to have to clean that hilt,” Luke remarked, cheerfully hoisting what was left of some slavers into the captured ship’s airlock. Luke hadn’t even bothered to drop the heavy Sith robes. Ben hadn’t either, but still. What his uncle did to them was nothing short of embarrassing. They came, they boarded, Luke promptly vented an entire deck with a well placed cut into the hull and they were off working their way through the ship. Limbs flew. Bodies flew. Parts of the ship flew. Some other ships flew in half from the vigorous amount of lightsaber tosses Luke was engaging in. At this point, Ben had seen everything.

Everything included his borrowed lightsaber’s hilt being gummed up with various bodily fluids. After Luke’s entrance, Ben wasn’t entirely confident that it was blood this time. Last time he needed a corrosive to get it off. Thank the Force gloves were a thing. And masks. Ben had come to greatly enjoy the protection from blood splatter that his borrowed Sith mask offered. Luke, in the process of refining his Sithly mannerisms, had refined the art of having blood splatter around him instead of onto him. He even broke it down into slow motion for the added effect. Ben was profoundly jealous.

“Hmmm, sixty-eight. Not a bad number.” It was a huge number considering the size of most criminals cells. Then again, Luke came from a time where mowing down entire battalions was considered standard practice.

“More for PR to work with,” Ben dully agreed. He was, after all, public relations. He would know. The organising of posters, the image management, the propaganda, the funding, the meetings that went for four hours… That was now Ben’s life, when he wasn’t with his uncle, terrorising the regional criminal enterprises. What would his mother think?

“Wait until we get to Nar Shaddaa,” Luke winked and Ben sighed. His mother probably would have been in on it.

At this point in Luke’s campaign, it was becoming rapidly apparent that this time around the Hutts were likely to reach Endangered status in the Republic’s Sentient Life Register. Them, anyone associated with them, anyone who looked like them and anyone involved in the same business as them. Naturally, that meant most of the Outer Rim was going to disappear in the name of self defence. Ben should have felt uncomfortable about this, but instead he could only think about the reports he had to review as soon as he returned to Tatooine.

“We wouldn’t be on this clanking pile of garbage if they hadn’t shot at us first,” Luke was complaining. He did have a point there, because the slavers attacked Ben and Luke first. “I can hear the hyperdrive motivator from here and that suboptimal clunk is on the other side of the ship. How this thing even flies when it’s in worse shape than the Falcon is anyone’s guess.”

Now there was a nostalgic complaint. Ben wondered how the Falcon looked these days… before his father took it apart blind then taped it back together again with all of the pieces in the wrong place.

“We’ll have to tow it. We can use it for scrap?”

“Pffft, scrap. This steamer will be fine for atmospheric travel if we get it back without it falling in two.” Which would be a small miracle with the amount of internal lightsaber damage it had sustained. Ben blamed the hilt blades, which seemed to serve no other purpose than to make the lightsaber itself impossible to hold and cause unnecessary property damage.

“How… about… a transport network?” Ben instead suggested. The ship was large enough to carry people as a sort of oversized shuttle. It just needed some… work. Work that would preferably hide the lightsaber scoring and blood stains and various other fluids.

“We could use it as part of a shuttle network,” Luke hummed, dragging another body towards the airlock. “That’d look good for the electorate. I remember how many times public transport caused riots on some of the planets I visited.”

“Booze and circuses, uncle?” A phrase from his mother, describing most politician’s approach to running a system.

“No, infrastructure and jobs. After we work those out, people can have their booze and circuses. You can’t have booze or circuses if there’s no way to get to the booze and there’s no room for circuses. Han would be appalled if there wasn’t a taxi service to evict him for being drunk off his eyeballs.”

In the interests of keeping the Jedi distracted from their other manoeuvre of making Palpatine’s life difficult, they had engaged in a policy of WWHSD. What Would Han Solo Do was a simple premise that operated on equally simple logic. If ever they were confronted with something that seemed too simple or too good to be true, they would ask What Would Han Solo Do? It was akin to a political cipher, which if any of the Jedi knew, was in fact disguising good government behind numerous layers of debauchery, irrationality and seeming stupidity. Ben wasn’t quite sure if his father was as smart as Luke made him out to be, but given the current implementation of that strategy was Steal Everything the Hutts have, Nailed Down or Not, Ben could only assume from his experiences with his father that it was accurate. That and jettisoning cargo at the first sign of a raid.

All in all, WWHSD had been… popular, Ben supposed. Their popularity shot up from zero to fifty percent almost overnight. There was almost a mystical quality about a game of Sabacc with a crime matriarch, her spoilt son, a table full of criminals, a casino heist disguised behind a failed vault heist and the fact that a Sith Lord had managed it and gotten away without a scratch while still being at the table. Luke was something of a folk hero. At least to Tatooine locals. Everyone who’d been in the casino that week would be wetting themselves for years to come after Luke’s best impersonation of his father in career form. So many strangulations. So many bribes. But still, the locals seemed to at least appreciate that every credit from that heist went straight back into Tatooine’s standard of living. A standard of living that started in the sand and was slowly elevating itself into air conditioned dwellings.

From there, Luke’s haphazard flying and criminal mopping up operations scored spacer street cred, military cred, political cred and, most importantly, a health dose of apprehension from the Jedi Council. Ben suspected there would have been a great deal less apprehension if Luke was in the habit of leaving people alive, but that was extremely difficult with the amount of incidents Luke seemed to bring upon himself in WWHSD fashion.

Take the diner complaint a system or two over for example. It was a simple complaint about food quality from a local. People ate the food, people died. It should have been simple, right? Send the health inspectors in and ensure the place was up to scratch. Except no. The battered inspectors had been sent back with a politely worded letter telling them where to take their complaints in a rather colourfully worded manner. Naturally, Luke took offence to their grammar, continuing existence and decided to personally investigate and, naturally, Ben was obligated to attend. It would have perhaps helped the case of the diner if the kitchen was not in fact the entrance to an underground spice mine.

It would have also helped if the drug runners were not storing mining explosives in the mine. It also would have greatly helped if slaves hadn’t been involved in the mining process. Naturally, this being Luke, the slaves were rescued, but what was left was a two kilometre long gash in the bedrock where an insurmountable amount of H.E. had prematurely detonated and obliterated every single shaft in the complex. Luke’s response? “It happens,” Luke shrugged. “Wouldn’t be the first time we’ve accidentally blown up something we shouldn’t have, but it’s a spice mine so who cares? They’re everywhere around here.”

Luke Skywalker shrugged and called it a day.

Darth Vader, on the other hand, asserted his superiority, swished his cloak in a menacing manner and left with a ship full of ex-mining slaves following a short conflict with dirty inferiors. Vader’s supremacy was paramount. At least that’s how Ben, the obedient and still nameless Apprentice was selling the ordeal.

Ben could only thank the Force that Luke’s Force assisted reflexes provided enough Sithly fear factor without lines, because at this point Ben was sure that Luke's decorum was only being maintained by his mask. The Jedi would have said the Sith Master was trembling with rage. Ben knew better.

And that was only a single instance of the mayhem that seemed to almost follow his uncle around like an obedient puppy. Other students would have said it was the Force, but Ben knew grudges when he saw them and if it was the Force, it was gunning for him more than any other entity in the galaxy. At the rate they were going, Force be damned, Luke was well on his way to becoming Tatooine’s first elected Senator in any timeline that Ben could think of. Maybe Ben’s mother wouldn’t be proud, so much as apprehensive and in a state of exasperation as to how Luke had managed to enter politics on a whim versus her years of alliance building.

It was an absolute farce and Ben was somehow fully on board with it. His mother would be mortified… and for the strangest reason, Ben was perfectly content with the thought.

There was a report about the Sith Lords. It was a frightfully detailed report that had Anakin glued to it in spite of the chastising drone of the Council members.

There was a tiny speck of a moon a few systems away from Tatooine. On this moon was a diner with numerous health complaints. For reasons only known to the Sith Lords themselves, they attended the diner. After twenty three minutes of them entering the premises, it had ceased to exist. In its place was an an ever widening hole two kilometres long and countless kilometres deep.

Twenty two minutes prior, the Sith calmly exited with a number of sentients trailing along behind them.

Twenty one minutes prior, screams were heard.

Nobody knows what happened from minutes sixteen through to twenty-one as there was a deep and terrible silence that boded poorly for anyone still in what was left of the smouldering shell of the building.

Fifteen minutes prior, a ship full of nineteen weequay pirates bundled into one of the patron’s yacht made for five, and was immediately ripped from the air and slammed into the ground by an invisible hand.

Thirteen minutes prior, a weequay shot into the air above the diner and, by all witness accounts, spontaneously exploded.

Ten minutes prior a wardrobe containing a drug lord was hurled from the roof and splintered on the stone below. He never left the wardrobe, but a blood red blade flew after it with uncanny accuracy.

Five minutes prior, a body that resembled a lump of meat had been ejected through a window.

Two minutes prior, the majority of responsible patrons had evacuated the premises in a stampede that left twelve people severely injured.

Thirty seconds prior, there was a CLANG heard by passersby outside.

And after all of that happened, a resident proudly announced that he had been the one to make the complaint that resulted in a two kilometre long hole where the diner used to be. He also made the timestamps Anakin was now referring to and, through it all, not a single person had any idea what happened within the diner itself. Nor did anyone have any idea how such a large hole had been blasted into the bedrock.

The Jedi Council, too, were at a loss. Engineers had been dispatched to inspect the site while they pondered the cause of such destruction. Was it some Dark Side power? Had the diner owners done something to displease the Sith Master for such a furious attack? All questions with no answers.

Anakin, rather more privately, thought it was a waste of time. Clearly, the Sith Lords had found a spice mine disguised as a restaurant and detonated whatever stores they had of blasting explosives. It was the Outer Rim. What else was it going to be apart from pirates, business relations of pirates and the impoverished locals they were extorting? Business as usual. Beyond Sith Lords being involved, for reasons, but blowing up competing spice mines was a normal practice. Sometimes Anakin forgot that he was just about the only one in the Order that had these experiences.

The hard part was going to be explaining it to the Council. Anakin silently composed himself.

Masters, if I might interrupt. I have a hypothesis as to the extent of the damage. It’s well known in the Outer Rim that spice mines have been disguised as other other ventures, including restaurants. It could be that the Sith Lords, as per their current pattern in Tatooine, are currently asserting their territory and deterring other criminal elements from populating the area? It would seem to me that the Sith Lords detonated the explosive supply of what seems to be quite a large, in turning causing the damage recorded in the report. This would assert their territory due to Tatooine’s proximity to the system.

That sounded suitably detached. Excellent, now all he had to do was voice it and convince the wizened group of people before him that no, it wasn’t a Dark Side ritual fuelling the Sith Master’s powers, but a gang turf war. And the Sith Master wanted them off his lawn. And the Council were going to nod appreciatively and thank Anakin for his efforts and research.

Yeah right. Like that was going to happen.

So Anakin butted in midway through an argument and told them anyway.

Then it descended into another argument. And another. And another that branched into speculated Sith mysticism. And another that tangented from that.

Anakin saw Obi-Wan toss a glance in his direction and roll his eyes.

Three hours of politely worded insults later, Obi-Wan and Anakin returned to their quarters.

“Personally, Anakin, beyond the initial report, I rather think that venture was a waste of time.” Obi-Wan tossed off his boots in a distinctly more frazzled manner than usual. “You said it yourself, it was most likely the mining explosives. If it was a Dark Side ritual, then surely we all would have felt something. You don’t need engineers to know that.”

“I have never heard Master Yoda yell before,” Anakin commented in a dazed manner. Maybe it was more of an indignant squawk than a yell, but that would undignified sound and that would make its way straight back to Master Yoda. Hence, Anakin settled on a yell.

“Nor I, not at least for quite some time,” Obi-Wan grimaced. “Master Windu certainly seems convinced of some Dark Side mysticism.”

“It’s wishful thinking, Master. Why waste time on a Sith ritual when you can use explosives?” Anakin sighed.

Lazily, he reached for the remote. Then he flicked on the holo and swore.

Tatooine had a new Senator.

Lord Vader to be precise.

“I can’t believe we missed it! I was waiting all day for the results!” Anakin tried not to wail. He really did.

“Shhh! We’re missing it!”

They missed the election results for that ridiculous meeting of all things. Mace and Yoda could squawk each other to death next time for all Anakin cared, he wasn’t going to miss the coverage for their petulant arguments.

Sheev Palpatine forced on his most sincere smile. He was the Supreme Chancellor welcoming a new system into the Senate. He was. He was not a Sith Lord. He was most certainly not thinking about his racing heart as a nova of bleakness approached. He was not thinking about the large amount of heavily armed Jedi crammed into their pod. Anakin Skywalker in particular was almost hanging off the side of the pod in an extremely undignified attempt to obtain a better view. Sheev Palpatine was not thinking about how they were eying their pathway to the approaching pod the same way a gundark eyed a ship’s electrical wires. He was most certainly not thinking about the way the Darkness, through it all, merely stared back, tinged with amusement and contempt.

Sheev Palpatine most certainly was not thinking about these things.

Darth Sidious was and felt himself age a decade in a single wisp of air from the newcomer.

“I present to the Republic Senate, Lord Vader of Tatooine,” Sheev Palpatine struggled out from behind clenched teeth. Clenched because he was being crushed by some unseen Force. If the Jedi had noticed, they were yet to intervene. Skywalker was entirely fixated on the Sith.

“Greetings to the Republic Senate.” Lord Vader chilled the air with every rattling breath, his red and black mask’s gleam dulled by the pooling inky robes. “I will usher in a new age, free of corruption, purged of deceit, a cleansing of all inadequacy. There will be no mercy, no clemency, no forgiveness. I do not forgive, I do not forget. I remember all and all will be judged. I eagerly await my likeminded Senators allegiance in the resolution of these matters in an expedient manner. My sight is unclouded and my intent is set.” It was said in a sibilant hiss that drew around the room, seemingly without aid. Every word poked apart Darth Sidious’ fragile composure, exposed to an audience of trillions. Trillions, who if the Senate was any indication, applauded their new overlord. Then Vader bowed, every so slightly. It was more of a head tilt than a bow.

Darth Sidious felt every ounce of Vader’s crushing malice focus, out of all the lifeforms in the room, onto one solitary pinprick. Himself. Then he felt it smile.

“Thank you for your… unique words, Lord Vader,” Darth Sidious instead croaked with a throat that felt like a mailed fist was squeezing it shut.

Vader inclined his head, ever so slightly and withdrew, and the Darkness followed, like an obedient puppy. Vader’s pod retreated, with the Jedi Council’s pod speeding after it into the delegates below.

It was all Darth Sidious could do to continue proceedings and not rub at his neck. Indeed, everyone else was unbothered by the experience, by the speech, almost as if they were lulled by Vader.

It was in this moment, Sidious felt dread.

Chapter Text

They were in pursuit! Or the rest of the Jedi were, at least. Anakin wasn’t quite sure where he was; his boots lost traction on a carpet and instead of clearing the corner he’d skidded into an entirely different room instead.

Nay, not skidded, but coasted on bundles of the finest fur as he gracefully came to a halt with the greatest of finesse. Nothing less for the Jedi’s number one Padawan.

Not that he had long to recover from his unintended, alternative exploration of the Sith’s path of retreat.

“May I help you?” A dark haired boy asked, tugging at his sleeves and holding out an extended, precocious hand from above. Anakin had to hold back a coo, because Force only knew which set of rooms he’d stumbled into in his pursuit. Maybe the boy was an innocent nobody. But on the flip side he could also be connected to the resident evil overlord. Please it not be something related to the Trade Federation.

“Ah, erm,” Anakin instead flailed from the ground.

“Leave the poor Padawan alone, Ben. Clearly he’s lost,” a good natured voice remarked and Anakin watched a human perhaps slightly older Obi-Wan’s age step into view from around a corner. Blond, bearded and with the least pretentious clothes Anakin had ever seen on someone in a senatorial office. Anakin did a double take before hastily forcing down the response into a haze of casual blankness. This individual could’ve easily stumbled out from a cantina in Tatooine, booze still in hand… but here he was in a pretentious, stuffy Senate office. Anakin’s mind boggled and his eyes darted between dark wooden panels and the… comparatively exotic dress sense of the man before him. Maybe he was privileged enough for it not to matter if he dressed like a Tatooine drunkard?

The older man extended an arm and, with surprising strength, hoisted Anakin to his feet.

“Thank you,” Anakin sighed, dusting himself off. “These are the Senate offices and…”

“You didn’t want a potential galactic incident on your hand,” the man winked hugely and chortled while Anakin choked on his own saliva. “Don’t worry, it’s not like we’re not already used to making waves. Sometimes literally,” the man’s eyes happily crinkled and he chuckled.

It was only then did Anakin’s eyes find the crest hanging above a distant doorway in the spacious suite. An extremely familiar crest which had populated more holo political coverage than even the Trade Federation’s recent incursions. “This is the Tatooine delegation’s room?” Anakin blurted out and the man only laughed harder, his teeth glinting.

“It certainly is!” He waved a hand. “Come over, take a seat. We’ll have something to eat, it’s been a long day. Ben, grab our guest an extra plate.”

“Do you know where the Tatooine Senator is?” Anakin rushed out, even while the bureaucrat not so subtly lead him into another room with a dining table. Usually, being gently shoved along was considered a prime sign of an ambush. Unlike every other ambush Anakin had been party to, the potential ambusher was cheerfully whistling what sounded like a Corellian drinking song as they swaggered through the suite. An Ode to Booze, Beverage and Brawls if Anakin wasn’t mistaken. That was a classic, right up there with My Ship is a Lady and She’s Mine.

“Occupied, I would presume. Lord Vader has had an exceptionally busy week filled with Hutts, pirates, slavers and an irritating weequay that doesn’t know when to shut up,” Vader’s paperwork monkey happily explained. “I’m Luke, by the way and that terror who ran by is my nephew Ben.”

Oh. Right. Introductions. That was an idea. “I’m Anakin Skywalker, Padawan of Obi-Wan Kenobi,” Anakin squeezed out before the young boy shoved a plate of tantalising meat into his hands. “Anyway, the Jedi are looking for him,” Anakin explained, even as he was seated and another plate of steamed vegetables set in front of him.

“What for?” Ben asked around a heaping of salad.

“Erm…” What to do? The average person didn’t really know anything about Sith Lords. “They have questions about his conduct with the Hutts,” Anakin instead offered as slowly, ever so slowly, it occurred to him that his hosts were bureaucrats and the floor opened up to consume him. It was like Jabba’s rancor pit, only more effective in creating the anticipation of being devoured by a ravenous carnivore.

“That’s odd, I would’ve thought they had more questions about the spice mine he blew up,” Luke idly commented around a sip of water. Anakin nearly inhaled a shred of some sort of seafood.

“I’m sorry, what?” Anakin coughed, sending a chunk of tentacle flying out his mouth. The moment of truth!

“The spice mine in the Outer Rim,” Luke was enthusiastically nodding.

“Yeah!” Ben added most agreeably. “They stored all of their blasting explosives in the one chamber and well…” The boy made an excited and exaggerated movement with his hands. “That was a big explosion,” the boy said rather solemnly after the dramatic motion. “At least he managed to free all the slaves. The slavers weren’t so lucky.” Explosives? Ha! Eat that, Master Windu! Anakin fist pumped beneath the table, well out of sight. As Anakin glanced back up, he caught Luke’s eye and the scruffy man nodded in a far too knowing manner.

The line repeated in Anakin’s head. At least he managed to free all the slaves. Lord Vader the Sith… freeing all the slaves on Tatooine. Obi-Wan was going to have an aneurysm if Anakin didn’t have one of his own first.

“This is going to sound tactless,” because it is, Anakin silently added to himself, “but why was the Senator freeing slaves in the Outer Rim? It’s not really…” Anakin let the words wander as he once more stumbled over the S-word sticking point. One could not demonise a Sith to those who knew nothing about the Sith. Not only would it come off as unfair, but the galaxy at large was loathe to call anything pure evil at first glance, unless it was a lawyer, insurance broker or speeder salesman.

“It’s not something ninety nine percent of the Core Worlds care about or give a single thought to while they’re digging their fat fingers into luxury dinners like this,” Luke suggested and Anakin almost fell out of his chair. Oh no. Luke was a realist. If Luke was a realist, then what was Vader?

“Uhhhh….” Anakin carefully restrained a nodding motion of his head. It would be used against the Jedi. He was a representative of the Jedi searching for a Sith Lord. He was not here to agree with a Sith Lord’s servants about the Republic’s manifest incompetence in dealing with slavery. This wasn’t happening under Anakin’s watch!

Luke carried right on. “Slavery is illegal. The Republic doesn’t want to deal with it because it costs money.” He waved a hand in a majestic motion. “Fortunately for the Republic, Lord Vader takes pride in his craft and has graciously chosen to complete security patrols of his sovereign area free of any cost to the Republic.”

Anakin swallowed a swoon of approval. “So for Lord Vader it’s because…”

“Lord Vader’s very good at removing people from existence,” Ben happily answered. “If slavers, pirates and criminals make people miserable, Lord Vader makes them reconsider their life choices.” Like their choice to continue remaining alive, Anakin added to himself. “He’s supremely gifted in aggressive negotiations conducted with a lightsaber.” Aggressive negotiations with a lightsaber… sounded like the go to Jedi strategy for any breakdowns in communication. With how poorly the Council and Masters were at communicating it was a wonder there was a Jedi Temple still standing after all these years.

There were some doubts about Ben’s offered explanation about Vader’s motives. From the millions of credits in damage done to the Hutt’s criminal empire, Vader didn’t seem to so much take pleasure in his work so much as he was engaged with it in a passionate and fiery relationship. Given Sith in particular drew power from passion, it was more probable that Vader was using the massacres to feed his connection to the Dark Side… but… at the same time, most Sith didn’t wait for acceptable targets. In not one reported instance had Vader ever struck first, even in the Hutt matter his ship had been attacked first from the Order’s investigations. Vader, if anything, was somehow, through what could only be political sorcery, acting only in self defence. Naturally, him acting only in self defence posed a problem of the Jedi Council.

How exactly did the Jedi Council go about taking down a Sith Lord who technically hadn’t broken any laws? Kicking in front door and subduing him was hardly an option with the complete lack of illegal behaviour and, rather more importantly Anakin thought, his public relation polls. Vader hadn’t so much risen in opinion as he’d breached the atmosphere and collected an orbiting satellite on the way out of the sector. If the Jedi Council wanted to take Vader down, they needed to bring more to the Republic than “we don’t like him because he solved slavery in Tatooine overnight when we refused to lift a finger for hundreds of years”. Solving the issue of slavery wasn’t also wasn’t an issue any member of the Republic could comfortably complain about when those implications alone would be in the career ending category of abject stupidity. Vader was acting beyond politics and nothing upset a politician more than being reminded that their existence was entirely irrelevant in the real world.

“The Council is struggling to understand how Lord Vader has become so popular with the local criminal population of the Outer Rim so quickly,” Anakin instead ventured, mentally patting himself on the back.

“I suspect it’s because he’s had to kill most of them in self defence,” Luke languidly responded and Anakin choked on a guffaw. “What’s he meant to do when a bunch of idiots rock up with blasters and attempt to board his ship?” An entirely reasonable response to the problem, or it would’ve been if it wasn’t a Sith Lord hacking whole boarding parties plus ship to pieces with a lightsaber. Not that the Jedi handled the matter any differently, but it was a Sith Lord. A Sith. Why did Sith have to make everything so difficult?

“There were prior provocations, then?” Anakin asked around a leaf of green.

“If by prior provocations, you mean they attempted to sell his students into slavery, then sure.” Luke waved a hand and Anakin attempted to drink his water without inhaling it.

“Students? The Senator has students?” But what about the Rule of Two? Sith were only meant to have one apprentice, not multiples.

“Lord Vader’s a scholar and teacher,” Ben interjected. “A lot of parents sent their kids to his Academy to help them develop life skills beyond what traditional schools could offer. Having Lord Vader accept tuition is very prestigious.”

Anakin’s squinted and caught a word. “Sent? They aren’t sending them anymore?”

“No, Anakin, not anymore,” Luke grimly shook his head. “Not with those two idiot Sith Lords running around killing everyone and trying to start a war. No respect for anyone, let alone Lord Vader’s humble work.”

Sith Lords.

Sith.

Lords.

The plural. There were more than two! Vader at least, plus two others. Why would there be three Sith? Why was the servant of a Sith complaining about other Sith? Sith were known to fight amongst themselves, but why now?

He should’ve asked more but he couldn’t. This was beyond him. Beyond his knowledge.

Anakin distantly remember thanking his hosts, before he hitched up his robes and sprinted towards the hangers.

He really hoped no one saw him trip on that accursed rug a second time, as he slid halfway down down the corridor before finally finding his feet.

Shmi didn’t have a lot of questions for her new employers. Lady Alarnaa was positively saintlike despite her ritualistic face paint and voluminous folds of black fabric. She had softly explained that it was part of her Apprenticeship and once she had “graduated”, she would be able to strike her own path through the Order. Gentle, with the grace of a lady fit for any court with her most strenuous orders being phrased as the most delicate of requests, neither Shmi nor any of the other workers really had any complaints towards Lord Vader’s students.

Complaint was too strong a word, though words were had about Jacen and his ever growing stockpile of weapons, ships and explosives that had been piling up around the palace (or Planetary Department, as it was now known). If it weren’t for the volatility of his… interests, Shmi would’ve been tempted to call it teenager clutter. If the teenager in question had a taste for weapons of mass and imminent destruction. Then again, her son had a keen interest in podracing as a human no less, so she supposed she couldn’t be too judgemental towards him.

The others were not so much meek as they made themselves scarce, quietly and dutifully carrying out Lady Alarnaa’s orders and requests. When those were finished they made themselves available to the other ground staff attempting to wrangle the carnage Jabba’s political departure had left behind. Often, it involved a great deal of “lightsaber diplomacy” as Jacen had delicately phrased it, while he disposed of a rather large pile of scorched limbs and associated bodies of visiting bounty hunters.

One of the students was still missing from Shmi’s acquaintance, the boy by the name of Ben. Ben, the children told her, had been sent with Lord Vader to Coruscant to attend to him while he conducted his Senatorial duties. Shmi was sure, that like the other children, that Ben would have no problem advocating his own personal form of lightsaber diplomacy along with Lord Vader. It was self defence, after all, and nothing to lose sleep over.

Though, Shmi did have to wonder about the ages of Lord Vader’s students. They were all children, clearly, but from what they said, Lord Vader had offered to hone their unique gifts and the parents had willingly sent them for teaching. There were no signs of coercion that she could sniff out. From what she could tell, Lord Vader was much beloved by his students, even if they did occasionally complain about his quirks and profound, sometimes excessive, love for his academic field. If it wasn't for the variety of species taken under his wing, Shmi could've mistaken him for a doting parent.

Not that Shmi could blame the man for his... passion in dealing with the criminals surrounding their system more expediently. She was beginning to see his point of view as yet another small fleet of Hutt retained bounty hunters descended on their position. A message drowned in static filled the screen and Core tinged Basic. “Surrender Vader or we’ll blow your palace to hell and back!” Unimpressive, if Shmi did say so herself. They didn’t even seem to realise that Vader wasn’t even on the planet and hadn’t been there for some time.

Lady Alarnaa smiled beatifically as she gazed over Shmi’s shoulder at the transmission. “Kill them all.”

One Hutt ship took a single ion pulse from the newly installed cannon mounted on the ex-Hutt palace and immediately plummeted from the sky. Perhaps if they had been slightly higher in orbit when they’d hailed Lord Vader’s student, they would have drifted and perhaps regained enough power for an emergency landing. In atmosphere though, they had no prospects and Lord Vader’s secretarial office collectively winced as the security mics truncated the explosion as it bounced off distant canyon walls.

And, as the cannon recharged. More followed. Explosion after explosion. Ship by ship fell from the air and Shmi could almost swear she heard Jacen’s distant cackle.

All in all, it was another peaceful day on Tatooine. The suns were bright and Tatooine was littered with valuable scrap as the Hutts generously donated their resources to the Tatooine natives.

Not quite the reparations Shmi had in mind, but she would take them anyway.

It was a perfectly standard day on Coruscant. Dirty, dripping with sentient excrement from the bowels of its own underbelly. From what Uncle Luke said, this was Coruscant’s perfectly average day of affairs. Or would have been if sautéed Hutt employee hadn’t whistled past the nose of a passing Jedi. Said Jedi was now a vaguely green colour. Ben made a mental note to himself for future intimidation purposes.

“My apologies, Master Jedi, I’m afraid I’ve been remiss with my janitorial duties,” Luke drawled in a threatening tone Ben could only aspire to match in the most whimsical of his dreams. “I will be more careful in future.” And without another word, Ben followed his uncle’s lead and stalked past the still gormless Jedi. Don’t make eye contact. Don’t pause. Don’t give them an in. Don’t give away that no one here is actually a Sith Lord. Not that Luke seemed to be having any trouble with the lattermost requirement. Luke stepped into the role like an old pair of shoes. How unfortunate for grandfather that his son’s desire to be a Sith Lord was decades too late. Luke clearly excelled at the field. No wonder grandfather was so disappointed by Uncle Luke's refusal.

“Wait!” The man called, his dreadlocks flying through the air as he turned and hurried after them. “That blade! Are you Lord Vader?”

Luke wasn’t bothering to slow his stride. “And if I am?” Ben marvelled at the vocal execution. The smooth snap of indifference that may as well have physically slapped the Jedi from how the man recoiled. Pure perfection.

“The Jedi Council have summoned you to a meeting!” The man blurted out, now hurrying after them.

“What the Jedi Order wants or does not want isn’t really my problem, Master Jedi.” Another blaster bolt hurtled towards Luke from a balcony only to impact and fade away on a gloved hand. In response, Ben watched his uncle haphazardly toss the red blade and moments later heard an echoing scream and a soft splat of impact. The blade returned and Luke sheathed it with an entirely unnecessary flourish.

The Jedi’s jaw was once again firmly hanging open.

“It-it’s of a matter of importance!” Ben almost felt sorry for him at this point. Luke had absolutely no intention of making life easy for the Jedi.

“Important to whom, exactly? It’s certainly of no importance to me. I have no need of any Jedi or their assistance,” Luke sneered. “To the contrary, I would rather Tatooine’s trade partners leave our negotiations without lightsaber wounds or other forms of grievous bodily harm.”

“That’s not-”

“-How about the nine year old who came to the rescue of Naboo because the attending Jedi lacked sufficient engineering credentials to understand the operation of a droid command ship?” Luke queried. As he stepped through the alley, he twitched and another sharpshooter was dragged to their doom. “So many assassins, Master Jedi! The centre of the Republic and it's overrun by filth and weaklings.” A bit much in Ben’s opinion, but they were Sith Lords and Sith Lords, according to the Sith Temple, were all about… well force (though Ben rather personally thought the Sith took “use the Force!” Far more literally than anyone’s teachings could have suggested). That suited Ben and Luke perfectly fine while they were negating the final years of a failed galactic government. Certainly, they’d need a great deal of force to derail Palpatine’s plans for galactic domination.

“Do you have to kill all of them?” The Jedi snapped, stepping to the side as a body landed where he’d been standing. Luckily, he hadn’t noticed that Luke had levitated said body to his exact position for that express purpose.

“All of those men were already sentenced and given death sentences in other parts of the Republic, Master Jedi.” Luke flourished, neatly decapitating a man with a vibroblade who’d lunged at him from around a blind corner. “Unless of course you are suggesting that the sum of the Republic may ignore its constituent parts?”

The Jedi flailed, before he ducked and Luke’s blade neatly sailed through the air where his head had occupied to bisect the bounty hunter behind him. “What is this!?” The Jedi snapped, igniting his own blade.

“I believe, Master Jedi, the phrase you are looking for is thank you. Unless of course the Order has been remiss in teaching its Padawans elementary courtesy.” In a billow of black, Luke stalked even further away from the speechless Jedi. “Though given the Order’s new predication toward slavery of its unworthy, perhaps you’re merely taking a leaf from our book of educational learnings.”

Carefully a step behind Luke, Ben rounded the alleyway’s corner with his uncle and withheld a low whistle as a truly phenomenal cackle emerged in response to the Jedi’s scream of outrage.

Ben had so much to learn.

Chapter Text

Padmé watched.

An explosion that was no longer an explosion. A ball of superheated plasma sat suspended in the space her cruiser once occupied. Sat patiently while Cordé and her escort hurriedly evacuated from the area. Sat patiently while they rushed by a hooded figure who nonchalantly flexed a mailed hand into a fist and the ball of plasma disappeared into nothingness. As if it never had been in the first place.

Lord Vader was even more fearsome than his debut Senatorial address would have him appear. Fearsome and, seemingly, terribly bored by an entire delegation almost being obliterated by assassins. After the burning ball vanished, his easy and unnatural strides brought him into step with the fleeing delegation. “Senator Amidala, I see you have made yourself ever popular with the warmongering dregs of senatorial society.” Except Lord Vader wasn’t speaking to Cordé, his elaborate masked features were entirely on Padmé’s own even in her dress of an aide. Tatooine’s newfound Senator gracefully inclined his head in what might have been a bow towards her. Padmé did her best not to trip over the gawking Panaka. Panaka whose security training at no point had ever contended with a cordial Sith Lord. The Jedi certainly hadn’t and she’d been contacted in a mad panic as they informed her that her security should make preparations in the event that Lord Vader was linked to Maul. To the contrary, Padmé had little doubt that Maul would’ve keeled over dead if Vader merely glanced disparagingly in his direction, such was the difference in their raw demeanor.

“Lord Vader,” Padmé gasped as they entered shelter. “I’m surprised to see you as our greeting party.” An understatement, of course, but she doubted Vader needed any elaboration as to why devouring an explosion would be surprising. Perhaps Jedi she would have expected given the upheaval over the Military Creation Act, but not Vader with his own bloody war against the Hutts. Vader was not who she was expecting on this landing pad. Unless she happened to be a Hutt, then she was sure Vader would’ve been an eager recipient of their arrival. Followed by Lord Vader granting an infamous priority departure to the clan member.

The infamous Lord Vader, who by all estimates, had a military of his own on the cusp of removing Nar Shaddaa from the painful throes of existence in a storm of fiery plasma. Though Padmé imagined the cusp to be rather literal, given that Vader had somehow managed to blockade the entire system in the space of a Centaxday. How much of that was due to his military presence and how much was due to the sheer amount of debris from the constant stream of reinforcements minced by plasma fire was pure speculation. The fact remained that nothing would be coming or going if it wasn’t affiliated with Vader’s fleet. Where the fleet had come from was a mystery for the ages, because the designs of the ships had many an engineer scratching their heads in a manner considered unprofessional. Lord Vader’s fleet was as much of a mystery as the man himself.

“You’ve been making waves, Senator. When the Military Creation Act was proposed, one could hardly imagine that it referred to the militant attitude of its proponents.” In spite of Vader’s reputation, there was a certain amount of respect Padmé held for Tatooine’s Senator as sarcasm positively dripped from him. “It’s almost as though they’re unwilling to engage in discourse. Whoever would have suspected the Senate was not entirely honest in their demands for a peaceful resolution.” Respect because Vader was at the forefront of any and all discourse across a variety of topics even while he slowly snuffed out the fading embers of the Hutt empire. While the man’s violence and recordings of him showering entire worlds with the blood of his enemies, Padmé could in no way say he wasn’t equally dedicated to his diplomatic duties.

Padmé nodded shortly. “My rivals in the Senate are eager to see a swift resolution to the Separatist crisis, regardless of the cost to life.” The sooner she was dead, the sooner they had one last advocate stalling the procurement of an army.

“More eager to fill their silk lined pockets with the bacta, blasters and other war profits,” Vader drawled and Padmé outright stopped to stare, feeling Panaka slam into her back with a grunted curse word. “I doubt that life of any kind factored into their considerations unless it’s a form they can sell.” She outright turned to stare as Vader’s thinly concealed contempt for slavers washed over their party.

“You oppose the Act, Lord Vader?” Padmé arched an eyebrow. It was difficult to imagine that someone of his reputation would oppose an act that would, presumably, see him granted even more power in resolving the crisis. Then again… why would he have any need for the military of the Republic when practically overnight he’d recruited a formidable fleet of his own? They called it Death Squadron in hushed, timid whispers and indeed it brought death to all who dared trade slaves in the domain of Vader. Death Squadron, Vader’s personal avatar of destruction blotting out of the sky of all those who dared to oppose him. No, the Republic gathering their own naval might would indeed to be contrary to his own interests.

“Certainly, Senator.” Vader casually waved a hand and in a comfortable diplomatic dead spot, Padmé allowed her metaphoric jaw to drop. “I fail to see the need for a dedicated military when I alone am more than capable of resolving this… diplomatic irregularity. More specifically, I lack confidence in the Jedi and their capabilities in enacting a suitable military campaign.”

“What is your issue with the Jedi?” She did her best to conceal the defensive edge that threatened to overtake her. The Jedi had helped save her world and were peacekeepers on many others. While the Sith inherently had conflict with the Jedi, Vader was a different breed of Sith. Not at all like Maul who relentlessly hunted her. Maul hunted. Vader merely provided a noose and patiently awaited it tightening around the necks of his opponents as he slowly smothered the life from them. Or he took the literal path and simply strangled them without so much as lifting a finger. That too was in his nature.

“Ah, Senator, I’m sure you’re familiar with the Jedi as peacekeepers.” Vader’s hissing crackle made Padmé hair stand on end. “Though their record in this area is… regrettably lacking in much keeping of the peace. They are simply not equipped to manage the logistics of large scale conflict. My expertise in this area affords more permanent and expedients methods of dispute resolution.” Such as glassing planets from orbit and laying waste to entire battalions on his own, Padmé could only assume.

“Yes, Lord Vader, your methods of dispute resolution have been a source of much discussion within the Senate.” And the military. And the criminal underworld. And the general public. And especially the Jedi who were frantically attempting to arrange a meeting with the Sith Lord who, by all accounts, was booked out a full decade in advance. It’d take a miracle for the Jedi to arrange a face to face of any kind with Vader, unless it was one he himself arranged. It didn’t take precognition to know that such an event would end poorly for the Jedi.

“I am pleased that my Apprentice and myself have brought peace and order to so many chaotic patches of Republic space,” Vader practically purred. “Considering his less than desirable upbringing, his progress has been remarkable.” It was all Padmé could do not to trip over an ornamental vase while her delegation murmured behind her. Unless she was mistaken… that sounded suspiciously like pride for his apprentice who was just as much a bane of Hutt existence as his master. It was rather peculiar when Padmé had been led to believe that an Apprentice was merely a servant, instead of… instead of whatever emotion it was that hovered around Vader. It certainly hadn’t been part of the warning provided by the Jedi.

Instead, she settled for the old fallback. There was a phrase much used in politics for these situations. “You must be very proud of him.” Tactful, to the point. At no risk of causing offence.

“Indeed, I’m proud of all of my children. We have achieved much together.” Padmé nearly buckled under the force of Vader’s fondness.

And Padmé felt the air leave her lungs in a rush of air while she forced herself to stay relatively in step with the Sith.

Children.

Children, a plural.

There was more than one child.

The Apprentice was a child.

Lord Vader had more than one child.

Were they all his?

Did the Jedi know there was more than one Apprentice?

She dragged herself back to reality as Vader, ever the gentlemen when not mulching his enemies beckoned for her to proceed ahead of him. “Come to think of it, Lord Vader, where is your young associate?” The Apprentice who was never far from Tatooine’s representative was again almost more of a mystery than the senator himself. No one could recall the boy ever speaking or communicating with another sentient. He was there, a background shadow to Vader’s conduct within and outside senatorial walls. Until his shadow took form and then the link between them was clear.

“My Apprentice is undertaking a short chore. He will be with us momentarily.” Lord Vader concluded with a quiet chuckle that made her entire delegation recoil.

Yes, Padmé was quite sure that anyone who ran afoul of the Apprentice’s blade would be quite short by the time he was done. And inexplicably, as if he could read her mind, Vader began to laugh.

Chancellor Palpatine was elated by the survival of Senator Amidala and offered his heartfelt sympathies. How terrible it was for a Senator so dedicated, so young, so gifted a speaker to be targeted by nefarious forces who strived to squash down her vote. He would investigate thoroughly and bring the wrongdoer to justice.

“It’s such a shame that the assassin wasn’t found by security,” Palpatine simpered. And with the amount he paid them he demanded perfection. Fett was the ideal candidate for the plan to finally bring down the Jedi Order and was paid appropriately for his role within it.

Darth Sidious on the other hand quivered as Vader’s attention focused again on him alone and a mailed fist coiled itself around his ribcage and squeezed. An abyss edged with amusement and highlighted with a delicately waggling finger.

Oh no, Lord Sidious, the hissing, poisonous drip whispered. Perhaps the Jedi Order fell for your insipid, simpering display, but you’ll have to do better than that here.

Sidious withheld a whimper as the Dark honed itself into a locus around the unknown Sith. A whirlwind of whispers of the suffering to come at the hands of the other Sith. The other Sith who made no attempt to hide his nature. Who was accepted, who held power the Jedi couldn't ever hope to touch.

Then three bodies fell from the ceiling that was empty only moments earlier. Two with a THUD and third landing casually on his toes. His bounty hunters lay there moaning, hearts still beating but the stench of burnt flesh and the blackened streaks of lightsaber wounds were unmistakable. They had taken on the Apprentice and suffered a calamitous loss. But they lived. Lived so that Vader may make use of them to his own ends. Sidious bristled with a rage that would spell instant death if it was ever released.

“Master,” the mild sounding boy bowed to Vader. “I have retrieved the would be assassins for you.” For they hadn’t managed to assassinate anyone, had they? Not with the other Sith Lords ready, waiting, expectant, aware of what was to come. As if they already knew how Sidious wanted it to end.

“Most impressive, my Apprentice,” Vader clasped a proprietary hand around his Apprentice’s shoulder in a manner that had Sidious cursing his own Apprentice's lackings. “I take there are no objections to me questioning your would be assassins Senator?”

“None from me, Lord Vader,” that accursed girl curtseyed to the Vader and Vader returned it with a graceful bow befitting royalty more than a Senator.

“Excellent, I am much obliged.” Light. Casual. As if nothing could touch and at this moment in time, nothing could, not even Sidious himself.

And the Dark Side merely laughed while Palpatine stewed and watched helplessly as the core template for his clone army and his subordinate were constricted by Vader’s telekinetic grip and floated away, gasping for breath. Cackled while Palaptine was forced to smile at his own impending demise.

It didn’t escape Padmé that years ago during the invasion of Naboo that she’d criticised the Senatorial committees that waffled while her planet burned. Stuffy old men who cared more for their wealth than the facilitation of the Republic. Now, it was only becoming more obvious in other committees she sat upon, but this one was free of those familiar faces. Instead Bail and Mon’s face’s were angled into careful expressions of capitulation fitting for the Senate Intelligence Tabular Hearing which was newly formed and, oddly, only opened to a select handful of Senators who’d been invited to the committee. Naturally, being so select, all of them had immediately agreed if only to see the purpose of such a secretive committee.

The reasoning became clear when Lord Vader and his apprentice swept into the room and the committee’s three nominated members fell into a hush as the fourth joined them.

“Fellow Senators,” Vader greeted in a hissing whisper and bowed in a manner that lifted the hairs on Padmé neck. “I am pleased to see you all answered the call of duty. Today we attend to discuss a… fringe matter, but an important matter no less.”

“I confess that the name of this committee is non-indicative in its purpose,” Padmé allowed. “I take it we are here for explanation of its purpose?” Whatever purpose it had would be aggressively pursued. Lord Vader wasn’t one for half measures or platitudes as Chancellor Palpatine had discovered. Vader preferred to hang his problems from the nearest available set of rafters as an example to everyone else.

“To commence, an explanation of the purpose of this committee,” Vader waved his hand and Padmé was greeted with a holographic explosion of plotted data, graphs and numbers that screamed forensic accounting. “The purpose of this committee is to conduct an audit into the finance provided to the Jedi Order through Republic channels and to determine the efficacy of this funding.” Padmé held it together, but beside her Bail and Mon’s jaw’s were hanging open. “If they are to act as peacekeepers on the public purse, then the public should expect a degree of reassurance that their funding is being used effectively.”

Three jaws dropped.

“You can’t be serious,” inched out of Bail, almost without his own consent. “Auditing the Jedi? Why would the Senate be interested in such a thing?”

“Oh, rest assured Senator Organa, that my commitment to this task is greater than the Jedi’s own. Perhaps if they had engaged upon these matters with more interest, my involvement wouldn’t be required,” Vader coldly assured Bail and Padmé had the strangest impression of sincerity. “For you see Senator Organa, the Jedi Order has not been audited or risk assessed since the Ruusan Reformation. For so long as they dine on the public purse, they too must be held to public account. I submit my expenses for public perusal and so too should they.” Ah yes, Lord Vader’s distressingly blunt expenditure outlays were documents of proverbial legend for Padmé own accountants. There wasn’t a single cent not accounted for and spoke of a spartan existence wholly dedicated to Vader’s… unique form of employment that put the entire Jedi Order to shame. Vader was the leading example for expenditure disclosures and not a single member of the Senate was unaware of this fact.

The proposed audit of the Jedi Order though was uncalled for, it was outrageous, it was unheard of and unfortunately for everyone present it was also long overdue. Vader’s data streams spoke for themselves and everyone present was in fact familiar with the budget details that cycled through, data points neatly aligning themselves. There were discrepancies in the data that the Senate had long been ignored because the Jedi had their own utility that defied a casual cost benefit analysis.

Who could say with any honesty that they could divine the needs of a collective of entities connected to the supernatural whims of the Force? Who could call them out of inefficiency, waste and the irresponsible waste of credits when they were mere agents of a higher power? There were no auditors who had knowledge of the Jedi or the Force to even begin such an analysis. It was now a problem of the past when Vader stepped out from the darkness to reveal an entity that was equally as capable of strangling his way through bureaucracy of myth and legend as he was pirates and slavers. Lord Vader was connected to the Force and that alone was the most difficult part of the audit complete with the candidate volunteering for the arduous role.

Unfortunately for the Jedi Order, Lord Vader was just as personally connected to reigning in the Republic’s haemorrhaging budget as he was the Force. What a pity for them all.

Obi-Wan had a bad feeling about this and much to his consternation, Anakin didn’t seem to take any heed of it whatsoever. In fact, Anakin had an unbecoming spring in his step as they made their way towards the offices of Tatooine’s rooms. Nearly a skip at they made their way to the entrance.

“Anakin, when I warned you about the interests of politicians this isn’t what I had in mind.” Anakin had hardly anything to do with Palpatine these days, much to Obi-Wan’s relief. No, no, instead his young Padawan made “friends” with the two chief bureaucratic servants of Darth Vader and was now formally invited to dinner or lunch (paperwork permitting) at least once a week. Usually more if Vader himself was occupied. Yet, through the mercy of the Force, Anakin never had the misfortune of encountering Vader himself in the darkness addled halls of this part of the building. Obi-Wan thanked the Force for small blessings… and had a distinct feeling it was laughing at him, which did nothing to help his unease.

“Don’t be like that, master. Luke and Ben are perfectly nice people.” Anakin’s optimism was uncharacteristic and Obi-Wan could only do his best to manage those misplaced expectations.

“Keep in mind, Anakin that both of them work for a Sith Lord,” Obi-Wan gently reminded him as Anakin tapped the buzzer and they waited for entrance.

Only to be interrupted as a man around Obi-Wan’s age peaked out from around a violently opened door. “If you saw my job prospects you’d happily work for a Sith Lord as well,” the human male snorted and Obi-Wan resisted the urge to blanch. He would not be complicit in feeding the Sith’s appetite for fear. “You must be Obi-Wan!” The man beamed. “I’m Luke and the sprog you’ll see running around with paperwork twice his size is my nephew Ben.”

“Uncle, I am not a fish!” Came back a high pitched voice and Obi-Wan blinked.

“You’ll be swimming through enough of that paperwork to be one if we don’t hurry up,” Luke called over his shoulder as he gestured for the Jedi to enter. Anakin bounded over a precarious stack of documents with a practiced leap and Obi-Wan followed.

“You are busy here, aren’t you?” Obi-Wan stroked his beard, thinking of Nar Shaddaa and Vader’s ever growing blockade. Certainly, these two wouldn’t ever be short for work under Vader’s employ it seemed. Though their prospects of a social life also seemed purely limited to who could visit while they worked as he watched a young, dark haired boy who could only be Ben speed past holding a stack of flimsi twice his height.

The chief bureaucrat snorted. “You’d think this is from the wreck at Nar Shaddaa, but no, no, Lord Vader had to-,” Luke’s face twisted in a manner that triggered immediate sympathy, “-have an audit into the Republic’s expenditure.” Followed by an immediate and profound roll of his eyes that had Anakin wincing. Oh dear, yes, that would cause some unhappiness for everyone involved.

“Didn’t your boss just release his expenditure reports? I mean… I heard accountants waxing poetic about it on the holo just last week,” Anakin frowned and turned to Obi-Wan in clear confusion.

Obi-Wan did a double take. Since when had Anakin ever followed Senate expenditure reports? And perhaps a lingering expression of disbelief gave him away when Anakin glanced back over with a bob of his head. “Really, Anakin?”

“Well, ever since we had a Sith Lord elected to the Senate I figured someone should keep an eye on what he’s doing with his credits,” Anakin explained. “It’s good practice, especially since the Order thinks whatever he’s doing has to be illegal.” Because, to the shock of the Order, simply being a Sith Lord wasn’t enough to arrest someone. With the history of the galaxy it was unthinkable to Obi-Wan that it wasn’t already a law. With Lord Vader being so understandingly popular with the Outer Rim and its constituents, the opportunity for it being made into a law was long gone. No, the Jedi Order couldn't arrest someone for simply being a Sith Lord, especially not when the Sith Lord in question was a one man war waged against all of the galaxy’s slavery. It would’ve been admirable, if Lord Vader wasn’t the galaxy’s current foremost expert on brisk genocides.

“Weren’t we already keeping an eye on his finances?” Obi-Wan instead wondered aloud as he was led to a sitting area.

“Nope,” Luke cheerfully answered, dumping down one of the saddest and most well loved teapots Obi-Wan had ever set eyes on in his life. What a misshapen creation, as though it’d fallen out of its mould while hot and been given a healthy kick on the way down for good measure.

“Not that we know about,” the boy added. “And we know a lot.” With the entire Senate eating from their palms, Obi-Wan would’ve been more surprised if there wasn’t intelligence on what the Jedi were or weren’t doing.

“Why aren’t you at school?” Anakin shot back in a friendly manner. It almost felt like an in joke.

“Homeschooled,” and the boy stuck his tongue out then turned to Obi-Wan. “Uncle pays me a king’s ransom so he doesn’t have to take calls.” At least boy was receiving an education of sorts, even if growing up in a Sith Lord’s senatorial office was hardly the norm. Ben seemed better adjusted than Anakin, who admittedly, had a far harsher upbringing and clearly a lingering trauma to which he was still attached.

“And I don’t regret a single cent of it going towards that higher cause either,” the uncle in question insisted, dolling out four teacups, saucers and a healthy amount of marble cake that had Anakin drooling. “I made the cake myself, it’s excellent,” the man beamed and Obi-Wan, in spite of himself felt some of his reservations fade away. If Vader’s servants baked their own cakes and practically lived in their office as a home space, then what could the Order expect from Vader himself? Surely this had to be a trap.

“And to save time for the Nar Shaddaa audit?” Obi-Wan slipped in.

“No, we’ve been assigned a more specialised task unfortunately,” Luke sighed, fork in one hand and a pencil rapidly moving through rows in another. How very strange. Usually droids were used to audit finances, so what was it about this task that required a living person? “Not gonna have any off time for the next decade at this rate. I’ll be dead, buried and still working,” he grumbled and Obi-Wan thought of Vader’s equally dense schedule and could only agree.

“Of doing what exactly?” And the Force screamed. A shrieking wail that rent it asunder. The Force was crying out in pain. But why was it screaming? Vader was nowhere near and the tainted slime of the Dark was likewise absent. Why couldn’t Anakin hear it screaming? Anakin whose eyes widened with concern as Obi-Wan crumpled and reached out a steadying hand.

“Are you alright?” Anakin mouthed at him, but Obi-Wan only had eyes for Luke. Luke who had yet to answer. Luke who couldn't see what was happening.

“Auditing the Jedi Order of course,” Luke answered blithely, completely unaware of Obi-Wan’s escalating distress. Simply oblivious. There was no way the man was Force sensitive. It was impossible. “Lord Vader’s been pushing through reforms on transparency for more efficient spending of public moneys. He figured that the Jedi should also be doing their part in the public interest.” Pausing, Luke almost seemed to hesitate. “Lord Vader also expressed some dissatisfaction at the state of the Temple’s security and felt a review and potential reinvestment into its framework would do it some good, especially with the amount of children present if anyone were to attack the Temple.” And the Force’s keening abruptly terminated in a whimper.

“How very generous of him.” It was a trap. It had to be a trap. The event itself made the Force writhe in agony. The Council had to be told. Had to be warned.

“Someone had to do it,” Ben added, forcing a glass of water into Obi-Wan’s hand. “No one else was willing to volunteer to take care of the paperwork. It stretches all the way back to the Reformation.” Twenty five millennia of documents to sort, enough to cripple any droid without prior sorting. And Vader had inflicted it upon himself and his staff. A being that revelled in suffering.

“I would have offered to purchase you a new teapot in thanks for Lord Vader’s concerns, Luke, but I fear that too may end up as an unreasonable purchase for the Order in your audit,” Obi-Wan faintly stated.

Luke shuddered. “If it makes you feel any better Master Jedi, his Lordship is reviewing the documents as we speak and I can assure that any gifts of teapots would be duly declared.”

Obi-Wan, in a haze, heard Ben giggle and felt a distant event that would never be shatter into pieces that may as well have been grains of sand.

Chapter Text

This would’ve been so much easier if they weren’t all Sith Lords. Maul, formerly Darth, now Maul, should been an instant kill on sight for any Sith worth their requisitely evil salt. Unfortunately, Jacen and the rest of his motley crew were Sith Lords and the simple fact of the matter was that justification was the act of a Jedi, not even the most junior, intern level of Sith. Really, if they were following standard operating procedure then they should’ve already sprinted in while screaming and flailing their lightsabers like consummate professionals. But no, no, that wasn’t the case today. Namely because none of the students who’d studied Sith history (i.e. none of them) had realised that Darth Maul had been left a raving lunatic moored to a desolate junkyard for a number of years before he’d become simply Maul.

For Jacen, it was quite the predicament, because was Maul even really a Sith Lord at this point? Could you have a retired Darth that wasn’t Vader? Did the Sith Code demand that one group of Sith hunt down other groups of Sith on principle or was that a new feature of the Banites? Did different Sith ideologies technically have features or was it dogma? All great questions that didn’t have answers at this point in time. Jacen didn’t know and was struggling to allocate a suitable amount of care at this point, when Maul was carrying out his namesake on the Lydia provided picnic basket. There wasn’t much Sithly behaviour in demolishing lunch prepared by an eight year old, but Jacen was likewise sure Luke would’ve have found a means to make it work for Lord Vader. While masked. And with a lightsaber in one hand. It was Luke. He could make anything work… mining explosives not included, but everyone had their weaknesses.

Fortunately, Luke had prepared them for this occasion. A simple criteria of analysis that could and would apply to any situation that defied conventional logic. The cornerstone of Darth Vader’s senatorial debut. Five words that could answer any existential crisis that didn’t involve an Imperial boarding party.

What would Han Solo do? Killing the crazed Zabrak in front of them wasn’t a Han Solo option. There was no profit in immediately executing Maul. Killing him would in fact shut down numerous opportunities for profit, both monetarily and otherwise. Maul could be pawned off as a bounty, used as bait or… recruited… Jacen’s mind slid to halt on the lattermost idea. Recruited. Would Han Solo ally with an unstable foe to take on a larger threat? From what Luke said, he would if the pros outweighed the cons. The look on Sheev Palpatine’s face when Darth Vader recruited his former apprentice he’d left to rot? Priceless. The cons? Well, they all might die horribly if Maul came to his senses, but that was a ways off in Maul’s current state. Han Solo had risked more for less and still somehow survived his various business deals gone wrong. Namely with Luke’s intervention, but fortunately Luke was available if needed as well.

It was an easy decision compared to the previous ruminations that'd only distract Jacen from his precious schematics once they got back to Tatooine. Jacen and the rest of the students had already gone to serious efforts to hold ex-Sith down… Well, “serious” was a delicate term. Jacen had managed half of a sentence before the spider legged wreck collapsed in heaving sobs that had their entire contingent shuffling awkwardly at the entrance. Then the picnic basket had been provided and Maul was now contently sobbing into it as he had his first sandwich in years. Jacen sighed. It had to be the masks and robes that attracted these people.

Against his own personal judgement, but in the spirit of WWHSD, Jacen allowed Lydia to gently guide Maul back to their clanker of a freighter. One red hand in her tiny pale one as she excitedly dragged their rescue up the ramp of the ship, which may or may have sagged slightly on one side as they boarded.

Jacen didn’t stop to consider the ethics of using an eight year old to disincline a former Sith Lord from a massacre. Han Solo sure as the Corellian hells wouldn’t have thought twice about it either, if anything Ben had to say was right. Ben probably glanced back over his shoulder at his father in his equivalent circumstances and saw the eight year old leave with a fat sack of credits in a paper bag.

Ben was beginning to feel as though Luke’s cover being blown was a concern of the past. Absolutely no Jedi with a modicum of dignity would have believed that the middle aged man donning a pastel pink apron covered in cake batter splatter was Darth Vader. Absolutely none of them of them would have believed that Darth Vader was engaging in salacious gossip about Kuat Shipyards’ design patents with Anakin Skywalker and absolutely none of them would’ve thought that Obi-Wan Kenobi was also there making smalltalk with the Dark Lord’s nephew about his uncle's interest in baking.

There was a CLANG and Ben’s head spun around just in time to see his uncle trick shot an overflowing pan of sponge cake batter in an oven half a room away, all the while offering Obi-Wan green tea. Obi-Wan hadn’t so much as blinked at the display, let alone Ben’s grandfather who was making noises of approval while he flipped through Luke’s frilly, recipe laden scrapbook that was a matching pink to his apron.

Nope, they were probably safe. Just another day in the Office of Lord Vader, not that anyone seemed to realise that this was Lord Vader’s office. Ben shrugged to himself. Whatever worked.

Then Ben’s comm rang and he stepped into the ‘fresher to take the call while Obi-Wan lamented the state of Luke’s favourite, dented teapot. “Yes?”

“Aide, there was a discovery made on Lotho Minor that requires Lord Vader’s personal attention. Notify your superior immediately.” To anyone else, Jacen’s distorted tones must’ve dripped with absolute malice. To Ben’s superior senses though, he recognised that fraught twang of WWHSD in action and spared a silent thought for Jacen’s suffering. Such a decision wasn’t for the faint of heart. Or for anyone who hadn’t been used as a door stop from birth, really.

Clearly, Ben’s father would’ve kept Maul alive as a bargaining chip or information source… or anything else that involved money. Then something would go inevitably and disastrously wrong and Maul was launched into the wild to merrily cause havoc, while his father frantically attempted to recapture the bounty that he technically wasn’t allowed to collect on account of his own huge and outstanding bounty. That sounded about right. “My superior will be-”

- CLANG! “Kriffin’ cake. Stay. In!” Ben heard the snarl of his uncle float from a room away and caught a waft of something deliciously spongey.

“-Notified as soon as he’s available,” Ben amended, wondering how long both of their Jedi guests would delay in order to escape the inevitable weekly Council spy report on the actions of Vader’s bureaucrats. Probably for another hour or two, when it was past Master Yoda’s bedtime.

“See to it, aide,” and Jacen disappeared, leaving behind the impression of a person who wasn’t paid nearly enough for their job. Ben would have to organise a raise to his allowance.

“Uh, uncle?” Ben called out from the ‘fresher in his most innocuous tone of voice.

“What?” Luke snapped back and Ben heard his uncle whisking furiously from a room away.

“Remember that paperwork back home that we didn’t do?” Maul was going to require a small army to get through his paperwork. Artoo at least had all of the auditing records for the Jedi collated from before they’d skipped back in time. It was a matter of waiting until they had suitable plausible deniability to suggest their discoveries were an accidental find instead of one prepared earlier. Maul on the other hand, no one had seriously expected to be on Lotho Minor, let alone be legally raised from the dead on account of Jacen's rescue. The paperwork required to excuse a serial killer and assassin were going to take a full floor routine of mental gymnastics on Luke's part. Ben would’ve honestly preferred auditing the Jedi from scratch than attempting to find plausible reasons for Maul’s presence on Tatooine.

“What about it?” Was tossed back with the sounds of a splash. Ah, the sound of an overflowing cake tin.

“We kind of need to do it now,” Ben pushed, finally leaving the ‘fresher. Obi-Wan and his grandfather squinted at him over the recipe book and teapot.

“Really?” The tin must’ve flooded the oven. That wasn't a happy noise.

“Lord Vader insisted,” Ben pointed out, with an undisguised sigh. He ignored the the way Obi-Wan and his grandfather gawked at him, as though sighing at a Sith Lord’s order would cause Ben to spontaneously combust into flames. Though if Luke couldn’t manage his oven situation, they might all be in flames anyway.

And if anything ever solidified that Luke and Vader were two different people to the Jedi, it was the tortured moan of dismay Ben’s uncle made in response to that statement. Followed by him flinging his apron off in a huff and Anakin Skywalker’s suspiciously placed cough as a stream of molten batter ejected itself across the room.

Maul, formerly Darth, now Maul blinked at the child before him. A near-human of some type, perhaps? He really couldn’t say as she didn’t resemble the sort of which he was familiar. She could’ve passed for a regular human if it weren’t for her exaggeratedly long ears which didn’t sit flush with her hairline, as though they were attempting to escape from the side of her head. They bounced to and fro with each bob and weave. Maul’s eyes involuntarily tracked the motion. This particular hallucination was new. Normally they were screaming, not bouncing.

“Hi!” She said brightly, her ears twitching.

“Hello?” Maul returned, wondering if the clarity of this particular hallucination was an ill omen of what was to come. Usually, he’d have hallucinated his Master or Kenobi or some other priorly known entity. In his hallucinations, his legs also weren’t quite so… bipedal either. Maul did a double take. Indeed, there were two sets of metallic toes poking out from between the fluffy sheets that wriggled obligingly as he willed the motion.

Bipedal legs? Where had those come from? He hadn’t had proper legs for years.

“I’m Lydia!” The child bounced, her blonde hair achieving a brief moment of hang time as she did so. The light reflected at just the right angle and Maul winced from the glare. “What’s your name?”

Maul did his best to ignore her. Engaging with his delusions had never gone well previously. All of them at some point would morph into his Master who’d crow and mock him for his failures, before casting him into murky depths. This girl wouldn’t be any different. None of them were capable of providing food from thin air either.

“Are you hungry? I’ve got soup!” Maul stared. Had that always been there? It was a rather visually realistic bowl of soup and smelled correct as well. Was it a sign that his brain was engaging in such fantasies? He hadn’t even liked soup prior to the incident at Naboo. “Here, take it!”

It was shoved into his hands with gusto and Maul was left the dull sensation of the ceramic burning his hands… which meant… which meant…

“This is real!” Maul would’ve leapt to his feet if not for the fact that he was down to two, swaddled in heavy blankets, and was holding a searing bowl of liquid that would cheerfully obey the known laws of physics should he move appropriately. The girl, Lydia, was real too then, which meant that this was not Lotho Minor!

Maul would’ve cackled with glee if not for the fact that the girl cheerfully handed him a spoon in response to his moment of silence.

“I made it fresh today! Jacen said you might have trouble with solids since, ah,” the tiny child waved her hands. “My picnic basket gave you a stomach ache,” she finished lamely.

“Picnic basket?” Maul repeated, wracking his memories. “What basket?” There were no baskets he could remember.

“At Lotho Minor,” the girl nodded. “I gave you my lunch. Then we brought you back here because you didn’t look too good.” That made sense. It was unusually charitable, but there was bound to be some hapless group of souls out there led by a misplaced sense of benevolence.

“And who do I have to thank for the expedition?” Or kill rather, since the moment his Master discovered his survival, Maul would be wishing that he was still back on Lotho Minor.

“Darth Vader, Senator of Tatooine asked us to investigate a vision he had of Lotho Minor,” she answered without concern or pause.

Maul stared. It couldn’t be. “Darth Vader… as in a Sith Lord?” It couldn’t be. If Darth Sidious finally had his filthy, wretched hands plucked one by one, finger by finger, from the edge of the mortal coil, then Maul would have felt it. Felt it and celebrated as hard as one could while entirely bereft of sanity. What had happened and why Tatooine of all Force forsaken places? He asked the girl as much.

“Lord Vader ran for Senator after the disposal of the Hutt clan and was resounding in his victory,” the tiny girl explained, her hair bouncing along behind her during her animated speech. “Since then, Lord Vader has been asserting his rights as sovereign by continuing to resist the filth of the Hutts. Currently, we are in the midst of expunging Nar Shaddaa from known space with superior firepower.” Bright and undeterred, Maul wondered if the little girl had any idea of what she was saying. Though Maul had to take back his previous thoughts on the matter. Tatooine was an excellent choice when gaining power of the system was as simple as painting the surrounding region with a rainbow of enemy internal organs. Sith were uniquely qualified in such a method of dispute resolution and clearly unparalleled violence for Vader was a feature in his position instead of a hindrance.

Darth Vader… the Senator of Tatooine and this was presumably Vader’s young apprentice for her to be so aware of his status. Maul’s soul was lagging somewhere along behind him as he silently regarded her explanation of how exactly a Sith Lord had managed to free all of the slaves for political points, while the Jedi shrugged it off with the might an entire Order behind them. The term embarrassing didn’t quite encompass a Sith Master singlehandedly obliterating a crime family that had endured for millenniums. Endured at least until they’d tripped over an entity who uncaringly dropped a booted heel on the Outer Rim’s slug infestation. Clearly, Vader was playing with a more legitimately viewed form of power if the Senate had stepped back from the situation entirely. Sidious must’ve been greener than usual with envy that Vader could act openly and that he could not. Maul cracked a fanged grin that had girl smiling radiantly.

Lydia was the epitome of politeness, which did little to ease Maul. It was always the quiet ones who were the worst. “You are Vader’s apprentice then?” Maul asked, his mind drifting off elsewhere.

“Lord Vader has many apprentices,” she serenely answered.

Many apprentices. It rung neatly in Maul’s skull in the way that the rest of the words hadn’t beforehand. Many. Apprentices.

Darth Vader was not a Banite Sith.

Maybe it was for the best that Maul didn’t immediately attempt to kill his rescuers.

Chapter Text

Maul hadn’t encountered the concept of a Sith Order outside of historical texts and even then, this particular Order was wilder than anything within his imagination. As he gazed upwards, the Sith Apprentice Jacen’s maniacal laughter echoed down from above. To his right a series of explosions echoed in a closed off corridor. To his left Maul had briefly spied schematics for a monstrous dreadnought that dwarfed any of his former Master’s toys and would've had the man weeping with envy. Deeper within the building there were shrieks and with the ebb and flow of the Force, it was difficult to tell if they were screams of agony or of a far more innocuous nature. It certainly felt almost… homely.

Darth Vader’s apprentices were children. Not that it would have spared him from a fatal retaliation should he have made any hostile attempts towards his hosts. His first meeting with the most senior of the Apprentices was with Lady Alarnaa, who was in the midst of questioning a female Clawdite, was… not what Maul had expected. She sat and patiently offered the Clawdite tea and treats while the Clawdite did her best to struggle against her restraints. Without lifting a single torture implement, the Clawdite’s suffering screamed into the Force while the teenager serenely watched on without a single twitch of anything. There was a minimalistic edge to the method that had Maul nod appreciatively from a distance. Different, but the results spoke for themselves.

After their… introduction, Maul had been passed off to one Shmi Skywalker who strode through the installation as though she owned the place. Shmi Skywalker was a peculiar woman. She was not Force sensitive herself as far as Maul could determine, but it still hung around her in almost annoyed fashion. As if… it didn’t think she was meant to be present at all, before it lashed out further only to be rejected by every single other Force wielder on the premises. The sentiment was not one shared with the students.

A hatch above opened and Apprentice Jacen fell from above with a disgruntled rustle of his robes. Goggles of the like Maul hadn’t seen before were perched high on the boy’s nose.

“To business. Maul, you will be meeting Lord Vader on Coruscant to discuss your arrangements. Apprentice Jacen will escort you.” The boy in question, backed by the holographic glow of the dreadnought flicked his goggles up and responded with a thumbs up.

“Certainly, the Master has already sent word. He would have attended himself, but he has other matters to resolve before he can leave the Centre.” The Centre… what an odd turn of phrase. “We have necessary documents to facilitate the meeting, but should anything fall through…” Maul himself would rapidly fall into mutilated and unrecognisable pieces, like everyone else who had crossed Vader. Yes, that was quite clear.

As such, the trip to Coruscant was uneventful as Maul found himself paging through the backlog of galactic news, only to find his former Master preening on almost every single front page. He hurled the datapad away with a noise of disgust and spent the rest of the journey in a restless meditation, the sensation of perverse wrongness licking at every part of Vader’s apprentice then piling onto Maul himself. Vader's students were aberrations.

Maul like most people, as he later came to discover, met Lord Vader in a handful of manners, with this one being the most frequent. The still cooling corpse of the Hutt envoy had been nailed to the durasteel with no small amount of force. Various limbs and tentacles still being joined was a trick of the light as the slightest step out of perspective revealed the many fragments of a once sapient being and the shrapnel holding them in place. The selective severing of the arteries was an almost artistic touch, that reminded him of the interrogation he’d attended previously. Like Master, like student.

“Ah, Maul,” Vader murmured, his mailed gauntlet carefully wrapped around another gasping underworld figure’s throat. Threads of invisible malice clung to him more than his cloak and beside him, Vader’s chief Apprentice had a further four individuals simultaneously pinned with a bored effort. “My Apprentices have informed me of your dissatisfaction with Sheev Palpatine’s questionable instruction skills. How may I be of assistance?”

Maul froze, his jaw falling open without his consent. “You are familiar then, with Darth Sidious?” His mouth was far too dry. His words were far too weak. How could this Sith possibly be familiar with his former Master when the Jedi were so blind?

“Of course I’m familiar with the Banite filth,” and before Maul’s eyes Vader’s victim expired with a snap and fell limp to the ground. “Millenniums of knowledge and lore lost to pretenders with no understanding of scope or long term planning. We will, of course, remedy such deficiencies,” Vader hissed and one of the remaining four were dragged through the air, desperately choking for air.

“And what do you have in mind, Lord Vader?” Maul swallowed, the Dark Side was hissing and spitting furiously at the feet of Vader who was casually folding it to his will, as if it was a helpless pup.

“A great deal, Lord Maul. I have a task for you… should you choose to accept it.” The four drifted closer to the Sith Master.

“And if I don’t?” Maul fought the urge to take a step back. He was without a weapon and even if Vader didn’t draw his own there was little doubt in Maul’s mind that he’d be walking away from the experience.

Darth Vader ran a caressing hand across them as the four drifted into range and they dissolved into stains of bodily fluids that oozed across the space between them.

“I understand, Master,” emerged from Maul’s mouth without a further thought.

“Excellent.”

“Master, we… have a someone here to see you,” the Padawan might not have been wringing his hands, but the Force certainly was in his stead. It was twisting itself in furious knots around the poor boy, which was a new and exciting Force phenomenon that seems to orbit exclusively around Vader and his entourage.

Obi-Wan blinked over a datapad. “Oh? Who is it at these hours?”

“Lord Vader’s aides sir, it would appear that their office has been firebombed,” exploded out in a hurry and Obi-Wan’s stomach dropped.

Anakin was sprinting out the door before the Padawan finished the sentence. Obi-Wan could only hope that Lord Vader wasn’t a step behind them and skidded out in pursuit of Anakin.

Obi-Wan couldn’t help but think a firebombing in the midst of the audit of a Jedi was a little too convenient. The Order had nothing to hide… but perhaps another party was hiding something within the Order that they didn’t want the Sith Lord to find.

Anakin naturally had been left to babysit their refugee guests, while Obi-Wan went off and did… things that were very vague, but at the same time were very important. But his co-babysitter wasn’t someone he’d been expecting.

“Sit with you, may I?” Master Yoda sidled into position next to Anakin.

“Master Yoda, sure, providing Luke and Ben don’t have any objections?” Not that Anakin thought they would, since working for a Sith Lord had to have more risks of an imminent removal from reality than having tea with a Jedi. You’d think that the stress aspect weighed more on the Sith Lord with a hair trigger temper, but then again, they hadn’t ever been dressed down by Yoda either.

Luke blinked owlishly around a crumpet. “Sure, take a seat. Just catching Ben up on the latest since he had some chores to run during the last meeting.” Presumably that was the meeting Luke had while his newly abandoned office went up in a blaze of bureaucratic glory.

“Thank you.” Yoda slid into place as though he was meant to be there and Ben’s eyes narrowed as they darted between Yoda and the rapidly dwindling cake plate. A contest of two for who could snatch the most cake was now a contest of four and Ben wasn’t having any of it.

Luke devoured what was left of his crumpet and carried on. “I heard Lord Vader complaining about some wannabe Dark Sider sect the other day,” Luke gestured to his nephew, waving his crumpet for emphasis. “Some group of delusional morons called the Knights of Ren.” Anakin stared. What in the hells was a “wannabe Dark Sider sect” and why in the galaxy would Vader be complaining about it instead of killing it?

Anakin didn’t really need to see the subtleties of body language to see Yoda’s ears prick up. “Ohoh? News to me, this is.” Yoda was cheerfully stirring his tea. This was more intel on rogue Dark Siders than the Order had had in the last few centuries. Being given for free by the employee of a Sith Lord. Miracles really did happen. Much like it was a miracle that Master Yoda hadn't chewed him out yet.

“News to all of us. I don’t why he didn’t just wipe them all out, like he does every other mass murdering, child abducting cult he comes across.” Anakin inhaled sharply and felt a toast crumb fly down the back of his throat. Ben obligingly slapped him on the back. Well, that made all four of them, apparently who were at a loss when it came to Vader’s actions.

“What exactly is a Ren?” Ben asked, frowning at his teacup, echoing the thoughts of the two present Jedi. “I’ve heard of it, but not what it…” Ben waved a hand and shrugged. Yeah, that about summed it up.

“Ahem,” and Luke drew himself up and Anakin, without quite knowing why, was mortified. “A Ren, aide, is terminology applied by meagre minded pawns of Dark Side cultists, as they lack the simple pattern of thoughts required to call a lightsaber a lightsaber.” It wasn’t so much an impression as it was the most uncannily accurate intonation of Vader’s speech. Anakin hacked and saw Yoda struggling heroically around a full mouth of tea. It was a battle the green individual ultimately lost and Anakin obligingly handed over a bundle of napkins while Ben bit on his lip.

“Did… did he really say that?” Anakin wheezed. Clearly Jedi weren’t the only ones with disagreement in the ranks. Unlike the Jedi, it was less sugarcoating and more poisoning of barbs before they went in for the kill.

“Very blunt, Lord Vader is,” Yoda croaked, tears in his eyes. “Unaware I was of such friction.”

“That’s not even the worst part,” Luke fairly groaned and Anakin had to steady the Jedi Order’s grandmaster before he fell off his cushion. “A Ren, as far as I could tell, actually is a lightsaber,” Luke waved a hand through the air. “Of course, naturally Lord Vader was rather perturbed by the fact that none of them owned a bloody lightsaber and nor could they seemingly beat the most junior of Jedi younglings in a fist fight.” Master Yoda expertly covered up his cackle with one of the single most indiscrete cough’s Anakin had ever set ears on. “I mean, imagine being a Sith Lord and being told that a group of degenerate filth who can’t even use a lightsaber are meant to be your replacements.”

With that simple statement, so common a turn of phrase, Anakin found himself and Master Yoda in exactly that position. Imagining a Sith Lord capable of singlehandedly shredding through a fleet being taken out by a bunch of Dark Side wannabes who couldn’t even hold a lightsaber. Anakin thought he was doing a decent job holding it together, even if his teacup and saucer was rattling rather violently. Master Yoda on the other hand had forsaken all decorum to roll around on the floor as all sense of dignity gleefully ejected itself from the room with a whoop of contentment.

“Yes,” Luke nodded sagely, “that was Lord Vader’s approximate response as well. Along with a threat of grievously bodily harm to anyone stupid enough to name themselves after a lightsaber.” Luke’s voice abruptly changed to a high pitched, whining, snotty tone that Anakin had grown all too accustomed to in watching the Senate. “I hereby decree myself Kylo Ren. I don’t have a lightsaber, I don’t have a crystal so I can’t build one even if I wanted to and I don’t have enough Force Sensitivity to even put one together. And if I did have one it’d probably explode sideways because I was an idiot and broke the crystal during installation. Twice.”

Ben gagged on a full slice of cake and his uncle slapped his back intensely until it finally cleared. “Who in their mind would want to culturally appropriate a Sith Lord?” Ben wheezed. “Lord Vader must be saving them for a… special occasion.” That was code for a three o’clock visit in the morning for prescheduled stress relief, from what Anakin had heard from the local clean up crews. Vader was making a mint off of the bounty money and he wasn’t even part of the Guild. Clearly someone had informed that if the Hutts weren’t safe they sure weren’t either.

“An idiot,” Luke answered promptly and Anakin’s saucer bounced.

“The Rule of Two, Lord Vader follows?” Yoda had once again managed to reinstall himself back onto his cushion with a minimum of distress.

Luke raised an eyebrow as if Yoda had just suggested that Luke had sacrificed his first born to the Sith in question. “Huh? No no no, Lord Vader follows the old Code of the Sith. Here, I’ll write it down for you.” Fishing out a serviette from beneath the bread stack next to them, Luke scribbled onto it with the handwriting of an extremely experienced doctor.

Peace is a lie. There is only Passion.
Through Passion I gain Strength.
Through Strength I gain Power.
Through Power I gain Victory.
Through Victory my chains are Broken.
The Force shall free me.

Yoda blinked. “The Rule of Two, this is not. Older, this is and of the original Sith Order.”

“The Rule of Two?” Luke snorted. “Don’t mention that to Lord Vader, for your sake.” There was a shudder that Anakin felt.

“Lord Vader says it’s because Banite Sith can’t count to three,” Ben cheerfully added and Yoda's snicker cut through air. And that was news, because the Banite Sith had been the dominant Sith, so what had happened for a new Order to emerge that spat in the face of what was now an old tradition?

“Out of curiosity, Luke,” Anakin tentatively began, ignoring Yoda’s sudden, fixated stare. “Vader’s a Sith… so why does he target slavers and the Outer Rim criminals in particular?” Yoda’s ears drooped and Anakin was safe from intense, remedial lecturing during the debrief.

Blinking slowly, Luke gazed between the two Jedi. “Isn’t it obvious?” Nope, not to Jedi it wasn’t. The only exposure Anakin had was to the Sith attempting to bump off Naboo’s Queen, but Vader was in a league of his own.

Anakin and Yoda shook their heads. Usually the Banites targeted Jedi and hardly encouraged their servants to have high tea with them.

“Sith dominate the weak,” Luke gently explained and Anakin could feel a Force induced itch at the back of his skull. “There’s absolutely nothing in the Code that specifies who is considered weak.” Luke cracked a smirk. Anakin didn’t know who the competing Sith Master was, but he took a mental step away from them as Darth Vader’s actions had a lens of clarity thrust upon them. Vader wasn’t after the slavers at all, but the individual funding them.

Master Yoda beamed. “Stay the week, can you? Most educational, this is.” Yoda was lying. Anakin hadn't seen him laugh this hard in years and he doubted anyone else had either.

“It’ll take another week for them to renovate the office,” Ben grumbled. “And that’s a week behind schedule.”

“Ah, it’s fine, I’m sure there’s something Lord Vader can have us do here while they reattach all the doors and get off the carbon scoring,” Luke waved a nonchalant hand… as if it’d happened before.

Knowing who they worked for, a spontaneous office eruption was probably a fairly regular occurrence.

“Excellent, prepare rooms for you, I will!” Yoda practically bounced in his haste to make those arrangements.

Anakin couldn’t remember the last time the Temple had so gleefully allowed political staffers of any kind to take up residence, but then again... the Temple didn’t have any records of hosting the political staffers of a Sith Lord, let alone such friendly and cooperative Sith staffers.

Padmé stepped into the office with no small amount of apprehension, because Lord Vader was an unknown quantity at the best of times. Even her decoy was taking noticeably smaller steps. Even as they entered the far taller hooded, almost familiar figure before her remained with its back turned. “Greetings. Lord Vader stated that you would be assisting us with security,” her decoy voiced. Originally, the intent had been to petition the Jedi for their services until the threat could be discovered, but as with all things relating to Vader, it was not to pass. His Apprentice, far more softly spoken than Padmé had imagined had offered their own services at no cost or expectation in return for a favour.

“If you come to harm it will slow the work of the Committee,” what was clearly a boy had explained. “Lord Vader has made arrangements with someone intimately familiar with the methods of your would be assassins and he has offered to be your guard.” And given the sheer amount of assassins it could've been anyone, but there was an air about this moment. A hunch. All of it led to this point in time. 

The figure turned and she was met with a familiar, red tattooed face that she’d only glimpsed in the past. “You!” Burst from Padmé and her guards crowded around her and her decoy, blasters raised. Obi-Wan said he had killed the Sith! How was he here? But he wasn't going for a weapon...?

The Sith bowed, his arms neatly folded before him in mockery of the Jedi. “Me, Lady Amidala. Lord Vader has requested, as per the terms of our agreement, that I act as your security given that my former Master is responsible for the attempts on your life.” Padmé could only stare, because Maul had responded to her, not her decoy.

Padmé didn’t require any Force sensitivity to feel her entire escort flail, but her decoy’s training kicked in. “Why the sudden change of heart, Sith?” Cordé who had already escaped one attempt on Padmé’s life due to Vader’s interference.

“There is no change of heart, my Lady. Merely a change of Master and you may call to confirm as such with him. He is expecting you." And Padmé had little doubt that Vader was waiting, gleefully, to receive that call. "I am Lord Maul.” And Maul grinned, revealing every single tooth in his mouth. “Shall I elaborate on these arrangements?”

Maul, an apprentice of the previous Sith Master, now sent to undo that work by his new Sith Master. The Jedi Order would surely fall over themselves to hear of these developments, providing any of them left the meeting with Maul alive.

Chapter Text

Ben peered over his uncle’s shoulder where a sprawling chart occupied the space in front of him. “Still trying to work out why they exploded?”

Luke grunted and erratically combed his hair out of his face. “It shouldn’t have happened! I gently squeezed them so they wouldn’t struggle and they kriffin’ melted. There’s nothing in any of the holocrons about people melting if you give them an aggressive air hug.” An aggressive air hug. Ben pondered the words. Well, in theory a gentle Grip that didn’t involve crushing the subject into chunky paste could be considered a type of telekinetic hug. One the Jedi of this period likely made illegal anyway, but that didn’t mean much to a burgeoning order of short tempered Sith Lords.

It was strange, Ben had to admit. There wasn’t anything any of the students over at Tatooine could find either about criminals spontaneously melting while under a Force Grip. If Luke squeezed hard enough he could encourage just about anything to erupt into a shower of their gooey innards. Except Luke hadn’t applied that much force and a person melting was very different to a person exploding in a shower of their innards. “Could it be they were different? Physiologically?”

“They were different, because I’m beginning to think that they’re the problem and not me,” Luke huffed. “You know the bar they were at?”

Ben nodded cautiously. A bar for non-humans and all of the drinks served there had an unfortunate tendency to… melt non-humans. “It was the alcohol, wasn’t it? When you squeezed them-”

“-I must’ve been less gentle then I thought and ruptured whatever was holding the alcohol, which is what actually melted them.” That made far more sense than it should have, but this was pre-Clone Wars and pre-Empire Coruscant. The regulation of corrosives as alcohol for non-humans and near-humans took a running dive with the Empire’s non-human policies.

“You’ve never seen it before, have you?” The dawning realisation of just how much none of them knew about the past after the Empire’s purge. None of them even knew which booze could be lethal and Ben was related to Han Solo. Having a keen intuition to booze should’ve been a genetic trait and maybe it was, because one whiff had Ben occupying a safe distance while some part of the Force trilled its agreement.

“Nope, news to me. A lot of what’s drunk back in our time period is so tame it hardly counts as alcohol, according to Han.” Ben’s father would know all about declines in alcohol quality, with him a galactic leader is carting around illegal, subpar freight if it paid well enough.

“This is a problem, isn’t it?” The problem, of course, being that this galaxy had numerous Force users and various qualified Sith and Dark Side users in general. This galaxy had people who knew how it all worked with millennia of unbroken traditions. They, on the other had, had a Jedi Master who had a Sith Lord for a father and a barebones Sith Code with little to no comprehensive reference material. They were doing their best, but if they didn’t show enough to convince the current, former Sith Apprentice they had on the payroll…

“The larger problem is that Maul, and others, saw Lord Vader make people melt.” Luke hurled the flimsi down with a noise of disgust. “That means it’s going to be an expected of his Sithly powers and that’s a big deal when Force Melt doesn’t exist in any of the holocrons I’ve come across.” It couldn’t be that bad. “That includes the future ones from where we come from, even that bastard Palpatine couldn’t make people melt by thinking about it hard enough. Meaning, Lord Vader’s meant to be an innovator in the Sith Arts.” That would’ve been much less of a problem if Lord Vader wasn’t a Jedi Master pretending to be a Sith Lord. While Luke had a great deal of quality source material to reference from, actually tapping into the Dark Side to seek new knowledge? Bad. Very bad.

“So, uncle, how are you going to deal with it?” Because there was nothing in the Jedi selection of powers that had them melting people. This was firmly in the Sith area of expertise and none of them were exactly experts in developing fields of research for the opposing order of Force users.

“Force help me, I’m going to have to do some Sithly research,” Luke groaned. “Do you have any idea what it’s like communing with the Dark Side? It’s like an an abusive, crazy girlfriend who keeps trying to strangle you whenever you sleep. She slaps you, you offer her chocolate, she throws them back in your face and one wild night later you find out she stole your speeder and rode off into the night while you dealt with a bar brawl. In the aftermath, you find a slip of flimsi with a list of people who want to assassinate you and it almost makes it all worth it.” There was a distant, far off, dreamy expression that didn’t seem Dark Side related to Ben.

“Uh, you speaking from experience there, uncle?” It sounded a little bit too specific for Ben’s tastes. Uncle Luke wasn’t always Ben’s guardian and Ben was starting to resent the fact that his parents hadn’t made more of an effort before the end of the Empire, because Ben was beginning to think he’d missed out on the best parts of the last two decades. Luke’s love life sounded a soap opera plot escaped from a holo and Ben had missed it because he wasn’t old enough to remember it. Unacceptable.

“No comment,” Luke sullenly muttered, crossing his arms. “Now who can we test this on that deserves it?” Luke picked up a stylus and hurled it over his shoulder at the map behind him. It landed with uncanny accuracy.

Nar Shaddaa.

Ben and Luke exchanged a speculative expression.

“You know what, nephew mine? I think I have an idea that’ll work for everyone.”

Ben strongly doubted that, but the Hutts weren’t counted as part of “everyone” anymore. Not since Luke had done his best to legally wipe them off the Registry of Sentient Life.

There was a Sith Lord in the Room of a Thousand Fountains. Ahsoka Tano could feel his rage pooling around the room with the rest of the water. Why was she awake? Why was she here? Why… why did it feel like she was being beckoned by the hooded figure, who knelt so serenely when the Force around him boiled?

She wasn’t meant to be here. This was wrong. She wasn’t meant to be here. But she stepped forwards anyway, further into the room, further into darkness.

“Ahsoka Tano. It’s rather late for you to be wandering around at night, is it not?” The Sith purred and the smart decision would’ve been to run. To summon help, because it knew her name. In hindsight, Ahsoka did not opt for the smart decision.

She stepped closer. “How do you know my name?”

“Ah, instant gratification, what an excellent tool,” the Sith waved a hand and Ahsoka followed it to a tray of immaculately stocked cakes, biscuits and tea. “Have a seat, Ahsoka Tano, we have much to discuss.”

That set off alarm bells. Sith Lords did not recruit Jedi. At least not the ones she’d ever heard about. Still, against her better judgement, she knelt in front of the Sith Lord who waved a mailed hand.

“Tea, cake, biscuits? Appropriated from your Order’s kitchens of course,” the Sith murmured. From her own examination, it appeared as though the Sith had…

“Did you steal the High Council’s tea cart?” Her eyes fixated on the crest embossed on its side.

“No, no. I merely borrowed it without permission, with the fullest of intentions to return it once our meeting was at its conclusion.” There… was no lie in that statement. If anything, it was as though the Force was rolling its eyes at her while she lifted the offered cup. “None of it is tainted, unless you count the ambient taint of the Council itself,” was added as an afterthought. After taking a tentative sip of the proffered cup, Ahsoka could practically taste the Council in the cup. None of the lower ranked Jedi had access to this blend.

“Why are you here?” Ahsoka would’ve barked it at the Sith, but with a cup of tea in one hand and biscuits in the other, maybe it wasn’t leaving the best impression. “How do you know my name?”

“The Senate has requested that I audit the Jedi Temple and who am I to decline the call of duty?” The Sith hissed and Ahsoka shuddered but… the Force concurred.

“You’re… not lying… Why aren’t you lying?” She wondered aloud to herself.

“Because it’s my job, little Ahsoka Tano. While being a Sith has many benefits, it is not known for its inherent capabilities in amassing assets for its devotees.” The Sith’s own cup disappeared into he darkness that pooled around his face. “I am not attending this meeting in my role as a Sith Lord, but in my role as the party responsible for ensuring safety in the grounds. I would like to ask for your help in assessing OH&S risks within the Temple and reporting them back to me.”

She blinked once, twice, three times. “You just want access to the Temple’s security flaws so you can muster a force and invade,” she pointed sharply at him. “You’re not fooling me.”

“Correct.” A biscuit followed the teacup into darkness.

Ahsoka’s jaw dropped. “I’m sorry, but I’m right? Why are you admitting to this? Sith are meant to be…” Subtle. Ruthless. A shadow that lurked just out of reach. They weren’t meant to be plotting the demise of the Jedi Order within the Jedi’s most public and communal of rooms.

“So long as your illustrious Order operates as a school, it must be subject to safety procedures like any other institution of teaching.” She didn’t have to be a genius to know that the Sith Lord’s view on the Jedi teachings had dropped off a conventional scale and were plummeting corewards. “No emergency escapes, no evacuation procedures, no comprehensive security, no decentralised system for reporting incidents within the Temple, no accountability for defects in the construction itself. You have miles of ancient ruins leading below the Temple and not a single investigation team has ever investigated it for psychic contamination.” The Sith’s hand sliced through the air. “The Republic,” he leered, “provides the funding to your Order, which means you are accountable to us. So long as children live this building, you will remain accountable to us.” Chilling, unrelenting finality.

“Accountable?” That couldn’t be right. “How are we accountable to a Sith Lord?” Sith Lords were meant to take advantage of these opportunities and exploit them for more power. Wasting time on OH&S wasn’t in character for almost all of the Sith Lords Ahsoka had read about. Apart from that one who wrote a doctrine of ethics that neither the Sith or Jedi had seemed to care much about.

“I am the Senator for Tatooine, little Ahsoka Tano and the Chair of the Senate Intelligence Tabular Hearing Committee. The rest of the Committee thought it would be wise to… leverage my unique talents for this part of the investigation.” Another wave of his hand while the truth sang in the Force and a datapad drifted before Ahsoka. “On that you will find the areas that we must investigate for the Senate to be satisfied and that’s where you and your fellow children come in. Once all of the data is assessed, we will compile a report and lodge it to the Senate for recommendations to be made and any required improvement construction be sent out for tender.” The Sith’s teacup was set back at rest on the trolley. “All you have to do is note down any deficiencies that you feel are applicable and I will manage the rest.”

She could feel the slightest caress, an invisible hand stroking the side of her face and she jumped backwards to her feet. In a moment she was back in reality. This was a Sith Lord. Sith Lords did. Not. Care. About. OH&S. “But you’re a Sith Lord!” Ahsoka cried. “You’re… you’re not meant meant to care about these things! You’re meant to be pure evil! You’re meant to be tearing down the Jedi!” Sith Lords did not offer Jedi tea and biscuits at the early hours of the morning while… while the Temple Guards were suspiciously absent. Oh.

“Little Ahsoka Tano,” he crooned, “wielding the Dark Side of the Force does not impede one’s ability to assess your Temple as an OH&S death trap. After all, Sith temples are purpose built death traps and I do consider myself highly experienced in the area, from one professional to another… Do keep in mind that your assistance will save lives, even if you think a Sith Lord is incapable of such a ploy.” Sith Lords were incapable, so who and what was this one?

Without another word, the Sith Lord stood and disappeared into the growing shadows, followed by a quiet chuckle that bounced off the walls.

I’ll be in touch, Ahsoka Tano, a voice whispered into her mind. It was then she noticed the remaining tea cart.

“You liar! You said you were going to take it back!”

His laughter echoed in a non-existent breeze and Ahsoka was left with the oddest feeling that this wasn’t the standard set of emotions a Jedi experienced after an encounter with a Sith Lord.

It also occurred to her that she still didn’t know how he knew her name, while his datapad remained within her sweating hand. Since when had a Sith Lord ever wanted to save lives?

Yen Dooku was a man of culture, taste, knowledge and power, being the only Sith Lord publicly in a position of political power due to his master’s subterfuge. At least, up until this point, that’s what he had assumed given the Rule of Two. Instead, there on the holo, as clear as day, Lord Vader, Sith Master and Senator Amidala stood side by side as they delivered their report on the finances of the Jedi. Behind them, a hooded figure was cloaked in shadows. No doubt one of the Sith’s apprentices. (A Sith with multiple apprentices, clearly the line of Bane wasn’t the only one that had thrived and this one beyond his master’s knowledge no less. His master whose knuckles in the holo were a shade paler than the rest of him.)

More worryingly, a report concerning the forensic audit of outstanding Jedi funds was available and Yen had little doubt that those funds would not be found in their respective accounts. A lesser man would’ve quailed. Instead, Yen reached for the Dark Side only for its derisive chuckle to echo on a non-existent wind, before it slipped from his grasp. Only then did he quail, because in this moment the Force had abandoned him to his fate.

“It is clear from the records that the Jedi Order residing on Coruscant has never been subject to a forensic audit,” Amidala noted. “We have, of course, gazetted our findings and they were made available prior to this session. These irregularities are most concerning for the whole of the Republic.” There was a level of professionalism to Amidala’s age that did her credit. It was a shame though that she was a stalwart obstacle to their plans for the galaxy.

“Enough credits were taken to fund a sizeable military force capable of suppressing the galaxy,” Lord Vader continued. “What is most perplexing is that these funds were taken by a Sifo-Dyas, a former Jedi High Council member who had no such authorisation to utilise the funds,” the Sith audibly sneered and Yen felt himself take a step backwards away from the holo.

Oh dear.

“The Jedi have no records on file relating to the purpose of the spending. How was it that Jedi Master Sifo-Dyas accessed this funding without oversight from the rest of the Council?” Amidala gracefully motioned at a sprawling flowchart and the blood drained from Yen’s face.

“We have no knowledge of the accusations you’re levelling against us,” Mace Windu’s voice burst in as the Jedi Council’s pod entered the arena. “We weren’t provided with any of the materials shown here.” Now that was a tactical mistake on the part of Windu, as ill equipped as he was in the political ring. Lord Vader, according to his master, was fastidious in the publication of his investigations, providing of course you could interpret the coding required to read the blasted documents. As it currently stood, the amount of people who could read those publications were limited to accountants, lawyers and a small subset of diplomatic droids. Not for the first time, Yen had to wonder about Lord Vader’s background and preference for passive sadistic behaviours.

“Master Windu, while I appreciate that you are not in your element, I would assume that basic reading comprehension would be counted among the skills offered to Jedi during their teachings at your Order’s Temple.” Vader’s voice was enough that Yen half expected to see paint peel itself from his study’s walls. “I take it that the Order will investigate this unauthorised spending?” There was nothing in that question that could be construed as a request. A Sith Lord giving the Jedi Order marching orders and doing so with the Order’s knowledge! The world around Yen would’ve spun, if not for his death grip on his desk.

“It will be investigated by our own internal experts,” Windu nodded sharply at the Sith Lord. “We’re trusted with many important tasks by the Republic and this one will be no different.” Except it would be different, because this time they were accountable and they were accountable to a Sith Lord no less.

“Oh, I’m sure it will, Master Windu, but my Apprentice will offer his assistance regardless.”

The air soured in Yen’s lungs. The cloaked figure stepped forward and lowered its hood.

“Lord Maul is familiar with many forms of blackmarket procurement. He will be of much assistance to you, I’m sure,” the Darkness itself practically sang.

Yen’s eyes immediately found his master’s, with Darth Sidious’ jaw sagging in unfettered surprise as Darth Maul bowed to the Senate and Mace Windu.

No, this definitely hadn’t been part of the plan.

Chapter Text

Obi-Wan’s nose was practically sandwiched into the archive’s maps. Lord Vader was unusually helpful for a Sith Lord and the analysis taken from the captured bounty hunters he’d been entertaining clearly led back to a planet called Kamino, along with a pile of missing credits from the Order itself that seemed to orbit the general region. All of it set out in number of neat tables and graphs that had Obi-Wan wondering if the Darth had a prior background in accounting or lawyering, because there was a certain neatness to it that defied a layman’s approach to data. It was almost machinelike in approach. With Vader’s refusal to engage with banquets or the usual pomp of politics, it definitely spoke of someone who was thoroughly unimpressed with the process.

“Kamino… Kamino… Kamino… why isn’t it here?” Obi-Wan mumbled to himself, Jocasta Nu blissfully outside of earshot. “Why aren’t you on this starmap?” Planets did not tend to disappear from their archives unless…

“What if it isn’t on the maps, Kenobi? What if one of your own removed it?” A voice that sounded suspiciously malevolent taunted from behind him. An unpleasant voice to go with the thought, but a distressingly plausible thought nonetheless. They already had one ex-Jedi master who’d run off with ludicrous sums of credits and if he’d removed the planet from the map to cover his tracks, it wasn’t unthinkable by any means. Covering his tracks was the logical option.

While talking to hallucinations was usually frowned upon, Obi-Wan was running out of other creative, more mentally healthy sounding boards. Force only knew Anakin was snowed under so much Vader related media watching that he’d be able to retrospectively claim he was from an ice planet any day now. “Only a Jedi Master would’ve had the authority to interfere with the archives. But… Vader did specify that Master Sifo-Dyas had the credits traced to him and if those credits lead to Kamino, then it would explain why it’s missing from the archives. But for one of our own to engage in such behaviour?” Obi-Wan shook his head.

“Even Jedi are with flaws, Kenobi,” the voice pointed out.

“Oh, I’m aware, but you’d like to think that a Jedi Master covering his tracks had more going for him than simply deleting a star-” - Obi-Wan turned around. A dead man stared back at him, hood lowered, his arms folded across his chest.

He was hallucinating the Sith who’d murdered his master, in outstanding detail. He had to be… then his eyes panned sideways and Ahsoka Tano raised her hand in greeting. “Erm, Knight Kenobi? Master Windu asked me to bring Lord Vader’s apprentice to you to discuss the audit of the Order. He… sent you a note?” There was a helpless shrug at the end.

Obi-Wan panned back to the Sith who was expressionlessly gazing back at him. “Hello there…?” A note that Obi-Wan had missed while fussing about the archives. A note that informed him that he would be working with his master’s still very alive murderer who Obi-Wan had thought he’d killed. It was nice that Mace thought that such news could be contained in a non-urgent note, especially given the amount of paperwork that would've been filed to establish Maul as no longer being dead.

“Maul,” the Sith answered shortly. “To think that you of all people would be the one assigned to this matter,” there was a faint snarl at the end that had Obi-Wan contemplate drifting a hand towards his lightsaber.

“If it makes you feel any better, I wouldn’t have volunteered for this part of the investigation if I’d known that you were involved. I understand that Sith tend to… hold grudges over prior,” with Obi-Wan waving a hand in Maul’s general direction. “Incidents.”

“My new Master believes such grudges to be unproductive in light of targets that require a higher priority.” New Master… Well, that did line up with Vader having nothing but contempt for the other Sith Master that was menacing the galaxy. Maul was going to be on a short leash.

“That does sound like Lord Vader, he is ever pragmatic.” Ahsoka Tano was still yet to move, her eyes flicking rapidly towards between the two of them, almost as though she was asking Obi-Wan for help. “Oh, I’m sorry Ahsoka, now that you’ve delivered Maul here, I see no reason for you to not resume your normal classes.” And if a fight broke out and it resulted in lightsabers being pulled out, there was no need for a Youngling to be caught in the crossfire.

She wasn’t moving, but a frown was visibly deepening. “I… can’t do that, Knight Kenobi. Master Yoda suggested that I should… assist you with the investigation, because Padawan Skywalker is so busy with his paperwork. If anything happens, he won’t be around to help and Master Yoda said it’d help me with finding a master.” Both Maul and Obi-Wan stared in unison.

“And why would the eminent Grandmaster send a child into the depths of the unknown where my previous Master is afoot? Many other Jedi have found their master without such a risk.” Maul practically purred and Obi-Wan felt the need to dust himself off for agreeing with him.

“I’m rather curious about that myself. No offence to you, Youngling, but this is best left to the experts.” There was a derisive noise from the back of Maul’s throat.

“I don’t think he’s going to take no for an answer, Obi-Wan,” she said in a very small voice and the Force resonated with that statement. There was something missing in this situation, something that must’ve happened to Ahsoka for Yoda to be involved with this idea. That was a conversation to be had with Master Yoda prior to leaving and doing so with Maul as an eager set of ears wouldn’t be helpful to anyone involved.

“Very well, pack the essentials and I’ll send you a message with instructions on what else should be added from general supplies.” Like a set of Force restraining cuffs, in the event that Maul decided not to heed his master’s instructions.

“Thank you, Obi-Wan,” and Ahsoka fled with a nervous bounce in her step.

“She’s afraid,” Maul stated the moment she was out of earshot. “Not an all consuming fear, but a hesitation.” And the distinct sense that she was about to burst into tears. Not at all the normal response of a Youngling to their classes. Overall, Obi-Wan found himself, yet again, reluctantly agreeing with the assessment of the murderer.

“I don’t suppose you’d know if she’s had a run in with Lord Vader, would you? That does tend to make any Jedi anxious.” But Maul apparently was docile enough for Mace and Yoda to trust him in the presence of a child. Vader was quite an influence if he could compel a blunt instrument to stay its hand.

“My Master does not torment children, Kenobi,” Maul blandly replied. “Adult Jedi, Banite Sith, bounty hunters and politicians are within his sights, but Tano I doubt has done anything to draw his wrath.” That was… actually helpful and rung with truth as far as Obi-Wan could feel it, groping blindly at the Force.

“Oh good, then it's got to be another problem that I’ll have to work on while we deal with the Kamino situation. For now though, if we’re going to be making a trip, I think a supply run of our own won’t go astray.” Obi-Wan motioned towards Maul and they fell into step as Obi-Wan contemplated which ship he’d be able to borrow that’d stand up to a visit to a potentially hostile world. It was a relief that Vader hadn’t singled the girl out, but Kamino was still missing from the map. “As for Kamino-”

“-I have been provided the location, it will not be an issue.”

Jedi did not do smalltalk as a general rule. Neither did the Sith, apparently, Maul resolutely staring ahead and given their shared history Obi-Wan could understand lack of desire. That didn’t mean, of course, that Obi-Wan couldn’t make conversation about the mysterious Lord Vader’s motives and potential underlying sadism in sending over his master’s murderer for an investigation.

“Speaking of your master, where is Lord Vader these days? Off glassing some helpless planet?” Obi-Wan stroked his beard. Vader’s pattern of destruction waxed and waned, with periods of peace before tides of catastrophic devastation. Nar Shaddaa was long overdue.

“Nar Shaddaa is hardly helpless to a Jedi, Kenobi, with how many of you are mounted and displayed on the walls of Hutts,” Maul drawled and Obi-Wan made a mental note to avoid any tasks relating to Nar Shaddaa in the near future. “But when my Master is involved, yes, I suppose they are rather helpless in the face of his wrath.” Along with everyone else unfortunate enough to still be trapped on the planet when Vader finally descended with the galaxy’s most aggressive mop made of sustained laser fire.

“Doesn’t your former master have a preference for bounty hunters?” Obi-Wan wondered aloud. “I suspect they’ll be quite occupied with Lord Vader tearing through Nar Shaddaa…” He spun around and stared at Maul’s unmoving row of exposed razor sharp teeth. “We won’t be encountering any bounty hunters during our investigation, will we?”

“I very much doubt it, Kenobi. Not when there’s no Bounty Hunters Guild remaining to pay out those bounties. I suspect they’ll be finding a new base of operations since a ball of glass will hardly be fit for their business.” Indifferent almost to the point of being comical.

This was going to take some getting used to, when his “partner” for the investigation discussed the annihilation of a celestial body with the same air that most housewives discussed their favourite flavour of cheese.

Contrary to expert Jedi opinions, pioneering Dark Side experimentation was not carried out in a grand temple that swelled with the pulsing force of a Dark Side nexus. No, it was apparently carried out with a glass of whiskey and a swagger in the now burning depths of Nar Shaddaa’s finest establishments. Strictly speaking, it wasn’t being performed in line with traditional Sith values, but so long as there were results, Ben wasn’t going to complain and nor apparently was the Dark Side which seemed to be observing the entire affair with a chronically raised eyebrow and the occasional facepalm.

Lord Vader toasted his own success, for the technique was progressing beyond the expected schedule and would be a part of his immaculate legacy with no witnesses to dispute details suggesting otherwise. Communing with the source of his powers had never been a more elementary task. Eventually, all would kneel before him. He would be paramount. Supreme. Beyond reproach.

Luke Skywalker on the other hand was four tumblers into the experience and likely required a further three in order to interpret the whispers that poured from the Dark Side. “What the hell could it possibly mean?” There was a furious gesture to a limp twi’lek arm that was valiantly attempting to fuse itself with the durasteel floor as Luke glared daggers at it from across the room. “I’ve adjusted pH levels, manipulated covalent bonds, mutilated molecular compositions and done more for Sith Alchemy in the past week than Sidious has done in both of his lifetimes and it still won’t bloody tell me what I’m doing wrong.” The fact that Luke could even use Sith Alchemy was a surprise… up until Ben had discovered that much of his uncle’s technique involved hurling abuse and the Force at the object of his attention until the laws of physics and the Force complied with his demands. Then he was immediately less surprised, because Ben recognised it as the same technique regularly applied to extremely uncooperative pieces of temple machinery that had learned to regret their life choices under Luke’s care.

“Uh, doesn’t Sith Alchemy normally manipulate the midichlorians themselves?” Ben glanced down at his datapad which was covered in a protective bag and he flicked off a piece of errant tissue. “It feels like it might need a more mystical approach to finalise the technique.” It would be a frosty day on Tatooine before Ben ever said the term “Force Melt” out loud.

“Sith Alchemy is inefficient and relies on the work of simpletons who never mastered a basic physics class,” Luke snorted and sheared through a bounty hunter that was mid-flight. “If we’re going to develop a new power, we may as well do the job properly. After all, Lord Vader is meant to be running a school and there’s not much point in engaging in R&D if you can’t pass it on to your eager students.” In a sentence, Ben felt the entire Banite affiliated section of the Dark Side convulse as though Luke had deployed a backhand.

“Darth Bane is going to be rolling in his grave,” Ben muttered under his breath and felt the unnatural shadows hanging off his uncle nod fervently.

“I may have made a mistake,” Luke announced and Ben eyed what was left of the Nar Shaddaa bounty hunting cantina suspiciously. While his uncle was making progress, there was a disturbing lack of uniformity in the quality of the melted sapient that was now in place of the bar’s clientele. There was also a noted lack of the usual artistic flair that was normally associated with Darth Vader and the consistency of the residual goo was flat out wrong. Chunks of bone, cartilage and other undesirable impurities hampered the residual goos, but with every Hutt employee there was improvement.

Fortunately, Jacen was on standby on the brazenly named Executor, eagerly awaiting the orders to glass the area once they’d left to erase any evidence of development. With the amount of mining explosives Death Squadron’s fleet of ex-slaves had confiscated from their previous masters, there’d be very little munitions expenditure so much as a dumping of surplus… stock. For how many secret spice mines they’d uncovered, it was an economic miracle that spice still had any demand associated prices when supply managed to far outweigh demand. How the prices hadn’t crashed through the proverbial floor of the galaxy was a rumination for another day.

“I still see some skull in that pile, uncle,” Ben added, pointing over at the skull in question as an undissolved eyeball slid loose with a wet splat. Slowly but surely they were seeing the same consistency Maul had witnessed in the Acid Incident. For being a Sith skill in the making, there was a great deal more meticulous concentration about the correct atomic structure of what they were melting more than there was emotional outbursts. Maybe it was less Sith Alchemy more Dark Side Science, but Ben could only speculate. He was a Jedi in training, what did he know about the various Sith fields? About as much as Luke did from the amount of profanity he’d heard. Uncle Luke was fluent in Huttese, who knew? At this rate he was going to be the only one left who could speak the language.

“No no no, not this, I mean the Maul situation. I think Obi-Wan killed Maul back in our timeline,” Luke stated so blithely that Ben almost slipped on a displaced spleen as they made their way to a barricaded room. “I think I’ll have this down pat before we leave, no worries.” The Dark Side hissed approvingly and Luke casually flipped it off while still downing a tumbler. “Don’t you look so smug, I’m not the one who folded faster than Han on a sober week because they were offered modern knowledge of applied physics. For all the superweapons you bastards made, I can’t believe you haven’t had anyone recent who even had a passing interest in proper engineering methodologies.” It was okay. It was fine. His uncle was calling the Dark Side, a Force of nature, ignorant and uneducated and by all accounts it agreed with him. He could do this, because having Luke metaphorically slapping and kissing an intangible tentacle monster that only existed at a conceptual level still made far more sense than the voices in his head ever did.

“And you sent Maul to work with Obi-Wan?” Ben’s incredulous stare didn’t do much good behind a mask, but thank the Force there was a benefit to them both being telepathic.

“I forgot,” came back so lamely Ben almost dropped his idiotic lightsaber.

“You forgot.”

“In all fairness, the amount of Sith Lords Obi-Wan burnt through wasn’t high on my priority list. I was more worried about them having problems on Kamino.” A wave of a hand and the barricade to the next section of the buckled inwards. Another twitch everyone’s blasters were hurled sideways. Another gesture and the sixteen odd bounty hunters were dragged shrieking into the centre of the room. A clench of a fist and the locus exploded in a shower of fine, gooey innards.

“So… what exactly are they going to find on Kamino, then?” Ben frowned, shaking rainbow goo from his gauntlets, noting the much smoother consistency and the Dark Side’s mild noise of interest.

“The clones, I’d presume,” Luke hummed, pointing his hand scanner at the still spreading mess of ex-bounty hunters.

“Clones? What clones?” Ben blinked. Sure, there’d been the Clone Wars, but they weren’t the same clones, were they?

“From the Clone Wars. You don’t know about them?” When Luke turned to incredulously face Ben and Ben could’ve sworn he saw a shadow mirror the action with him. “What were they teaching you at school?”

“About the Empire?” Ben shrugged. And politics. And more politics. And further politics. None of which had been useful up until this point due to Luke’s presence. The Clone Wars was more of a “and this is what we had before the Empire” one line sentence before it delved into the Empire. Palpatine hadn’t left much behind of the Clone Wars that was applicable as teaching material.

“Kriff the Empire,” Luke cackled and pumped a fist. “The Clone Wars were where it was at, huge armies of droids and Jedi kicking the poodoo out of each other with extreme prejudice. The clones were highly trained armies made by the Kaminoans (I’d presume) and used as general troops for the Grand Army of the Republic. The Jedi acted as general and commanders for the clones due their Force abilities. On the other side, the Confederacy had droids that were ordered around by military veterans.” While Luke spoke, Ben was struck by the image of a Jedi sprinting in, swinging their lightsaber wildly through a mass of machines. “It made our war look piddling in comparison and we’re just in time to see the real deal.”

Okay, Ben had some concerns about his uncle at the best of times, but being in the middle of a droid vs Jedi galactic death match? “So, uh… where are we going to be during this war?” Oh no.

“In the middle of it, of course. You can’t expect peace keepers to do the job of professional soldiers and there’s where we lend our expertise.” Luke laughed manically and practically skipped from the room.

For the first time in a long time, it occurred to Ben that Luke was still his father’s son and both incarnations of Darth Vader did their best bathed in the bloody red glow of a live battlefield. It was also no coincidence, Ben was certain, that both of them were war veterans who had an extensive history of concussions during their tours of duty.

Chapter Text

Asajj had swiftly learned that in order to be an effective acolyte of a powerful Sith Lord, that one must be prepared at all times. No matter her mood, no matter her personal feelings, no matter the situation, she must be prepared for all eventualities at any possible time. Nothing would stand between her and her missions for Count Dooku. Jedi intervention was an expected part of that preparedness and it was only a matter of time before their meddling became problematic for Count Dooku. She was prepared for Jedi. Jedi were the inevitable outcome. But this? This was not covered by Dooku’s training.

Asajj Ventress was not prepared.

Darth Vader flowed through the ragged hole in what remained of a small time gang bar. A wraith lightly padding through an accompanying sea of multicoloured gore that rushed in at his ephemeral feet. More gliding shadow than tangible entity, a haze of darkness draped over him. A bounty hunter’s hand grazed Vader as he passed his state slid smoothly from a solid to a liquid. The Force didn’t so much scream as there was a penetrating silence, as though the Dark Side itself had personally leaned over and slammed two hands over her ears.

She couldn’t move, those invisible hands clamped around her as one by one the occupants resisted and dropped into primordial ooze. The bartender, with a blaster extended towards the approaching shadow, clawed a hand towards her. “Hel-”, before terminating abruptly. His entire form convulsed once and pooled into a uniform slime that joined the rest of the writhing mass that inched along the floor with its Master. Asajj couldn’t look, but nor could she look away.

Vader glided to a halt and his Apprentice stepped out from his shadow. “Deal with the rest.” Yet none of what she’d seen compared to what dripped from his speech.

“Yes, Master.” Asajj wasn’t sure if it was a split second or an eternity later when she heard blaster fire, a lightsaber ignite followed by shrieks of terror while the Dark Side purred its contentment.

“Ah, Asajj Ventress. I am pleased to make your acquaintance.” It wasn’t a voice befitting a politician. Dooku spoke with decorum. Vader… Vader spoke as though every word was lined with razor wire that carefully wrapped itself around his victims.

With some effort, Asajj managed to force her own mouth to shift. “You must be Lord Vader,” she gasped through gritted teeth. “I’m afraid…” And how. “I’m afraid I haven’t heard of your apprentice.” Another blood curdling scream and Asajj shook. Vader’s apprentice was already terrifyingly competent. He had no need for an acolyte, surely? There was only one way this meeting was going to end.

“Ah, my Apprentice is but a sprout yet to flourish. His time will come.” There was a genial wave of the mailed hand in the direction of said apprentice. “But we are not here to discuss his progress, as admirable as it has been.” For the moment, the haze lifted and Asajj was deluged in fondness, a wave of approval for his apprentice and her heart ached, then she shoved the feelings away. This was no Jedi and Vader would readily feed on her weakness to further sustain his own monstrous strength.

“What interest could you have in me?” She would’ve snarled it at anyone else. Instead, Vader’s preemptive cackle stripped her intent before it could manifest.

“I am familiar with the Nightsisters.” Another tremble, but she couldn’t move. Her lightsabers were stubbornly refusing to answer her call. Of course he knew the Nightsisters. “Or, rather, I was familiar with one before her unfortunate demise and the tales she shared were most remarkable.” Truth, which only served to have Asajj struggle harder against her bonds. Nightsisters rarely left Dathomir. For Vader to encounter one… “Perhaps I can show you what she showed me.” Without any way of moving, Asajj could only silently scream at the approaching hand.

Vader’s gauntlets cradled her face and Asajj dreamed without dreaming. Dathomir burned in a bloody haze of lightsabers and blaster fire. Droids marched upon her homeworld and it burned until all that was left was a void where her people once lived. A handful of them left in squalor, before they too left and Dathomir was left to the wildlife and the fading whispers of its tombs. Then he let go and she breathed in a malaise.

“Such were her visions, Asajj Ventress. Your world and people burning at the feet of the Banite Sith.” The only thing preventing her collapsing to the ground was Vader’s own embrace. “Crumbling to ash at the behest of Darth Tyranus. So weak, so pathetic, so desperate to appease his Master that your people were culled to buy him precious moments.” There was no lie in the statement and it sapped her strength further. “You will be sacrificed to appease little more than a withered husk, that Dooku is fool enough to call master.” To be used and thrown away… again and hatred might have burned, but so cold was the Sith before her that she couldn’t feel her hands let alone anything else.

“I…” She was fading, being consumed by the wave of malice that he brought with him. What future did she have with a betrayer?

“Worry not, Asajj. Together, we will shatter fate.” Truth, the Dark Side whispered.

“Yes, Master…” There was nothing else she could say to escape.

Distantly, she was aware of being carried, but whether it was Darth Vader’s unnaturally warm arms or the Dark Side’s own material grip, she couldn’t say.

Ahsoka’s mind couldn’t be more blank if she tried. In front of her, Maul and Master Kenobi were… not quite bickering, but it was close enough to it if Ahsoka squinted. Tension over the lack of an event where there should have been an event. They arrived to a rain logged world of oceans and landed without ceremony. Master Kenobi had expected some form of resistance from Kaminoans. Subterfuge, sabotage, perhaps even a murder attempt or some form of lure off world. But no, that wasn’t what happened.

What actually happened was Maul strutting in as though he owned the place, followed by the Kaminoans tripping over themselves to meet his demands.

“I require an immediate status update for Lord Sidious,” Maul’s curt, businesslike tones had cut through any attempts at nicety. “Lord Sidious” hung in the air and the Force practically hissed at the name. Lord Sidious… their missing Banite Sith Lord. At least they had a name now, Ahsoka guessed, from the way Obi-Wan’s head momentarily twitched in Maul’s direction before he resumed an expression suggesting that two Jedi and a Sith Lord attending on behalf of another Sith Lord was a perfectly normal thing to happen.

“Ah, yes, in relation to the specifics of his order of clones?” The Prime Minister had asked and Ahsoka did her best to not let her jaw drop.

“Yes, and an update on the reliability of the method used to enforce compliance,” Maul asserted and Ahsoka could feel strings of the Dark Side reach out to Lama Su. From then on, Lama Su was a puppet pulled by the Sith’s strings, pleasantly detached from reality as his mouth opened and out poured every single secret of the so-called Grand Army of the Republic. Every single secret that she recorded, while Obi-Wan, without a word, collapsed into a spare seat while Maul tore out the details. When he was done, Lama Su pleasantly dismissed them and they slunk away back to Obi-Wan’s ship without a single lightsaber having been drawn. Maul had his satisfaction at a job well done, but Ahsoka and Obi-Wan had no such luxury. Instead, Ahsoka was struck by the sensation that should’ve done something to stop Maul… but with what he’d discovered, if she had, what would’ve been the cost? Would there have been a Jedi Order or Republic left?

Now, seated in the ship, a single datapad crammed with details on the table before them, the Force itself seemed to be holding its breath.

“I was honestly expecting more… friction from the Kaminoans.” Master Kenobi stroked his beard, with an eye turned to Maul who was resolutely hooded and no doubt straight faced.

“Of course you were, Kenobi,” Maul drawled. “Unlike you worthless Jedi, we cannot cut down loyal servants at a whim. Relationships are cultivated over long periods of time and remain discrete.” Discrete to the point of Kamino being removed from the archives. The list of suspects was shorter and shorter every time Ahsoka had a spare moment to think about it. The Jedi Order had a traitor in its midst and they were surely connected to Sidious. Vader’s security audit wasn’t about the Jedi at all, but about the Banite Sith he was currently dragging over hot coals. Meaning… him looking into the Temple? It meant that Sidious was in some way involved…

“We don’t do that,” Ahsoka butted in, pulling herself out of her thoughts. Maul was… odd. He oozed with the signature cold malice of the Dark Side in far greater quantities than from anyone else Ahsoka had ever met. Lord Vader, more unsettlingly, had a more subtle presence in that his frost was more of a passing chill than the bucket of ice that was Maul. Maul’s presence was immediately obvious. Darth Vader could be mistaken for a cold spell and, from his appearance at the Jedi Temple, revelled in his ability to hide. Maul’s intentions were far more obvious and arguably less dangerous than his new Master. "We don't always pull lightsabers on people." Even though it felt like more often than not that Ahsoka heard about Jedi negotiations ending in lightsabers.

“Why is it then that all of your negotiations tend to result in lightsabers being drawn?” Was fired back and-

“-We’re not discussing this again, Maul, for pity’s sake,” Obi-Wan groaned. “She’s a child.”

“A child who has been misled,” Maul retaliated and Ahsoka would’ve responded, had an object that felt suspiciously like a datapad not snapped into her hand outside of Obi-Wan’s view. “But, if you insist that we have more important matters to discuss…”

“We do. An army of clones. Why would Darth Sidious want to provide the Republic with an army? Is he intending to play both sides?” Ahsoka was definitely sitting this one out. It was already… a lot to take in. “I can’t see Master Sifo-Dyas willingly going along with a Sith’s plans in any capacity.” Before now though, nobody thought he’d steal the credits to fund an army in the first place. How had no one else noticed but a Sith Lord with two chips on each shoulder?

“The biochips, Kenobi,” was the pained reply. “The chips they use to ensure that the clones remain loyal.” That sounded suspiciously like slavery to Ahsoka's ears. “These clones are no doubt booby trapped with a functionality that will cause them to turn on Sidious’ target of choice as soon as his position is tenable. Perhaps Sifo-Dyas held noble intentions, but Sidious’ hostile takeover of the project will not be so charitable. They may as well be droids for what will eventuate.” An order embedded in the clones… an order that’d remove the last supposed remaining threat to the Banite Sith. An order older than Darth Vader’s presence and the offer from him that had to be yet again sitting in her hand.

“It’s us, isn’t it?” She asked in a small voice. Who else was it going to be?

“Yes, little Tano, you and the rest of your Order,” Maul purred. “Massacred so that my former master may have his glorious Sith Empire.” It would've been laughable if only it wasn't so serious.

Obi-Wan clasped his hands. “Which brings about an interesting question, Maul. Why is it that the Banite Sith are so eager to eradicate the Jedi and Vader isn’t?” That was the billion credit question. Why was Vader so different from the other Sith Lords?

“Isn’t it obvious?” Maul lowered his hood, exposing all of his sharpened teeth. “To free you.”

Ahsoka felt her hand clench around the datapad.

It didn’t take a genius to realise that something had gone terribly wrong during Luke and his nephew’s trip to Nar Shaddaa with Darth Vader. Once the Smuggler’s Moon, now it was more of a Criminal Burial Ground with the entire moon’s population either ash, imprisoned, relocated in the case of former slaves or outright missing. From the Order’s own scouting reports, there was a large amount of organic matter of indeterminate origin. From the tests that were being run, there was a sneaking suspicion as to the source of the goo. As such, it was of no surprise to either himself or Padmé when they stepped into the rooms of Vader’s senatorial staff and found his most senior bureaucrat sobbing on the floor with a bottle in hand. It was a perfectly normal and understandable response considering the circumstances.

Anakin, for one, was grateful that Maul had conscripted him for Padmé’s security detail while he and Obi-Wan went off to plumb the depths of the Order’s credit problems. If he hadn’t, Anakin would’ve perhaps been assigned to that same scouting party that was now taking “time off for reflection”. Poor Luke and his nephew clearly hadn’t been able to escape the call of duty. Ben at least seemed to be handling whatever happened substantially better than his uncle and was pouring out a drink for an unknown woman as they entered.

“Are you alright?” Padmé peered over at Luke with a refreshing amount of concern. In response, there was a wracking sob that contorted his entire body, followed by him shaking his head.

“Uh, not really?” Ben answered, eyes rapidly flicking between Anakin, Padmé and the unknown woman who reeked of Darkness. “I think it’s better if we talk about this outside and let uncle… grieve… on his own.” If Luke or Vader remotely cared about dignity over results, then them walking in on him would’ve destroyed his reputation. A small mercy.

Anakin noted the hefty bottle of Pan Corelian Gargle Blaster that was being cracked open by the older man in question and nodded. “Yes, let’s give him some space.” With that, they relocated into an adjoining room, with Padmé’s wide eyed expression yet another reminder that they were still in the Temple instead of the Senate. The Temple Guards subjected to unending amounts of visitors as Vader’s staff were buried in meetings, paperwork and Yoda dropping in for lengthy, giggling visits on his less busy days.

How the aides of a Sith Lord had successfully moved into the Jedi Temple without any contest was rather simple. Vader was inaccessible due to the sheer mystery of his location at any given time. His staff on the other hand were almost always available and down for an exchange of salacious gossip or smack talking about their colleagues in politics or otherwise. Master Yoda had personally argued in favour of them moving their office to the Temple, in light of “security concerns, there are” and the rest of the Council had, by all accounts agreed to the idea. Even though there was the unspoken acknowledgement that Darth Vader would presumably visit his staff in person at some point, which created a much larger security concern in Anakin’s opinion. Then again, hell had already broken loose when Vader’s first nighttime expedition into the Room of a Thousand Fountains was discovered and he hadn’t killed anyone… yet. So maybe that was a risk they were willing to take.

“I take you are also assisting Senator Vader?” Padmé asked the mystery woman (who had to be another apprentice, in Anakin’s opinion). “I’m Padmé Amidala, I serve with Lord Vader on the S.I.T.H. Committee. I am pleased to make your acquaintance…?” With both of the woman’s hands full, Padmé bowed in her direction.

“Correct. I am Asajj Ventress,” and she likewise bowed slightly in Padmé’s direction, her expression closed and almost Jedi-like. “Lord Vader has instructed me to assist you with the Confederacy of Independent Systems,” came the cool, no nonsense reply. “I was not expecting his staff to be so…” Her head tilted in Luke’s direction as another muffled sob echoed through the walls.

“He's not normally like this,” Ben piped up. “It’s because of… the moon visit.” Of course. What else was it going to be?

“Ah, I see. What happened? I sense a great deal of loss.” Ventress inclined her head in Luke’s direction, her face softening as she did so.

In response, Ben groaned over his cup of tea. “He ran into his ex,” the boy began and Anakin felt a chill shoot up his spine, “and that relationship has never been healthy. So they met up, did some work together for Lord Vader and… well…” There was a familiar rolling hand gesture that had Anakin automatically gritting his teeth.

“They fought the whole time?” Ventress prompted and Dark Sider or not, Anakin had to appreciate her bluntness. The Jedi Order weren’t exactly great when it came to teaching sensitive approaches to mental distress, as Anakin had come to discover. Come to think of it, they hadn’t taught him any approaches at all let alone a sensitive one and he made a mental note to pick up a holobook on the topic when he had time. Padmé’s Senate recommendations hadn’t let him down so far and nor had her jam packed book club.

“No, it was the opposite. They got along like a ship on fire and that’s the problem.” Oh. Oh. Yeah, that didn’t sound good. “They bring out the absolute worst in each other. Sure, they get spectacular results, but…” Another strangled gesture. “Uncle has hindsight… and his ex doesn’t. Very much so in the moment, if you get my drift.” There was a peeling gong of truth in the Force.

“Your uncle has a conscience and his… ex… does not,” Ventress concluded, delicately sipping her tea. “I presume that his grief is over his own actions?” Actions that they could only speculate on without Ben explaining it in more detail. With the amount of carnage that occurred at Nar Shaddaa alone, it could’ve been any number of horrors.

“He gave the order at Lord Vader’s behest,” Ben grimaced and it all clicked into place. Luke hadn’t been attending in his capacity as a paper pusher, which… raised an awful lot of questions about what he was before he filed paperwork for a Sith Lord.

Padmé’s eyes widened. “He enforced the order that called for the glassing of the moon.” Not that it could even be called a war crime at that point, when Vader, as usual, acted in self defence. Attacking his blockade and refusing to surrender their slaves hadn’t been the most intelligent decision of those remaining on the moon. Not when Vader and his apprentice elected to personally clear the area before bombardment commenced.

“And others,” Ben agreed. “We didn’t have a choice,” and the Force once more, weirdly, sang its agreement. “The areas were clear as far as we’re aware, but turning an entire area to slag because of the safety risks… It doesn’t feel great.” One could only imagine what either of them would’ve felt if they were Force sensitive, if the act itself had already driven Luke to drink without the added awareness.

Anakin couldn't even imagine what they’d found to justify such a sustained level of firepower, but there’d no doubt be a report at some point disclosing the specific rationale that led to the decision. Darth Vader was, if nothing else, extremely thorough in his Senate disclosures. That didn't mean that Anakin had to be thrilled with hearing Vader's most senior bureaucrat weeping in the next room over.

Chapter Text

Sidious should’ve known that Anakin Skywalker agreeing to lunch wasn’t what it appeared. His door slid open and he found himself face to face with a familiar set of tattoos that had him back-pedalling rapidly away from the door. Maul leered, his teeth glinting. “Ah, this is your stop I believe,” he spoke over his shoulder. “I will be with Lady Amidala and Kenobi should you require my presence.”

“Thanks, Maul. I appreciate it,” Vader’s aide slurred from behind and his sincerity rang out in the Force.

“You are most welcome,” rang back with another peeling gong of truth. Maul stepped aside, Anakin Skywalker, Vader’s irksome secretary and the secretary’s nephew filed or wobbled in respectively. Skywalker strode in with purpose. The boy ambled. The boy’s uncle tripped on thin air and slammed face first into the ground. Skywalker didn’t even blink at it, with the aide hoisting himself back to his feet without missing a beat.

“Is he…?” Lacking words, Sidious gestured in a suitably diplomatic manner. This was not the usual conduct of his… guests.

Skywalker shrugged. “He’s been like that since he got back from Nar Shaddaa.”

Boot prints of an indistinguishable colour etched themselves into Sidious’ clean floor with every step of the secretary. “Yeesh, sorry about the mess, forgot to clean these after Lord Vader’s job on the Smuggler’s Moon.” The initial assault had been a month ago. Then again, from the overwhelming smell of alcohol wafting from the man, perhaps it was more of a case that Luke merely hadn’t been sober enough to engage in any hygienic practices, much to Sidious’ displeasure. This was Darth Vader’s confidant?

A stumble, one boot sailed through the air. Sidious heart stopped in his chest as it arced through the air and narrowly missed his priceless vase. Knuckles white, he watched the aide stumble a second time with another gore encrusted piece of footwear nearly graze the very same vase. Even though it missed, a film of unidentifiable, month old criminal remnants now decorated the vase. His heart thumped in his chest. Close. So close and yet the Dark Side failed to so much as whisper a warning. It was blind and so was the Sith Lord.

“Rightio, we’re good now,” and he swayed by in his equally gore encrusted socks, leaving footprints of another kind behind.

Skywalker and the man’s nephew made appropriately apologetic shrugging motions. Skywalker leaned over conspiratorially. “He’s been having girlfriend troubles, Chancellor,” the Jedi whispered. “She was on the Moon when Lord Vader showed up and it apparently didn’t end well.”

Over Skywalker’s shoulder, the boy was grimacing with a slight up and down motion of his head. The boy’s uncle unceremoniously hurled himself into a chair at the dining table and… to no one’s surprise immediately fell sideways from the chair. “‘M fine. Don’t mind me, just need another drink.” The Force wasn’t even needed to predict it.

“Here, allow me.” At least the man was a docile drunk and the rest of them were seated with appropriate meals and lunch largely proceeded without incident. Though leaving the wine on the table had been an error of judgement, as the bureaucrat leaned over and plucked it from the table the moment the Skywalker and Sidious’ own glasses had been poured. It was a sacrifice. A small sacrifice for information. He had absolutely no intention of looking this gift orbak in the mouth, even if it was drunk and on the verge of imminent expiration from alcohol poisoning. Not only was Darth Vader inaccessible beyond catching him as he engaged in his duties, but he was liberal with his blade as well. An in person encounter would require a substantial amount of planning before it could even be attempted, so for now this was the next best option.

“Ah, Luke, I’ve heard tales of your discussions with Master Yoda. Apparently the “Sith gossip” as it’s been dubbed has been legendary enough to leave the chambers.” For now, Sidious would smile, nod, play the generous host and allow his guests to talk.

“Don't get me started on Banite Sith.” Darth Vader’s secretary swigged heavily and directly from Sidious’ one of a kind three-hundred year old bottle of grange and a small part of Sidious died in the process. “You know what, these Banite Sith would go-go do something stupid, like build a weapon that’s a giant lightsaber and go off and call it something stupid like the Death Star or-or-or Starkiller or Star Destroyer.” The colour was draining from Sidious’ face, his wine sat untouched. “You’d think they could at least come up with different names, wouldn’t you? But nooooo, star this and killer that, like it’s been named by a twelve year old Corellian child. Then they’d go and paint it red instead of a respectable black like a normal Sith Lord.” There was a violent movement of Luke’s hand and Sheev watched it and the potential projectile it held sway alarmingly in the direction of his prized vase. If the bottle slipped….

Though a small amount of the extremely expensive liquid dribbled down the neck of the bottle, his guest expertly licked it away before it could stain the carpet. When Sidious established his Empire, this man would be among the first to die. “Do they pay people for their superweapons? Oh no no, they enslave some virtuous and well-meaning person totally against making weapons of any kind, then have them go off and design a superweapon while holding their family hostage. What could possibly go wrong there?” Vader’s right hand bureaucrat positively cackled, the bottle bouncing and up and down erratically in his hand. “Then-then the engineer, not liking that, goes and leaves in a weak spot and some hotshot lunatic, who’s never flown a starfighter before, goes to the first official deployment of the weapon and blows it up.” No… it couldn’t be. There hadn’t been any Sith weapons of note for thousands upon thousands of years. How was this possible? “Lord Vader saw it many times during the War,” Luke shook his head forlornly, changing hands so he could more adequately slap the table with the other. The Dark Side’s predatory gaze was set upon Sidious’ back. The War? Which War? “It was shoddy work every single time and the Banite’s erased that learned experience with every apprentice who killed their master. That wasn’t even the worst of it either,” the man grunted.

“Really?” Sidious politely clasped his hands in a picture of disinterest. The fact that he hadn’t so much as exchanged glances with his other guests was a minor detail. They'd surely understand.

“You ever hear the tale of Darth Plagueis the Wise?” Sidious’ stomach clenched. “He was the Sith Lord who discovered the secret to immortality.” This had not been part of the plan.

“No, can’t say that I have…” Vader knew, but did the aide? How much did they know?

“Of course you haven’t, because his moron of an apprentice knocked him off the perch before he bothered to learn it himself! Now the rest of the Sith don’t have the secret to immortality, because this one imbecile couldn’t control himself for another decade!” Luke slammed the table with such force that Sidious jumped, twisting in knots while the aide’s face contorted in rage. The Dark was silent, watchful, waiting. It was not here to avail him from his plight. “And this is the Banite Sith. Millenia of learning obliterated, vanishing into the abyss, because they entrust it to apprentices who aren’t fit to clean public ‘freshers, let alone be the holders of ancient knowledge. Bane was a pox upon the Sith and now Lord Vader has to clean up after his line’s constant lapses in judgement.” Luke downed the rest of the bottle. “Don’t get me started on the Sith pretenders,” he growled and the Dark Side purred its agreement.

“My deepest apologies, I didn’t realise it was such a sensitive topic.” Nor one that was so hazardous to Sidious’ own continued existence. This aide was a zealot and a trusted member of the sect from which Darth Vader hailed. Sidious gaze panned over from the hovertrain derailment before him and turned to Skywalker and the boy, who were both fixated on Luke. Skywalker’s stylus and fingers were a blur of activity as he hurriedly jotted down note after note as words spilled from the drunkard’s mouth.

“Oh yeesh, Lord Vader talks about it aaaalll the time,” Luke slurred. “The Banite Sith who never had a Sith Empire because they were too busy playing musical chairs with apprentices to make one of their own. Lots of opinions on that. He thinks a Banite Empire would last about twenty years before it imploded because the apprentice killed the master with no intent of following the plan. All that trust in one person. I can’t even imagine.” Invisible bands were tightening around Sidious’ neck, because he could imagine that level of trust in one person. He had been that person.

Sidious felt his appetite for his untouched glass of wine vanish into the endless appetite of the Dark. “You-you gonna drink that?” Luke was gesturing in the direction of the holo instead of Sidious’ glass but the meaning was clear.

“No, Luke, by all means, you have it.” The Dark Side had abandoned him. Not even for Lord Vader, but a drunkard simpleton with no Force powers of his own who merely acted as an instrument of Vader’s will. An instrument of an old establishment that had that viewed Banites as mere pests rather than serious competition.

The tiniest of breaths behind his ear as the Dark Side chortled.

Lady Alarnaa was the picture of grace. Hooded and masked, her and the more junior Sith Apprentices swept from their ship across what remained of Nar Shaddaa’s main starport. Not even that had been spared from Lord Vader’s ire, as the entire moon buckled under his sustained onslaught. What had once been the Smugger’s Moon was now merely a moon, with unremarkable qualities in an unremarkable part of the galaxy. All of the people who made it a thriving hub of criminal activity had been furiously ejected from the realm of the Living Force and into the Unified Force. Every touch of Quinlan screamed into Force and screamed into his skull. Never ending wails of despair permeated every surface. A triple pair of gloves and a two sets of heavy robes were a minimum for him to even be able to hear his fellow scavengers let alone hear and follow the Sith Lord’s flock. Even through all these layers, the moon was pulsating with the ghostly heartbeat of the final moments of the remaining millions as they cried out in terror and were silenced.

Quinlan Vos was doing his best to keep ahead of the pack that departed the ground and now leapt through the remaining structures that hadn’t been levelled. Children. The Sith Apprentices were children, around the same age as many of their Padawans or younglings. Yet none of the sapients left dismantling the depopulated moon treated them as children with crowds parting as the black cloaks scattered from on high and descended into the masses.

Depopulated didn’t mean safe. For every hired scrapper who was in the midst of restructuring Nar Shaddaa’s shattered surface, there was the usual selection of scum and villainy seeking to take advantage of the workers. Quinlan felt the blaster at the base of his neck and lifted his hands into the sky. “Can I help you…?” This was going to end poorly, even if it was standard practice prior to Darth Vader acquiring the territory. Vader’s lack of tolerance for petty criminals had achieved such legendary highs of infamy, that already they were being encircled by onlookers. Inevitability and bubbling anticipation lapped at them all. All of them knew what was coming.

“If you know what’s good for you, you’ll hand over that crate next to you and bugger off out of here,” a reptilian voice hissed. A scaled hand briefly entered his vision and it shoved him to the side. A Trandoshan- “-Hurr-urk!” A gag, a sputter and gasp… The pressure at the base of his neck vanished. Slowly, Quinlan turned around, his hands still in the air.

His would be mugger was dangling off the ground, feet pathetically kicking at the air and his hands clawing at his throat. “AACK!” Gripped, paralysed and completely unable to escape.

Behind him was a black robed child, no older than twelve, their hand languidly extended. “You are impeding the progress of our workers,” the small (male?) child spoke flatly and without tone. His voice carried across the entire section of the broken street. Quinlan’s eyes darted around to find all of three of them now ringed by an even greater mass of scrappers tinged with fear… and awe. “In the Nar Shaddaa of old this may have been acceptable practice.”

The boy clenched his hand into fist.

CRUNCH. The Trandoshan dropped from the air and landed with a wet splat.

“This,” he carried on, “is no longer acceptable practice. This is your first and final warning. The Hutts tolerated parasites, your trifling disputes and predation on one another. We do not. You are employed for a specific undertaking and will engage in that undertaking so long as the contract wills it.” A slice of his gauntlet through the air. “Should any… concerns… come to light, seek us out and we will remedy any conflicts impeding your capacity to complete you assigned work. Or don’t. We will know anyway.” With a delicate inclination of his fist, the child turned and stalked back towards the main building project that now dominated the moon. Only after he was out of sight did Quinlan feel comfortable moving and scrabbled for his possessions as he moved to relocate into a more secluded area away from the stares.

The Order had to be informed of Nar Shaddaa’s new status. The moon was useless as an outpost now, but Darth Vader had clearly succeeded in his intended creation of the Dark Side nexus on which him and his Apprentices could feed. The Smuggler’s Moon was no more, but as Quinlan gazed up at the skeleton of what could only be a nascent Sith Temple, he couldn’t help but wonder if it’d been replaced by something infinitely worse.

Back in their rooms at the temple and the moment Anakin was out of sight, Luke straightened with any hint of a stagger vanishing from his step. Ben, for the first time that day, allowed his pained expression to drop and instead turned to his uncle with naked admiration. “You deliberately missed the vase, didn’t you?” Doing it with the Force was one thing, but to do it without was an entirely different skill. Actors on a stage developed such skills with hours upon hours of gruelling rehearsal. Luke must’ve developed it in hand in hand with Ben’s father as a natural consequence of the latter’s bar crawling. It was exactly what Han Solo would do. Being drunk was his father’s excuse for everything.

“Of course I did,” his uncle gestured magnanimously, a spring in his step while the Dark Side positively chuckled. “Then when I went to retrieve my boots it gave me a second and third opportunity give Sidious a heart attack.” Luke practically radiated malicious glee. “This is a far better way of accessing the Dark Side. Sidious practically volunteered by being a Banite and who am I turn down his desire to participate in traditional Sith hazing rituals?” The Dark Side howled its approval and if wasn’t for Luke’s choice of target, Ben might’ve been worried. But it was Sidious so who cares? As Luke said, he signed up for it.

“It must be one hell of an expensive vase for Sidious to be that anxious.” The only thing more apparently drunk than Luke in that room was the Dark Side itself, whose exuberance bled from the apartment in conjunction with Sidious’ sustained suffering. How his grandfather hadn’t felt it was a sign of the warped nature of the Force itself and the blindness of the Jedi. The Sith artefact that’d brought them here couldn’t be responsible for the distortions of the Force, because the Jedi had been blind in the prior timeline. Though, there was still a chance it had made it worse, along with it still being out there somewhere in the wild, lying in wait for its next victims.

“Ah, my very young apprentice,” Luke oozed in his very best Darth Sidious. “For that vase is not merely a vase, but a hiding place for Sidious’ overcompensating lightsaber! The best in lightsaber combat on its own, he was not, which is why he had the hilts of both of his blades made from phrik.” Luke finished with a flourish and a wink. “When the Death Star exploded, it was all that was left of him floating through space.” A pause. “I was going to use them for flimsi weights after cleansing the crystals but Leia made me donate them to a museum.” A disappointed shrug that was echoed by a shadow hovering over his uncle’s shoulder.

“He hid his lightsaber in a vase,” Ben repeated, eyes widened as he remembered Sidious’ audible distress as his uncle's protracted fumbling for his bloodstained boots around the hideous ornament’s base. “That’s almost as bad as the cult that was naming themselves after lightsabers. But I’ve never heard of phrik.” It sounded like a choice piece of Han Solo profanity.

“It’s a nearly indestructible metal,” Luke noted. “So naturally, he decided to totally butcher the natural finish with electrum instead.”

“And grandfather signed up for a Sith Lord with a gold lightsaber hilt,” Ben asked without affect.

“Cut him some slack, nephew,” Luke waggled a disapproving finger. “With how many knocks to the head he took, Darth Vader was still surprisingly effective as a Sith Lord even if he did work for some namby pamby geriatric with a gold hilt. Force only knows Palpatine wasn’t doing much to hold his own Empire together.” Having met and had lunch with Palpatine, Ben found himself absentmindedly nodding along.

“Really?”

“Yeah, who’d listen to someone with a gold lightsaber hilt? It’s almost as bad as the guy who put a cross-guard on his lightsaber. What an embarrassment to the profession.”

Ben couldn’t fault the logic.

Chapter Text

If a future version of Anakin had’ve told him that the catchups between himself, the Grandmaster of the Jedi Order, the aide of a Sith Lord senator and the aide’s nephew, were the favourite part of his week then lightsabers would’ve been drawn. Instead, Yoda rolled along the floor, tears leaking from his eyes while Anakin sobbed arm in arm with him. The pretence of any intelligence gathering had long since been expunged out the nearest window, in favour of Luke’s most salacious offerings while serving under his Sith Master. It was intelligence the Council had to admit, but… not quite the sort of intelligence they’d been expecting. They’d been expecting military intelligence about the Sith, not disparagement of Banite Sith collective intelligence in and of itself.

“Oh, heavens no,” the aide blinked, his face the picture of confusion. “Lord Vader requires therapy for anyone with inexplicable delusions of grandeur or psychosis. The Sith wield the Force. They are not to be wielded by the Force. Running around like a lunatic simply isn’t tolerated. The Force is an instrument handled in the completion of a task and the moment one of his apprentices is wielded they become a slave to the will of the Force. It’s unacceptable.” Luke’s nose crinkled, as if the rotting, remnants of Vader's victims had wafted by instead of the slightest suggestion of Banite doctrine.

“Match our understanding of the ways of the Sith, this does not,” Yoda gurgled.

“Oh, it’s straightforward,” Ben shugged. “His Lordship organises a group meeting and everyone takes turns talking about whatever ails them. You know,” the aide waved a hand. “Prophetic dreams, whispers of power, pulling sensations towards artefacts and unstable moods. The usual.” Anakin’s head turned so fast his neck popped. But no, there was no hint of mockery on Ben’s face. “Lord Vader calls it a sanity check.”

“Attended one, have you?” Yoda croaked, his eyes growing ever wider.

“Of course! Not like anyone else there is going to keep a minutes of the meetings, are they?” Luke rolled his eyes. Minutes. Anakin bit the inside of his cheek. The Sith kept minutes for their group… therapy sessions… where they talked about their feelings and their connection to the Force.

“Minutes?” Yoda repeated with saucer eyes. “Odd this is. Have such discussions, the Jedi do not. Between Jedi Master and student in a personal capacity, they do occur. Irregular though, are even those meetings.”

Silence permeated the space. An invisible giant leaned over and pressed both Anakin and Yoda into the ground.

Vader's aide stared. “The Jedi… don’t… have group discussions about their connection to the Force?” The disbelief that dripped from Luke’s voice was thicker than the molasses Master Yoda had been cheerfully shovelling into his tea minutes earlier.

Slowly, Anakin shook his head. “I didn’t exactly grow up the same as the other younglings did, but we had group classes for other academic subjects, not group…” Anakin fumbled for the words. “Sanity checks, as you say Vader calls them. We don’t engage in them.” Or even talk about them for… for what actually? Why didn’t the Jedi have group discussions about the Force and other issues? While it was normal to release unwanted feelings into the Force, Anakin better than anyone could’ve pointed out that Jedi had to be emotionally grounded enough to manage that in the first place. Releasing emotion into the Force could only be managed if the emotion was identified in the first place. While the Jedi were big on reaching out with their feelings, the identifying and management of those feelings hadn’t ever been a strong part of any training Anakin had been provided over the years. Anakin had received more instruction in differentiating beard conditioner from superglue than he ever had classes identifying negative emotions and Force connections.

“You seriously don’t?” Ben blinked at them, his teacup frozen halfway to his mouth.

“No,” Yoda answered gravely. “Private, such matters are, between master and student, not for group discourse.”

Uncomfortable didn’t even begin to describe the situation. Appalled covered only the tiniest of cross sections for the reaction they’d received. How were any of the Jedi meant to know discussing Force performance problems was the norm in other Orders? It wasn’t like the Banite Sith ever stopped by for tea in their feuds stretching for thousands of years. Nor were the Jedi on amiable terms with other Force Sensitive organisations or cultures. Anakin didn’t doubt for a second that the Jedi preference for lightsaber diplomacy was a Krayt dragon sized factor. As much as the Jedi preached tolerance, Anakin hadn’t seen it in practice, from the lowest youngling all the way up to Masters Yoda and Windu. This set of interactions between Sith employees and Jedi was a stroke of dumb luck, for the will of the Force as far as the Jedi viewed it, did not encourage weekly high tea with the enemy. Nor did it encourage exchanging frilly recipe books, aprons, wooden spoons or any number of cooking utensils Master Yoda had snuck out from of the kitchens. Or at least they hadn’t encouraged it, until the entire Jedi Order had collectively decided that breaking Master Yoda’s heart, by reminding him that his two new best friends were Sith agents, wasn’t in the interests of anyone who expected to surface from corrective training in their lifetime.

The aide’s eyes has widened. “This explains so much!” Luke sliced a hand through the air and leapt to his feet as he paced. “Lord Vader was wondering why none of the Jedi had noticed Count Dooku joining the Banite Sith and it’s because none of you talk to each other!”

Luke’s battered teapot exploded in a spray of steam and pottery shards that Anakin hurriedly redirected away from their guests. Said guests dived backwards with precisely the sort of reflexes that gave them such high value employment with their Sith overlord.

“Done what now, has Count Dooku?” Master Yoda whispered, his ears had flattened to his skull, his eyes round and moist.

On the bright side, Obi-Wan now had full justification for replacing Luke’s teapot with Order funds.

But Dooku!?

“What are we doing?” Ben was squinting at a starmap while his uncle furiously flicked through the holo’s news channels. While wall to wall coverage of Vader’s military conquests might’ve been flattering in any other situation, but now it proved to be distinctly unhelpful in whatever Luke was trying to gauge from the coverage.

“Hell if I know,” Luke shrugged with irritation and flung the remote off to the side.

“What? How don’t you know? You’re the one who taught us history in the first place!” Much abridged and lacking detail, but history nonetheless. Not that it was Luke’s fault either with the Empire’s censorship obliterating the Sith involvement in the Clone Wars long before Luke was old enough to remedy the problem.

“Kiddo, all the history I know talks about the Clone Wars happening. The hit Sheev Palpatine autobiography My Cult, My Sith Life unfortunately never made it to the publishers after father evicted him from the mortal coil,” Luke groaned with a wring of his hands. “I know that Dooku is a Banite Sith that father killed prior to him becoming Palpatine’s Sith Apprentice.”

Which is precisely why Ben’s uncle had outed Dooku, knowing full well that he was risking impalement via teapot. “So what don’t we know?”

“Everything else!” Luke groaned and Ben spotted a living shadow drape itself over his uncle’s shoulders. “Apparently, Obi-Wan was captured on Genosis. Father and mother went to rescue him and were captured as well. Their rescue by the Jedi Order and the clone army is what kicked off the Clone Wars.” He frantically gestured. “But I don’t have the timeline on that, nor is there an army of clones to provide to the Jedi Order, because we offered to rehouse all of them,” which had caused Ben and the others more than a small amount of distress at the quantity of red tape involved in the process. “Aunt Beru said that mother and father spent time together when he was assigned as her bodyguard, but instead we’ve got father, Darth Maul, Obi-Wan and mother all involved in investigation of the dark arts of Jedi Order finances and we annihilated all of the organisations meant to be doing the capturing.” Luke’s head was in his hands. “So the only leads we have are Dooku and Palpatine directly, because I don’t know who the other players are at this point in the war. Someone has to be funding Palpatine and Dooku external to the Jedi Order, but that’s going to take time as well.”

“And we can’t exactly ask anyone about it either,” Ben noted as the significance of Luke’s complaints sank in. “Lord Vader’s meant to be an all knowing tyrant, not someone working off a first grade, homeschooled history education from Tatooine.” Nor, with what they’d discovered during the Hutt purges, were they ever going to tell anyone about their status as travellers from a galaxy far far away on the timeline. Contrary to the claims of Ben’s mother, the corruption ripping through the Republic was alive and well right into the foundation of Palpatine's Empire, which was more of a new coat of paint than it was a regime change.

“And dead people,” Luke added under his breath. “Obi-Wan did his best to fill in the gaps, but if the Jedi back in this period knew what was going on, Palpatine wouldn’t have made it to power in the first place.”

“And grandfather?” Not that he was talkative either, according to Luke.

“His ghost was substantially less chatty than Obi-Wan or Yoda and even they were less keen after I took all of you kids in, well above age requirements.” Luke rolled his eyes. “The dead keep plenty of secrets and aren’t worth asking about them. Plus, I haven’t seen any trace of them in this timeline, so they’re off the table too,” Luke added, drumming his fingers on the table.

“Speaking of things we don’t know about… Did Mara ever work out what happened to that Sith artefact that brought us here?” Ben scratched his head with a stylus.

“Nope. Nothing. Not so much as a Sith holocron pointing out its existence.” There was a gentle breeze that rattled the ship, as if Luke had sighed through the Force.

“So what’s the plan? We’ve got no holocron and no other information about the big names in the war…” But it wasn’t that Luke had no idea what to do, it was that the only alternative was strongly undesired and wasn’t a preferred method of resolving their lack of information.

Luke’s eyes glinted with unholy light. “First, we suppress Palpatine, then we deal with Dooku and any of his other pawns in the Confederacy. What I do know is that the original Death Star was already being constructed prior to the end of the Clone Wars.” He cracked his knuckles menacingly. “And that’s an awful lot of scrap we can use for ship parts.” Yes, that was definitely on brand for Lord Vader.

She was most definitely not ten standard years. She was not Ann. She was Lady Ann and she was the overseer of the Sith Temple on Nar Shaddaa. A megastructure that would serve as a monument and to the glory of Darth Vader’s offering to the Dark Side and the power he wielded through it. The filth on Nar Shaddaa had been excised to make way for his immaculate glory and a tribute to all matters as they should be in the eyes of the Sith Master. At least that was Luke’s public stance on the temple, according to the helpful pamphlet and guide that had been provided to the students chosen to housesit their new library location.

Privately though, moving Grakkus the Hutt’s stash of Jedi artefacts had been such a bone breaking task that they had to ask: what would Han Solo do? Han Solo, their teacher had decided, wouldn’t have bothered moving all of his ill gotten gains from a place of security, until he was able to secure payment from a reliable buyer. In this case, they themselves were the buyer and the holocrons could be used to educate the other students, so it made sense to leave them in place. Especially with the Jedi poking around Nar Shaddaa, hunting for more information on the “Sith” who had chosen to remain on the moon. If he found their stash of holocrons, it’d give the Jedi a tangible reason to investigate Lord Vader beyond him being a Sith Lord.

Except, their regular Jedi spy hadn’t been around for a couple of weeks now. Quinlan Vos who’d gone out of his way to shadow and stalk Ann and Luke’s other students had inexplicably packed his bags and fled the planet faster than a bounty hunter being boarded for a weapons systems inspection. Only Ann and the others hadn’t done any more than the usual and there were no signs of Vos upping and leaving with their regular management of the moon.

As it stood right now, construction was proceeding smoothly. All of the Jedi holocrons and other artefacts had been carefully concealed as decorations in the walls of an otherwise, unremarkable, decorative meeting room in the basement level. The rest of the levels were still underway, with plumbing precisely as infuriating as everyone could remember from when the same had to be done at their old temple. Still, Quinlan Vos’ retreat from his investigation might prove problematic if he was returning to Coruscant with new information.

All Ann could do was send word to Luke and hope that he, along with the older kids, had a better idea of what exactly had scared Quinlan Vos away from Nar Shaddaa.

The drums of war were beating on Nar Shaddaa, but not for The Clone Wars or the slaughter that acted as the vanguard to its arrival. Instead, a funeral march beat for the millions of lives ejected into the Unified Force at the hands of an unfettered fleet and its Master. Dying screams yet wailed from beyond the grave and the Dark Side welcomed them with open arms. A rotating nexus of seething terror that radiated from very soil beneath his feet, tainted by the detritus of sapients and the telltale signs of a glassing. Lord Vader had been most thorough in his cleansing of the Smuggler’s Moon. It would be thousands of years at the bare minimum before the Force and the Dark Side lapsed in its rapt attention.

There was no whisper of the Trade Federation. No tattle of disunity from either the reluctant or dogmatic member systems of the Confederacy. No hiss of malcontent from the elitists within the Senate. The Confederacy may as well have never existed, for they were spoken of as only an afterthought. A mere curiosity compared to the force that washed away the lingering stench of the Hutts and their once booming slave trade. No, only whispers of Darth Vader, Senator of Tatooine carried through all levels of the would be sides of The Clone Wars.

The Republic were in awe, for even the Jedi had no retort to Darth Vader’s rhetoric. How could they when his methods boasted superior efficacy and political support from all but the most suicidal? Paralysed by indecision, the Jedi Order too could only brace as their moment for avoiding the ballistic impact of the Sith had long since passed. It was already the aftermath and they were yet to notice.

Meanwhile, throughout it all, the Separatists held their breath in escalating terror as the implication of war with Darth Vader settled deep within their minds. Darth Tyranus was not prepared for a war against a seasoned opponent. Vader was a veteran. Evident in every step, every blow, each calculated amount of cruelty that was mete out unto his foolish opposition. One could only imagine the Master of Tyranus and his wrath at the rug that had been gleefully yanked out from under him by a parallel within the Sith and not an inferior. Or perhaps, Darth Vader was Darth Sidious’ superior and retaliation had already been attempted, only to fail while the latter struggled in the mailed fist of the latest arrival in the galactic power struggle.

The criminal organisations said nothing at all, lest they catch the Sith’s eye. Of all of the factions involved in this farce, this reaction was the most conducive towards long term survival. To fail to exist figuratively within the eyes of the galaxy’s grand stage was preferable than to attract Vader’s attention and cease to exist all.

Silent step after silent step, he followed the robed figures as they flitted between rooftops. Children, he realised with a pang of longing, as one reached out to grab another that had slipped between leaps. Reminiscent of the Jedi younglings, but far more determined in their stride. Extruding the Dark Side’s malevolence, clinging to them in the form of an oily film… yet… the lingering taste of suffering one would expect from apprentices at such an age was lacking. Their steps were all swagger and bounce, not riddled with the crushing weight of their Master’s expectations. Even for a non-Banite Sith, their behaviour was not within the typical expectations of the Sith or the Jedi.

These children were not suffering in their apprenticeships. They and their Master were another entity entirely. An anomaly in the long game that had been played between the Jedi and the Sith since the dawn of the two orders. There was a third faction at play in this familiar, yet strange series of events.

So he followed them, cloaked in the natural energies of the moon itself, all the way back to the temple that was partway through construction. Through a maze of beams, stone and durasteel with gaps and holes intended for as receptacles for some other object. A design lifted from Malachor’s own Sith temple, but decorated with nascent flairs of an esoteric style, more fitting to Tatootine’s traditional architecture than what was typical of the Sith. Another curiosity to be unravelled. He followed them until they met up with a third figure, he recognised as the leader of the band of Sith apprentices for this planet.

“This is to be delivered to Lord Vader directly.” Another child, this time, a Twi’lek girl no older than ten standard years was handing over a datapad to two he’d stalked across the surface.

A wheezing rasp of pure oxygen filled his aching lungs.

Yes. “Lord Vader” was a mystery indeed, but a slow and direct path to him was better than no path at all. After all, he had nothing but time.

Chapter Text

Darth Vader had become an irritation and a spanner in the works of Sheev’s clandestine operations. The Hutts could no longer be relied upon as their population numbers trended towards extinction. The Bounty Hunter’s Guild was in tatters, with once respected members of their guild little more than a high tech pelikki shoot for the local Sith population. It wasn’t uncommon for Vader’s apprentices to be found chasing “bounties” of their own. There was no payment other than their Master’s enhanced teachings and that was more than enough for them. These were no normal Sith. A culture of treachery did not exist within them as far as Darth Sidious had been able to observe, which made chinks in their armour inherently more difficult to exploit. How was he to sway any of them to his cause when they considered all Banites inherently inferior to their own cause? It was a dogma that superseded the average Dark Sider’s lust for power in a manner that left Sidious without his usual arsenal. For now, he was without rebuke until more information could be dug up on this mysterious, anti-Banite sect.

For now though, perched as he was in his marble refresher, all he could do was peruse potential replacements in case any of his artefacts came to harm while Vader’s obnoxious assistant was present. For an appropriate level of value, the options were slim, to say the least. Another collector, whoever it may have been, had plundered a list of Sheev’s personal favourites and the remaining options were simply abhorrent. A high return on investment, but a pink vase, decorated with loth-cat kittens had to be the single most hideous object to grace this storefront. Nevertheless, Sheev favourited the relevant items from the themed collection and spent a moment in contemplation as he foresaw the price negotiation and shuddered.

BANG.

The door disintegrated. Sheev froze as a blaster barrel settled at one of his temples. A heavily armoured Weequay leered unpleasantly and Sheev felt his bowels twist.

“Not so fancy now, are yo-”

SPLAT. Coloured blood delicately wafted away and into the wall.

Sheev’s attacker had been liquified and Sheev craned his head around to stare at his saviour.

“What?” Luke grunted and hurled the weapon straight through the nearby window, which erupted in a spray of glass. Three hundred thousand credits evaporated into thin air within an instant. “Substandard garbage, there shouldn’t have even been a mist cloud. Whoever supplied them gave them knockoff garbage.” Luke’s knowledge of weapons banned under galactic conventions didn’t come as a surprise considering his employer.

“What’s going on?” Why couldn’t he sense anything? Why wasn’t the Force answering him?

“No time!” Underwear still around his ankles, wipes in one hand, datapad in the other, Sheev was hoisted into the air and over the shoulder of Vader’s righthand man. Impossibly fast, Luke kicked off from the stone sink that crumbled and hurtled straight through the window he previously shattered, down into the traffic below. Icy cold wind blasted the exposed Sheev as Luke expertly made the decent, his metallic boots sparking as he braked down the side of the building. At the sight of nearby speeder traffic, Luke’s bent his knees and flew through the air; his cloak billowing behind him, obstructing Sheev’s vision.

“Hells, where’s your bloody security?” He yelled above the wind. Where was his security and why had the external defences been deactivated? And why, why wouldn’t the Force answer him? Was this aide using the Force himself or were those strange boots he was wearing responsible for his near flight through the air?

An explosion, not far from his residence and a spray of blasterfire that Sheev ducked the best he could while Luke once more launched himself through the air.

“Nevermind, that’s probably what’s left of them. Helpless amateurs. Time to go!”

BOUNCE.

BOUNCE.

BOUUUUNCE.

Sheev could feel each and every single impact reverberate in his ribs. Every kink in his spine compressed wildly as Vader’s lackey slammed into vehicle after vehicle, his heavy boots leaving indents as they landed. Were he to call upon the Dark Side he would be fortified against such a trifling inconvenience, but there was no such option. As Luke rebounded off a wall, Sheev caught a glimpse of a purple lightsaber racing towards a not insubstantial mass of vehicles that aiming directly at them as they fled.

Darth Sidious was all powerful, but trapped in the public eye as he was, all Sheev could do was scream and wait for the end. A scream, that by all accounts, Vader’s righthand man couldn’t even hear.

A brilliant twin moon shone in the darkness. At least that’s what Anakin would be telling himself years after the fact, so he didn’t have to contemplate the Chancellor’s two bare buttcheeks bouncing between lanes and elevations of rush hour traffic. The sizeable army of bounty hunters and assorted criminals did little to distract from the extremely prominent view of those two moons that haunted the the journalists on the scene. In spite of the explosions, blasterfire, lightsabers and what appeared to be Mace Windu himself entering the fray, the holo remained stubbornly fixed on those twin beacons. Viewership would be meteoric, but absolutely none of those angles showed the full scale of the skirmish.

There was a large number of Jedi on the scene, doing their best to block pursuit, but with a speeder to lightsaber ratio so disproportionate it was only natural that some would slip past. Those that did make it through the impromptu blockade were being led to chokepoints where ever more Jedi were lying in wait. Part of Anakin wanted to rush over to assist, but he was at the temple and nowhere near the Chancellor. It had to be left to the Jedi who were already present, but if that was Luke holding the Chancellor… Where was his nephew? Ben was never far away from his uncle, for the obvious reasons.

Anakin skidded out of his room before the thought could be finalised. Anakin had absolutely no doubt that Luke could hold his own against a gang of thugs and ruffians, when he was an administrator to a Sith Lord, but Ben was a different story. Ben had better still be in their rooms, nursing either work or school or Anakin’s heart was going to give out before he even made it out of the building.

Ben was going to kill his uncle. “I’m going to the ‘fresher, back soon!” was the single greatest lie in the galaxy that had ever been told. Yes, clearly he had gone to a ‘fresher, but the ‘fresher of Sheev Palpatine wasn’t their ‘fresher, which meant that Luke wasn’t going to be back “soon” by any stretch of the word. Instead, Luke was now skipping through traffic at the most sedate pace known to Force Sensitives, while a horde of disgruntled bounty hunters descended from on high.

The real mystery is how Luke hired them when he personally was responsible for purging them and their former patrons from the galaxy. The Bounty Hunter’s Guild was a fading memory, so where had he dredged up this bunch of losers and what he done to persuade them to successfully assault the Chancellor’s heavily guarded residency? If Ben was Han Solo, he would’ve found the seediest, most disreputable bar in Confederate territory, waxed poetic about the money involved in ransoming off the Chancellor of the Republic (as if they wouldn’t just elect a new one) and waited for nature to take course. From the considerable size of the forces currently chasing Luke and his deadweight down the main media strip of the planet, he must’ve been to an impressive amount of low quality establishments. Admiration could and would have been affiliated with the plan had Luke bothered to inform Ben ahead of time that he was taking an hour out of his valuable day to haze the competition. An hour that Ben could’ve spent doing literally anything else with his time, but instead he was stuck minding Luke’s biscuits while Sheev Palpatine mooned every single resident of the galaxy simultaneously. If he was on Nar Shaddaa at least he could’ve watched it and compared notes with the rest of the stu-

BANG BANG BANG.

Ben leapt into the air at the furious hammering on their front door.

“BEN, ARE YOU IN THERE?” Anakin Skywalker sounded four seconds away from a conniption and Ben shrunk. Anakin would’ve assumed that Ben was with his uncle.

“Yeah?” Ben called back, wincing as Luke flipped through the air instead of going around a freighter like a normal person.

“CAN I COME IN?”

“Sure.”

Anakin barged in, just in time to see a thumbnail replay of Luke’s flip and everything it entailed. “Oh… Oh wow, I was wondering why he didn’t have much a dating history, but that right there, that’ll do it. Poor guy.” Ben’s eyes would be forever scarred by the experience. “Not everyone is born lucky kiddo and if you ever need to talk about it, I’m here.”

Ben blinked. “Um, thanks, I guess. My uncle’s good with this stuff as well.” Especially the portion relating to possessed ex-girlfriends. Luke was a certified professional when it came to eldritch entities trying to have their way with him. Perhaps a little bit too knowledgeable.

Anakin beamed, until there was another abrupt knock.

“Anakin, Ben, are you in?” Obi-Wan’s voice echoed through the door. Far more fraught.

“Yes, master! Come in!”

“Have you seen- oh good you have. Nasty business.” Without breaking his stride, Obi-Wan disappeared off into the kitchen and Ben heard the click of the oven being turned off. “Perfect timing, these-ouch- feel just about done for that wonderful springy texture.” Obi-Wan stuck his scorched fingers under the tap. “Did you know your uncle could do that?” Entirely too blithe to not know exactly what he was asking.

“Of course. Just because we work for a Sith Lord doesn’t mean we’re Sith material,” Ben rolled his eyes. “Uncle wouldn’t last thirty seconds as a Sith Lord.” Even now, Ben doubted that dragging your half naked rival across a populated city, in full view of the galactic press, counted as an acceptable form of Sith psychological warfare. It might’ve been too brutal even by their standards.

Before Obi-Wan could edge out another word, there was a knock, followed by a set of ears poking their way through the doorway. “In residence, are you? Time for our weekly meeting, it is.” A sing-song voice called through the door with Master Yoda practically inviting himself inside. “Messy, this business is, but have it in hand, Master Windu does.” Of course Luke had to use the “refresher” half an hour prior to his weekly meeting with Master Yoda. Perfectly timed to have all the key players away from the action.

Ben helplessly shrugged. “I’m just minding the oven, I have absolutely no idea what’s going on.” His confusion must’ve resonated crisply in the Force, because Master Yoda reached over and patted Ben’s hand.

“Not to worry, young one, not alone in this, are you. We too are at a loss.” Ben’s resulting flood of relief was a reason entirely inverted to what was proposed by Yoda.

For now, Luke was successful and the only thing that Palpatine would be lifting into the air this time around was his rear end. Ben had a personal hope that Luke would burn those clothes when he was done, but it would be just his luck if his uncle decided to auction them off for charity instead. After all, it’s what Han Solo would do and, just like Han Solo, Luke would deny everything.

With each leap along the traffic lines, it became more and more apparent that Darth Vader’s secretary was no ordinary man. This secretary was no mere secretary. An acolyte at the absolute minimum, but more likely a higher ranked apprentice. Each leap was Force enhanced but none of it radiated in the Force. Indeed, the Emperor’s distress was far more pronounced with him practically howling it into the Force with as much vigour as he was able without breaking his cover. There was no answer, for of course Darth Sidious couldn’t give the game away when this was being broadcast to the entire galaxy. His only recourse was to wait impotently while Vader’s secretary resolved the situation to the best of his abilities. It was to be noted that the secretary was taking the longest, most visible path to safety, passing through the headquarters of numerous media outlets, much to their pleasure. This secretary would be enjoying the fineries of the upper crust for quite some time after this generous donation.

Nor could the the assisting Jedi hear any of the screams. Not the distress of Darth Sidious and nor did they notice the unusual grace of the aide who effortlessly backflipped over a passing cargo freighter, providing a new viewing angle to the frothing mass of firaxa that followed at his heels. No, Darth Sidious would be at the tender mercies of Darth Vader’s foremost servant while this public relations amendment was undertaken.

The Jedi attempting to assist were unable to keep pace, left behind to deal with the riffraff, but there was no real threat in this incursion even while the aide dodged blasterfire from shuttles. It was merely an excuse to humiliate the would be Emperor before his star had risen in the public eye. Darth Sidious would survive the encounter, but Sheev Palpatine would not for this by exposed him by design to all things that unsettled and unseated a Sith in their native environment. Never having truly competed with another Sith who considered themselves equal, he would have been blindsided by the pettiness and depravity of his competition. His suffering was the amusement of all of his enemies, political, ideological and otherwise and this event would galvanise their efforts. A perfect, if petty, play by Lord Vader.

Equally interesting as the chase itself was the slim, feminine figure bounding along in the secretary’s shadow. Each one of his leaps was carefully mirrored, but she was half a step behind, directly in the shadow of Palpatine. Almost loitering directly below his outstretched hands as jolt after jolt the datapad he held came ever closer to breaking free. Her cloak seemed to shimmer with her surroundings, indicating a form of stealth technology that was far more portable than what was to be expected of now or even twenty years in the future. It was a foregone conclusion that, provided she kept her pace, that she would be the winner of the datapad, whatever it contained. Rather than the plans of Darth Sidious, it would contain choice personal details relating to Sheev Palpatine that were sure to salt a wound that was now festering even before the blow’s completion.

Only at the end did Palpatine’s grip lapse and the datapad slipped from his limp hands. Down, down, down, straight into the waiting grasp of the invisible woman below. She disappeared into a shadow, prize in hand, but she would no doubt appear again, elbow deep in the next curated misfortune. Another Force user, also hidden from the Jedi, but baring a technology that had hardly been conceived of let alone a functioning prototype. The ore that had initially facilitated personal stealth technology had long since disappeared due to the rarity of the ore central to its function. This was either very new or very old or, perhaps given her presence, was a sign of a more alternative pathway which had intersected with this galaxy. Regardless, she required further observation before she became part of Darth Vader’s performance.

Finally, after forty minutes of dedicated endurance, Sheev Palpatine was finally deposited at the feet of his guards at a government building, his saviour doubled over and gasping for air in a manner that deeply suggested it was being faked for effect rather than any real need. There was no dignity, no pomp, no ceremony and, most importantly, there was no fear. What was evident to all was a sad old man, undergarments around his ankles and no mystique or silencing tactic would alleviate this amount of reputational damage. Sheev Palpatine’s transformation into the Emperor could be no more, for the moment had been obliterated by what was sure to be a carefully curated character assassination. Darth Vader was an artist in his field and perhaps the final remaining artist with the efficiency of which this event had taken place.

The hood lowered and there was a gasp swallowed by his respirator. Greying hair and penetrating blue eyes sat in a face that had died at his master’s hands years ago. Older, more wrinkled and with a beard that strongly echoed Obi-Wan, Luke Skywalker was decades too early to exist in this timeline and not deceased enough to be from a far more familiar timeline. Luke Skywalker was Force Sensitive. Luke Skywalker had appropriated his father’s Sith title and was sowing destruction along the ranks of slavers and filth across the galaxy. Luke Skywalker, a politician and senator who had undertaken the task while in the guise of a publicly practicing Sith Lord and continued to do so unharmed by the Jedi Order. Luke Skywalker was alive. Luke Skywalker was not in his correct timeline and the opportunities were limitless.

One death hadn’t been enough for Darth Sidious and he hadn’t experienced enough suffering before his existence finally came to an end. Perhaps Luke would allow him to indulge in another, more thorough, reassessment of his former master’s ongoing existence. After all, if Luke could utterly destroy an enemy before the enemy had so much as tasted power, then what was the harm in having an extra set of hands to do the deed?

Chapter Text

“Is it just me, or has it gotten colder in here?” Luke was wearing two extra sets of robes and had a mug of hot chocolate in hand. “Bloody freezing, is there something wrong with the thermostat? I can give it a look over for you while his lordship is distracted.” Desperation in action. Even the temple’s dedicated maintenance team shuddered at the thought of examining the thermostat. An after hours appointment with Darth Vader would be preferred by every single member of maintenance, but still they checked, still it came back clear and still it was growing ever colder in the Temple.

The concern Obi-Wan had is that an uncharacteristic cold snap was a symptom of another, far more insidious phenomenon. Strictly speaking, the Temple Guard were in charge of formal security, that hadn’t stopped Obi-Wan from parking himself at a terminal and obsessively flicking between the feeds while Luke watched on. This was Sith related. Luke’s Force sensitivity was non-existent, but the bureaucrat could feel the cold dread rolling across the Temple as its source grew ever closer. Ben was wholly unmoved, sipping his chocolate and absentmindedly, thumbing though a holopaper, doing his best to ignore the front page… spread of recent events. Obi-Wan averted his eyes.

Without warning, Luke shot into a standing position. That wasn’t what necessarily alarmed Obi-Wan. What alarmed Obi-Wan was Luke eying the security monitor and blanching at the sight of an armoured figure marching up the front steps of the temple. Luke of all people blanching. All colour draining from his face.

“Obi-Wan, we need to intercept him now.” Oh yes, that was panic. Luke’s standard expression when dealing with his employer.

“Why?” Ben had also been yanked from his seat and they were sprinting for the front entrance.

“I didn’t tell him that we were bunking with Jedi,” escaped from Luke in a strangled noise that only approximated words.

“Oh dear.” Yes, that would explain why Luke’s blood had ejected itself from his body. Obi-Wan as well as he frantically called Masters Windu and Yoda to notify them of their new, potentially hostile arrival, the anxiety only building the closer they came to the centre of the approaching blackhole. Another Sith, one that gave Vader’s chief of staff cause for concern.

Sentient malice flowed from the Sith as easily as water did from the Fountain, as he silently waited for them at the threshold of the building proper. They skidded to a halt in front of a phalanx of Temple Guards who blockaded the entrance, hands on lightsabers. Masters Windu and Yoda stood off to the side, close enough to engage the Sith if required, but not enough to take his attention away from the Guard. Luke doubled over and wheezed for breath, his breath emerging in puffs of condensation and the Sith approached him.

“Luke,” the armoured Sith intoned, for what else could he be?

“Darth Imperius.” Luke gasped and bowed deeply. “Welcome to Lord Vader’s current senatorial headquarters. I apologise if the offered residence is… unconventional.” Obi-Wan held in a hacking cough to the best of his efforts as he felt the Sith’s searing and unflinching stare land upon him. “This is what was made available to us after the… incident… at the Senate.” Obi-Wan caught Ben’s grimace.

“And your master thought it wise for such an arrangement to take place?” The Sith drawled, rich with… amusement or contempt, Obi-Wan would hazard. Any natural tones to his voice were obliterated by the vocoder.

Luke opened his mouth. Froze for a second. Then immediately closed it.

“This is no need to answer. You are a mere bureaucrat and such knowledge is beyond your station.” Darth Imperius’ sneering tone irked Obi-Wan and he glanced over to see Master Yoda’s ears twitch ever so slightly. What wasn’t slight was the surge of irritation that flowed from Master Yoda back into the Force and Imperius’ head tracking it to its source.

“Lord Vader keeps his own council, as do you, my lordship. I can arrange a meeting, but such is the limit of my assistance.” The only thing missing was an exasperated shrug, but it was to everyone’s relief when Imperius' manner remained unchanged with the news.

“Yes, I am aware of what happened on Nar Shaddaa. Impressive. You may brief me while we await Lord Vader’s contact.”

“Yes, Lord Imperius.” Luke’s relief was visible.

With that, the phalanx parted, becoming an impromptu honour guard as Luke led the Sith Lord back to his makeshift residence in the Jedi Temple.

“Well, that just happened,” Obi-Wan brightly commented.

“Happened, indeed,” Yoda darkly answered, with Mace’s own sentiments resonating in the Force. “On the scene, another Darth is. Yet more evidence against them being Banites, it does provide.”

Obi-Wan could only carry on hoping that this non-Banite Sith faction remained cordial in their dealings with the Jedi Order. Light contact with Imperius’ presence suggested a brutal death for anyone who pried more deeply, so for now it was best to retreat and allow Luke to deal with his visitor in peace. Then, they could ask Luke what had prompted this most unexpected visit.

At least Obi-Wan had on good authority who Yoda would be siding with if an internal scuffle broke out within this Sith faction.

The door hardly closed behind them, before Darth Vader folded his arms and the Dark Side itself practically sighed. Or at least Ben assumed it was sighing, not being a real Dark Sider left Ben with only a minimum understanding of the Dark Side’s body language at the best of times. “You are aware that Darth Imperius as a title has already been claimed by another?” Ben found himself swaying alarmingly as he frantically swivelled his head between the pair. One clad in black Sith armour, the other in three sets of overlapping bath robes that may as well have been armour. It wasn’t like Luke was wearing much else when he flattened Nar Shaddaa.

“Not here, it hasn’t,” Luke chirped back, ushering them deeper within their borrowed quarters. “Instead there was some moron in this universe called Darth Nox who thought he could get ahead by enslaving Force Ghosts. He was a footnote in the annals of history, so I’m going to hesitate a guess and say that it didn’t end terribly well for him.” Whoever he was, he certainly hadn’t achieved the age old Sith goal of complete immortality. Thanks to Palpatine’s stupidity it remained an unresolved mystery. Maybe the Dark Side itself had reconsidered its life choices and subsequently allowing Banites any knowledge beyond the ability to replace a lightbulb. Palpatine was living proof of the Dark Side having at least some standards.

“An alternate pathway,” the Sith mused, panning around the suite and landing on Luke’s heavily stained, hot pink apron as it hung off a hook in the kitchen. “Fortunately the flow on effects appear to be minimal.”

“Maybe if the Sith Empire had’ve survived it would be different, but it didn’t and here we all are,” Luke flippantly gestured over his shoulder at their surrounds. “Holed up in the Jedi Temple, pretending to be Sith Lords,” Luke groaned and Ben used the opportunity to throw himself bodily onto the couch. If grandfather wasn’t about to kill them now, then it wasn’t on his itinerary for the near future.

“Words fail me as to how you achieved such a feat. Your knowledge of Sith tradition is non-existent.” Complete certainty, mixed with muted wonder. This version of Darth Vader had known his son in some capacity.

“That’s precisely why we aren’t pretending to be Banite Sith. Bane was gracious enough to obliterate a phenomenal amount of non-Banite culture and we are the happy beneficiaries of his lack of vision.” Thank the Force for that. The only people capable of contradicting Luke were the Banites themselves and they wouldn’t risk the exposure.

“The sect wouldn’t last twelve minutes with you as its Master.” Vader agreed and a wave of amusement rolled over Ben, while Luke disappeared into the kitchen and reappeared with a mug of hot chocolate.

“Why settle for only one minion when you can have an army of them?” Ben’s uncle was only partially sarcastic, because at least the previous Sith Empire hadn’t been held together with duct tape and an extremely apathetic quadruple amputee.

“Darth Sidious’ folly is rather apparent in hindsight.” That’s right… Darth Vader had only ever wanted one apprentice and Luke had declined at the time. Even if Vader had become the Master, the Rule of Two would’ve ended with him anyway.

“I’m still taken aback that you’re here, father.” Luke gingerly sipped his hot chocolate, with Ben scooting over to allow him to sit. “I was expecting to screw over Palpatine by taking your title first and skipping off into the wild blue yonder with it and now here you are.” Luke sat the mug down and clasped his hands.

“I surmised that my appearance was not part of the plan and have adjusted accordingly. After all, you appear to have taken the lead in matters, annihilating space and time in the process.”

“I don’t think we shared space and time in the first place. You can’t possibly be from our timeline,” Luke hummed, half to the Sith Lord, half to himself. “It’s an impossibility.”

“I concur. There is no possibility that you are the Luke from my timeline.” Yet Luke still called him father and Vader no doubt thought of Luke as his son. Interesting.

“Um, should we compare notes?” Ben found himself accidentally cutting in, lulled by the casualness of the encounter. Vader’s agitation didn’t appear in his body language, but it was rippling through the entire Jedi Temple as a sweeping malaise that was sure bestow nightmares upon the residents for weeks to come. Well, at least they couldn’t be any worse than the waking nightmare that was the wall to wall coverage of Sheev Palpatine's exposed arse. Literally, holoboards had been rented out all across Coruscant for each outlet’s deep dive into the death of Palpatine’s political career.

Darth Vader inclined his head and turned to Luke. “You died. Sidious killed you on the second Death Star.” Short. Clipped. The difference between the Anakin Skywalker of now and the once not so distant future was giving Ben whiplash. There was none of the barely restrained glee that followed around the Anakin of the Clone Wars. Though… this was also before the Clone Wars and there wasn’t going to be a Clone Wars if Luke had his wicked way with the universe’s timetable of affairs. Anakin Skywalker was never going to experience Sheev Palpatine’s war. Instead this Anakin Skywalker lived in a future where Sheev Palpatine’s greatest achievement was the amount of dance remixes set to his screams. If Ben had released one of his own under DJ Ren Dance Remixes, it was for him to know and for Luke to eventually find out after it made enough money to fund another warship. So far, monetary progress was steady, but there was only so many beats in the galaxy and finding one that made money was difficult when Ben’s day job involved physically beating the galaxy’s criminal population into a fine pulp.

“On the other hand, I didn’t die. You took offence to Sidious’ attempt on my life and hurled him to his death at the expense of your own. After that, the Empire sort of collapsed, splinter groups blasted off to parts unknown and basically we had another civil war.” Luke paused. “Oh and a group of idiots popped up, naming themselves after lightsabers.” Ben smirked. “Basically, we got stuck dealing with Imperial remnants, because everyone in power decided it’d be an excellent idea to let them flee into the Outer Rim and beyond instead of arresting them for corruption.”

Darth Vader sighed into the Force. “I see.”

“You have absolutely no idea how much I missed you when I found out that they weren’t planning on arresting any of the bastards.” The aristocracy was a protected species regardless of the galactic government of the day, which is part of why Ben’s father clashed with his mother.

Darth Vader admirably ignored Luke’s watering eyes. “With how little this child resembles you, I presume that he isn’t your progeny?” Darth Vader’s raking stare was invisible to the naked eye but clawed along Ben’s essence in the Force. Not violent; more the sensation of a krayt dragon doing its best to delicately examine a lothcat with its teeth without immediately clamping down. Still, Vader’s almost delicate probing with the Force was nothing compared to the noxious presence from the previous timeline. It was almost comforting, in the same sort of way that knowing what a serial killer’s rap sheet was prior to ambushing them in a dark alleyway.

“Oh, right! Introductions, I forgot,” Luke grimaced apologetically at Ben and Ben surreptitiously nodded back. “Father, this is Ben Solo, my nephew and your grandson. And Ben, this is Anakin Skywalker, your grandfather after he became a Sith Lord. We’re still trying to work out a Sith name for Ben that doesn’t sound like we appropriated it from a janitorial supplies manufacturer,” Luke added as an afterthought, with Ben shrugging.

“Nephew?” Vader’s shock rolled into the Force with the same approximate level of self-control as Ben’s father at an unattended minibar. His fist clenched, trembled and he might’ve taken a step backwards if he wasn’t locked into position by the news Luke had colony dropped from the heavens.

“Yeah, this is Leia and Hans’ son,” Luke blithely continued, either unaware or totally indifferent to the nexus building opposite. “He’s such a sweet kid, you’re gonna love him. Never got around to having one of my own so I stole him off them instead.” Luke leaned over and dragged Ben into a crushing, one armed hug. “He’s the best!” Without warning, Ben’s eyes began to intensely water. Pollen that followed Vader into the temple, surely.

“Leia Organa is your twin sister?” And there it was - cutting through all presumptions was the Anakin Skywalker that Ben had spent so much time with in this distant timeline. While his vocoder masked his inflections, Ben could perfectly hear the overlay of the new and old and fought down a dangerous grin.

“You didn’t know? Huh, guess I died before you found out.” There was an indifferent shrug. “Ah well, better late than never. If it makes you feel any better, Leia wanted absolutely nothing to do with you, so this is probably for the best.” Luke’s optimism was barely shining through the swamp water it occupied.

“Organa of all people,” was Vader’s strained reply. Then Vader’s gaze fell onto Ben and the Force related weight that came with it.

“Hi, grandfather.” Ben awkwardly waved. “It’s nice to meet you.” Even though Ben had already technically met Anakin Skywalker. But the more the merrier, right?

Silence. Stunned silence as the Force roiled around Darth Vader’s armoured form.

“If you need a moment, father, I do have a list of criminals to mow down. You know, if you need need it,” Luke offered in an quiet undertone. “We deal with a lot ex-Banite Sith in the organisation these days, so we do understand that a healthy outlet for build ups of negative emotion is better than no outlet at all.”

“I will consider it,” Vader finally replied, the coffee table was now only slightly rattling.

“Excellent! There’s a lot of work to get through and we’re out of tea,” Luke pouted. “You kids hang tight, I’ll be right back!” Vader had enough dignity to not react to Luke's long term verbal tic. Luke bounced out the door, whistling jauntily, with both Ben and his grandfather staring after him. Luke had a few screws loose, ones connecting core components for overall system stability, but he meant well and that was more than Ben could say about a lot of people in either timeline.

For now though, the silence between grandson and grandfather stretched onwards.

“So… grandfather,” Ben slowly began. “How do you feel about designing dreadnoughts?”

Seconds ticked by, before the Sith finally answered. “I am amenable to dreadnought design.”

“Great, because Jacen has ideas for a dry dock covering something of the old Executor-class size and getting a second opinion on that from non-time travellers has been difficult.”

“I can’t imagine why,” oozed back, loaded with sarcasm, as the Sith folded his arms.

Maybe, just maybe, being dumped into an alternate dimension wasn’t the worst thing ever.

From the moment a cool hand laid itself against his cheek, Luke was fully aware that this was one of those dreams. Not a memory, not a night terror, not a desperate struggle with a past long gone or even a future to come, as the Force so often delivered, but a far more frightening possibility - the present. Visions of the now. Specifically, a vision of the present provided by an entity of the current times, one that didn’t have hundreds or thousands of years barring access, but instead only space itself. It was, to be blunt, utterly terrifying, but Luke set his mind to the blissful memories of Sheev Palpatine’s cries as he bounced along on Luke’s shoulder and the sensation faded.

Pitch black extended before him. There was something solid beneath Luke’s feet for now, certainly, but one step forward, even a teensy one was temptation enough for some entities to engage in catapulting and rolling nightmares, like a hound slathering after barbecue offcuts. For now, Luke would play it cool and stand precisely and exactly where he had awoken.

I’ve missed you… Longing, filled with warmth.

Luke blinked. Slowly. Then stared straight ahead. Best not to give it too many ideas.

“I… couldn’t forget you… wouldn’t forget you…” The overlaid voice(s) corrected, with far more substance and Luke was carried into the conversation by good vibes.

“I’m glad you thought of me,” Luke answered, fully sincere, briefly wondering if anyone apart from Leia, Han, Chewie and Threepio had even noticed the disappearance of Luke’s fledging Order. At least it was one more on the list, even if Luke wasn’t entirely sure what was being added to the list. “It’s comforting to know there’s at least one more person in existence who cares.” Even if Luke wasn’t sure what it cared about.

“A person…” A far more solid, masculine voice whispered, filled with an unnameable emotion. “Yes… I’m a person.” A single voice, far stronger than the others. There was someone or something buried in that hive of activity after all.

Luke bobbed his head agreeably and a felt the back of a hand tenderly stroke the side of his neck and resisted a shiver. Don’t respond. Responding was encouragement and even though it was testing the waters, Luke desperately didn’t want it setting sail anywhere near his person. There was no need to give it ammunition. Don’t feed it.

“What do you want?” The voice purred, circling Luke in the dark, tugging at his clothes at it made its way around him. Playing coy as always. Either that or Luke’s guest was unusually shy for a being with such a phenomenal arsenal of tricks and traps that could snap his neck with an errant thought. Then again, that also went for Luke with the rest of the galaxy just as much. “What can I give you?” Or rather what can it tempt Luke with… There was a moment of consideration and the list was rather short. Every single item on Luke’s ideal Life Day gift list came with the caveat of physical impossibility or catastrophic consequences for the galaxy at large. And… hadn’t both he and Ben already received the gift of a lifetime when the artefact had punted them into a new reality entirely? In light of that, there was one thing… just maybe… this entity could help out with…

“I don’t want what you think I want,” Luke clarified, waving a hand through the air and cutting through the static. “You’re a shapeshifter.” If this was the same entity from before… yes, it was unquestionably a shapeshifter and the last thing Luke wanted to do was solidify any of its designs. “You’ll take the form of whatever answer I provide…” Luke briefly paused as a hiss filled the silence but carried right on. “But I don’t want that. I’d prefer to see you as you really are.” And if it was a four hundred foot, tentacled eldritch horror, then at Luke would know where he stood - at the bottom of the totem pole and about to be eaten, but such is life. At this point in Luke’s life it’d be unusual if it were anything else. “So who are you really?” Who and what had been stalking Luke’s every step for over a decade?

“I am what they made me!” It abruptly snarled and Luke blindly reached out a hand to reassuringly pat it on the shoulder and hit true, with the tension fading as it leaned into Luke’s hand. Luke held on until eventually the being below vanished and his hand dropped back to his side.

“So what?” Blasé, sure, but also honest and he felt the double take ripple through the Force. “Why are you beholden to them at all? Tell them to piss off and do what you want to do.” Worked well enough for Luke.

There was a stunned silence.

“It’s not an option.” A single voice again, resigned.

“Why not?” Of course it was an option!

Pain echoed through the Force, a phantom stab through Luke’s chest. “I’ve missed you so much, Luke. Please, come find me.” Delicate hands slipped around his waist, a voice from a woman long dead crooned into his ears, while a mass of undoubtedly red hair cascaded over Luke’s shoulders. But he wouldn’t look back, couldn’t look back - it broke the rules of engagement. “We’ll be together again… Soon.” Soon. A legion of voices echoed. That was new, never before had it asked for Luke to find it… instead its whispers chased him across the galaxy.

Luke merely smiled into the abyss as the arms around his waist tightened. Mara Jade had been dead for over a decade, but it was almost comforting to know that the entity who so often borrowed her face was as persistent as ever and fully capable of jumping dimensional boundaries unassisted. What a wonderful discovery.

“I’m willing to listen, provided you can be yourself.” Gentle, non-confrontational, but without pity. Never with pity. “What do you really want?” Luke queried, allowing the shadow to drape its full weight along Luke’s shoulders. At the core of this entity, it still had its own voice, Luke assumed, for as much as it borrowed from others there must still be a foundation. A person, nestled deep within.

“I want you.” One voice, as defined as Luke had ever heard it.

Yes, Luke had rather been afraid of that. Ben had no idea how lucky he was to be blissfully ignorant to this part of the family history. Ben might’ve been hearing voices, but at least it wasn’t this set of voices. Hesitation, the phantom arms briefly loosening before strengthening their grip.

Mortis, the voice whispered. Find me on Mortis. I miss you. Just like that, Luke’s long term, mystery stalker finally had a planetary address after a decade of obstruction and Luke beamed. Finally!

When Luke’s eyes snapped open, half dangling as he was off the couch, it didn’t escape his notice that a patch of shadows, far deeper than the others, was securely wrapped around Luke’s waist… and Ben was eying it speculatively from the doorway. Maybe it was time for a gentle chat about current and past events.

Chapter Text

There was no easy way to broach this topic. Artoo was vibrating nervously next to Luke and absolutely nothing Luke could say or do was about to soften the impact of the history he was about to unload on both his alternate father and nephew. It wasn’t so much that the facts were disagreeable as they were lying in wait for Ben and Vader around a shadowy corner with a billy club.

“So to kick thing’s off, I’m missing a year of my memory, where we apparently had a war that I participated in but have absolutely no recollection of whatsoever,” Luke confessed and the combined shock of grandfather and nephew nearly knocked Luke arse over tits. Artoo whistled unhappily and Luke fondly patted his dome.

“How.” The Sith snarled while Ben choked on a scalding, inadvertent gulp of tea.

“I’m getting to it,” Luke waved his hands through the air, impatient. “Back in the day, there was a woman called Mara Jade-”

“-the Emperor’s Hand,” Vader interjected and Luke raised a placating hand.

“Yes, I’m aware, we had an absolute blast trying to kill each other, then she killed my clone and got over it. It’s fine, father, I’m aware of her role with Sidious.”

“I’m sorry, what happened? You had a clone? She killed your clone?” Ben’s teacup rattled in its saucer and Luke’s stomach sank into his knees. Maybe a touch more seriousness for the kid who wasn’t aware of Luke’s backstory.

“The Emperor’s Hand or Hands rather, were Dark Side acolytes who skirted the Rule of Two. Sidious would enslave them via a parasitic bond and bend them to his will. Trained to a limited degree, they were called upon when tasks could utilise a Force Sensitive, but were beneath a Sith Lord’s attention,” Vader answered and Luke promptly nodded along.

“She was after me as part of Palpatine’s dying order. Kill Luke Skywalker,” Luke leered in his best Palaptine impression while Vader conveyed the body language equivalent of an eye roll. “So she did kill me… a completely off the wall, insane version of me that Palpatine had cloned for… reasons?” He inclined his head. “I don’t think we ever found out why he randomly cloned me, but Mara killing him and the other psychopath clone he was with finalised the order and freed her from him.”

There was a tentative and encouraging noise from Ben. “Then?”

“She was basically part of the team from that point onwards. Any of the Force related stuff popped up and we went to investigate and that… that's where it all went wrong.” Artoo’s sad boop sliced through Luke. “We got reports about a bunch of weirdos engaging in sacrificial magic on some backwater planet that was meant to have a Force Nexus.” A shrug. “We went to investigate, thinking nothing of it. When the Banite Sith imploded, there was a pile of Force cultists and mystics that ejected themselves out the woodwork. It was just another day.” Until it wasn’t.

Vader gestured imperiously at Luke to continue and Luke smirked at him. “So we get there and immediately there’s a Force hotspot with a village… except-”

“-It has no villagers,” Ben interjected, his brow furrowed. “It was the same with those idiots naming themselves after lightsabers when they didn’t have any lightsabers. They took and sacrificed the villagers.”

Luke had the pleasure of watching Banite Lord of the Sith Darth Vader do a double take in real time as he mentally mouthed “naming themselves after lightsabers” to Luke in abject distress. Living and now dead proof that consuming the Dark Side in large amounts caused honest to goodness brain damage. Father better be taking notes.

“Yeeeep, same sort of situation. Odd that we had so many cultists naming themselves after lightsabers,” Luke idly reflected. “But yes, we followed about seven of them in after we found the empty village. All standard, bad guy cultist behaviour and nothing really of interest to note. Once we got through the initial cave entrance it was clearly a temple of some sort, but whatever was carved into walls was even older than anything even Threepio had on record.” Artoo had taken detailed scans of the wall carvings and nobody could find anything resembling them in any database. It was as if the entire structure had appeared out of thin air. Then when Luke had returned to the planet later on, all traces of both the village and temple had evaporated into thin air.

“We mowed them down, since none of them could defend against lightsabers.” He blinked rapidly to clear his eyes. “One was left and he went down too, but neither of us expected him to bust out a blaster.” Mara down to a blaster of all of the ways for her to go when she was still holding her lightsaber. “All it took was a second of distraction and that malignant fog in the cave.” A fog that seeped into their minds and did its best to smother them. “There was a pool and when she was wounded Mara fell back into it.” There was a low hiss and Luke felt his father’s invisible gaze burn. “Without thinking, I dived into it after her. The threat was gone, but there was no way she was going to be able to pull herself with the hole that blaster bolt left in her…” That gaping wound where you could see light shining out the other side in the brief instant before she sank into the pool’s waters. With that, Luke had flung his lightsaber so haphazardly he’d managed his first vertical bisection without even thinking about it.

“Was it the Pool of Knowledge or the Font of Power?” There was a degree of urgency to his father’s question that had Luke wincing.

“Fortunately for everyone involved, I later found out from the design of the stone courtyard that it was the Font of Power that Mara fell into, not the Pool of Knowledge. Bathe in the Pool and drink from the Font. I didn’t drink anything and dodged a bullet from what I found out afterwards.” And narrowly avoided turning into some sort of eldritch horror, according to various legends. Something something Gods of Mortis, which wasn’t making Luke feel any more comfortable at the pool of shadows standing behind Vader doing its best to make eye contact while having no visible eyes.

“Good.” Vader crossed his arms. The pool of shadows standing behind him followed. Creepy.

“So I held my breath, dived in after her and there was oblivion. Not even Darkness, sheer, never ending emptiness. Felt like it lasted forever.” As all Force visions did in Luke’s extensive experience. “Next thing I know, Mara is dragging me out of the water… and…” Luke swallowed.

“And she wasn’t quite as you remembered,” the Sith concluded.

“No.” Luke shook his head. “And there’s nothing. No memories, no anything beyond Mara dragging me out, without a trace of a wound or that anything happened to her and then it’s blank.”A sea of nothing. “Remember that galactic civil war I mentioned us having?”

“Yeah?” Ben asked around a strained mouthful of tea.

“There used to be an organisation called the First Order, basically a deadman’s switch organisation Palpatine had stuffed up his sleeves in the event of an arse kicking.” Luke cleared his throat.

“Used to be?” Luke’s father repeated, almost knowingly and Luke shrugged at him.

“I think you already know from personal experience where this is headed.”

“Indeed.”

It was only Ben’s perplexed expression that had Luke hurriedly elaborating. “By the end it I woke up eleven months later, with no memories, no idea about what happened, with hundreds of missed calls from your mother, father, Chewie, practically the entirety of the former Rebel Alliance and the newfound knowledge that the First Order had ceased to exist in this time period.” Luke blurted it out, the words burning him. Artoo concurred, projecting a set of statistics that blanched the colour from Ben’s face and had Vader’s approval singing in the Force. Eleven months he’d never get back, no matter how much he meditated or pursued the memory. It was as if the Force itself was hiding the memories.

“Remember that story about waking up to a flimsi full of names the next morning after a murder attempt from a girlfriend?” Luke continued.

Ben blinked slowly. “It was real?”

“According to all of the eye witnesses it was real. A woman with the exact description of Mara Jade was seen speeding off into the night… but…”

“But?” Ben prompted.

“None of the droids who were there, including Artoo, have any such recording of a second presence being with me at that cantina at all, Ben. It was just me hacking my way through those unlucky enough to be in the way with no sign whatsoever of Mara Jade ever being present on the scene.” There had been quite a lot of panicked screaming and yelling with that discovery. An entire cantina and even the town trapped in a mass hallucination of a dead woman starting an extremely violent bar brawl. The implications of a being of the Force that powerful sent shudders through leadership.

“Kriff me,” Ben uttered and nobody bothered to correct his language.

“Artoo, would you kindly?”

And so it played to a rapt audience that didn’t involve Luke as he averted his eyes. He didn’t need to see this again. Not after the repeat that occurred so recently on the ex-Smuggler’s Moon.

“But… Artoo’s holo doesn’t have a second person it at all.” Ben’s dawning horror perfectly matched Luke’s own at the time, along with Leia, Han and Chewie. “Maybe you could see another person, but all they saw was you.” All they glimpsed was a flash of light and the hiss of a lightsaber before Death’s rushing wings greeted them. Or Luke’s robes, but he still wasn’t sure where the set in Artoo’s recording had come from and Artoo was at a loss as well. An awful lot of blank space in Luke’s mind that left behind an awful lot of blank space on the material plane as a direct consequence.

“A spirit,” Vader replied, crossing his arms. “What emerged from the Font of Power was a spirit posing as Mara Jade and an extremely capable one no less. The greater mystery is how you survived the experience with your mind relatively intact.”

Luke shrugged. “Hell if I know.” Spirits didn’t have a tendency to let go of people once they were ensnared. Why Luke was still walking around now with seventy percent of his mental faculties intact was anyone’s guess.

“Every action we take resonates in the Force and for eleven months Leia heard it screaming in terror while I mowed my way through numerous organisations.” Now Luke glanced back at his captive audience. “Wipe out the Hutts and you’re paid for services to the community and you’re a hero to the masses. Slaughter the entire extended family of a corrupt senior government figure because they decided to shack up with a psychopath and suddenly everyone who owned slaves has moral quandaries about your actions.” A shrug. “I ended the war, but not in a politically convenient way that gracefully sauced the mince of the aristocracy.” There was a delicate shrug.

“Who cares?” Ben asked so abruptly that Luke choked on a breath of air. “It’s not like you bumped off Mon Mothma’s entire extended family.”

There was a smooth silence as Luke fought down a hysterical urge to cackle in a manner most unlike himself. Fortunately, his father beat him to the answer. “To the contrary, Ben, Mon Mothma’s extended family are parties likely to be involved due to their fervent support of the Emperor at a personal level.”

“Uh oh,” Ben muttered, wide eyed. “That’s a…”

“An unmitigated public relations disaster that, while not quite eclipsing, approaches Supreme Chancellor Palpatine’s recent public rescue for lasting impressions,” Luke cheerfully concluded. “An ex-member of the Alliance spread some of Artoo’s spicier footage around. It was most unhelpful.”

The Force flinched and Luke shrugged at his father who projected a sense of incredulity into the Force.

“So I’ve got no recollection of anything from those eleven months. The suspicion is that the spirit possessed me outright,” Luke admitted, frowning as he hurled a fishing rod into that murky void of memory and came out with sweet crik all for his efforts.

“I repeat, how is your mind mostly intact?” Now Luke’s father was pacing the length of the room. “The standard operating procedure of a Dark Side spirit is to subvert the will of the host to in effect use it as a puppet while enacting their will in the living world.” Now Vader paused. “But it released you after eleven months… This is unheard of in any Sith texts.” Banite Sith texts, sure, but Bane was a moron who destroyed most of the knowledge trove that the Sith possessed prior to his dogma becoming dominant. Luke didn’t doubt for a second that systems worth of accrued knowledge disappeared into the ether due to Bane’s sheer narcissism and chronic head up arse behaviour.

“I think I ran out of targets,” Luke confessed. “I had an extensive list, you know, of all of the problems I was helping Leia sort out. Insurgents, the First Order, random Force Users naming themselves after lightsabers, humanitarian crises, slavery… You name it, it was there… By the time I came to the list was empty so I figured the spirit left me because it couldn’t feed off my sense of purpose.” Without the list Luke was perfectly content to sit on his rear running a hobby farm for the rest of his days. Unfortunately for the rest of the galaxy, there was always a list and Luke was always steadfastly chasing everyone and everything on his list. It was already at its original length prior to his possession by the time their dimensional hop had happened.

“And…” Tension was thick in the air.

“This isn’t the first time I’ve genocided the Hutts, Ben,” Luke quietly answered and the only proper Sith Lord present shot to attention so suddenly that Luke jumped. “Darth Vader was good at his job, but I was the best at mine. I wasn’t a Sith Lord, I was a janitor - no problem was too small or beneath my notice.”

“And so your work was extensive,” Vader uttered.

“And unappreciated,” Luke added to Vader’s disgust.

Ben coughed and cut Luke off. “So is our Mara is named after Mara Jade?” Ah, so Ben had caught on to Luke’s habit.

“Mara, Biggs, Jacen, Jaina and others are all named after people I lost over the the years.”

“Biggs and Mara I know, but why Jacen and Jaina?” Ben asked and Luke bit his lip. What a question. This was almost worse than explaining his eleven month long expedited dispensation of justice.

“So you know how your parents seemingly hated each other’s guts by the time you were sent off to me?” Vader read the room and was bracing himself for impact.

“Yes…?”

“That wasn’t your fault,” Luke confirmed. “But they’d never tell you that because it’d mean admitting that you were meant to have two older siblings until Leia miscarried and lost the twins.” In another universe, Luke was sure he delivered the news with tact, grace and the sort of poise characteristic of the most ancient of nobility. This wasn’t that universe and Luke automatically dived backwards as his kaff table screeched and hit the ground as a fine powder.

Ben and Luke’s father exchanged a terse expression and Luke held back a sigh of relief. Honestly, it could’ve been worse.

“So… so…” Ben’s eyes were welling with tears and Luke hurried to intervene.

“It had nothing to do with you and everything to do with them having different ideas about grief. Leia wanted to throw herself into her work to erase the feeling. Han wanted her to take time off and do literally anything else other than work and those two ideas… didn’t work.” They screamed bloody murder and a lightsaber was pulled out in the middle of a restaurant. The fact that it was Luke’s lightsaber, but not Luke holding it didn’t really help the situation. It also didn’t help that Han’s reaction to it all was to order more wine while yelling back at Leia. “Then you came along and they handled that about as well until they decided that you were happier with me than them.”

“You were in the middle of it all the entire time,” Vader rumbled. Between Mara’s death and Luke adopting Ben, it singlehandedly blew away any of Luke’s plans for children of his own. Not that Luke was too bothered by it when he could always tuck someone else’s abandoned duckling under his wings and waddle off with them as well.

“Nothing I said made a difference. I tried to get them to talk to each other instead of past each other, but it’s like the entire situation was cursed,” Luke explained. “Grief is meant to be blunted at least slightly with time, but that never happened.” Which was strange to Luke, because it was as if both of them were frozen in time at the exact moment the terrible news had been received. There was almost a sense of deliberateness to it that didn’t involve Leia or Han that even now rose the hairs on the back of Luke’s neck.“ It was so bad I wouldn’t be surprised if Palpatine’s ghost was still floating around being a pain in the arse,” Luke absently concluded. “Sure, his body exploded, but since has that meant anything for the nastier Sith Lords?” Ben was ever so slightly rocking from side to side but at least he wasn't crying anymore. It'd take a while for him to process it and Luke was happy to run distraction until he was ready to talk about it properly and not over Luke's long list of unremembered war crimes.

There was another awkward silence. “Did you move to confirm this suspicion?” The suspicion that Darth Sidious was interfering with them beyond the grave? Luke didn’t need to confirm anything when Mara Jade was already on the scene. It was a given that Palpatine was firmly wedged into their lives still, living or dead.

“I tried, but after the… event… happened it was rinse and repeat with Han and Leia, you know. Instead of them butting heads over how Ben should be handled it was them butting heads over how I should be handled,” Luke snorted. “They were perfectly fine with me blacking out and butchering an entire enemy faction in a blanked out year of no memories, but speculating on a Sith Lord cheating death was a step too far.” Luke rolled his eyes. It wasn’t even really about Luke. It was about them and them no longer seeing eye to eye after the loss of Jacen and Jaina. Unfortunately, Luke stuck his head up and had it just about blasted off in the crossfire. “So I got blacklisted from any involvement in any system remotely connected to civilisation. Leia had the officials and Han would stir up trouble with the criminals and none of it worked out great for me trying to do my job.” Which was mopping up the loose ends he’d somehow missed in that gap in time.

“How does a war hero on the winning side get blacklisted?” Ben’s incredulous question should’ve been rhetorical but Luke could already see his father stiffen at the question. Anakin Skywalker would know all about war heroes on the winning side being blacklisted.

“Ever wonder why you and the other kids are so good at dodging names and identifiers? I haven’t been Luke Skywalker, Hero of the Republic, Jedi Master for years, Ben.” Luke waved his hands in a Yoda-like manner. “Instead I am merely Luke - Caretaker of Orphans, Eccentric Old Man… Drunkard,” Luke added with a wink to Ben's aghast face.

“You’re harmless,” Vader concluded, while what little remained of Luke’s kaff table quivered.

“Correct. If Luke Skywalker, war hero turns up, all hell breaks loose and I get interrogated by the local authorities.” By which time the leads will have disappeared off-system. “If Luke, drunkard and waste of oxygen shows up with a gaggle of orphans, hey, he’s fine, at least he bothered to exercise the absolute bare minimum of sapient decency by taking his kids to the cantina with him and supervising while drunk,” Luke drawled. “My target won’t know I’ve arrived and you kids get a day out on the town while I get my investigations done. You knowing how to defend yourselves was less about training Force Sensitives and more making sure nothing went wrong while I was on the job. Never in a million years will I ever take you into a dangerous situation where I don’t think I’ll win.” And at this point, Luke’s track record spoke for itself. The irritating void would always be present but the skills he’d picked up during it would forever remain.

“It’s not just the lightsabers and the robes…” Ben murmured. “You’ve been doing this for years. Pretending to be something you’re not. You were never drunk at all, were you?” All the while Luke’s kids were dragged behind him in a gaggling batch, never knowing any differently.

“Force no! Fake it until you make it, Ben. If they thought I was mentally stable they never would’ve let me take care of any of you.” Which was the awful catch-18 situation in a nutshell. If he was sane he was unfit to take care of the kids because clearly he was only taking care of them to use them against his enemies. But he clearly wasn’t sane because he wasn’t using them against his enemies, which thereby made him a fit caretaker, drunkenness and questions involving sanity set fully aside.

“And this is how you ended up taking on the guise of a Sith Lord with such ease.” Vader intoned, folding his arms.

“Years of experience,” Luke chirped. “There’s a lot more bloody murder involved in pretending to be a Sith Lord, but the self defence and asking what Han would do is remarkably transferable in this line of work.”

“This family is an entire circus,” Ben groaned.

Artoo was the first to whistle his assent, followed immediately after by the shadow shaking in silent mirth. Oh yes, the Force was definitely laughing at Luke and he really didn’t want to think about which part was enjoying the most amount of glee.