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In Vader’s peripheral vision, the ghost that has been haunting him for three months breaks open a black melon and pours half of it into a leather-wrapped canteen he found buried in the sand outside Mos Eisley.
The other half of the melon confuses him for some time. Slippery sweet water already threatens to slosh over the narrow lip of the canteen. The boy’s soaked sleeves are already growing crusty with windswept sand. He carefully sets the remaining half of the melon in the sand by his feet and screws the canteen’s lid on.
The vessel is intended for an adult; the weight of it pulls against the knot the ghost has fashioned out of the two broken ends of its strap. He endures, however, with his usual care, and stands slowly while gathering the melon in both hands.
Vader’s gaze flicks back to the officers speaking to him, telling him that no jedi have been found in the city.
They wish to retreat. They hold their hands up to block the light of the suns, as if the brims of their helmets are not sufficient for the task.
The ghost has pulled the flapping canvas strewn about his shoulder over the melon.
“Keep watch here,” Vader orders. “They’ll come out when they think the coast is clear.”
The officers salute, and he swings his robes around. He passes his ghost on the way back towards the Executor and, when the ghost remains standing in the sand and wind, he whistles.
In only moments, the space at his side is no longer empty.
Perhaps it is because Padmé said she was pregnant before she and the others went screaming across the galaxy into rat’s nests and hidey-holes.
Perhaps it is spite driven by Ahsoka’s words on Mustafar.
Or perhaps it is Mom in the force, beseeching Vader not to waste his life away in the gleaming obsidian throne room he’s made of his quarters on the ship.
Whatever it is, Vader stops in front of The Executor and asks his ghost if he’s going to be brave today.
The answer is no.
The answer is always no.
The reliability of that answer softens an emotion in Vader’s chest which might otherwise have been anger. Instead he watches as the ghost sits down in the sand, still holding the melon under his stringy canvas cloak. Early monsoon winds pluck at him, whipping hair into his eyes. He shakes his head. The monsoon scoffs and goes right back to plucking.
Vader nudges him with a boot.
The ghost looks out at the desert with grey, glass-bottle eyes.
He must be thinking of the desert on Da’nor. He must have been counting the suns all day, trying to make three out of two and pale blue leaves out of yellow and white shrub blossoms. Vader doesn’t know where he was in town, although judging from the canteen he found, he must have been poking around dump piles and property fences.
There is a building redness in the rims of his eyes, no doubt from how he keeps rubbing at them.
Vader moves forward and his ghost immediately jerks back. The movement sloshes the half-melon with regrettable consequences.
The ghost’s eyes widen as he looks down at his covered lap, unable to see the liquid soaked into his clothes, but certainly able to feel it.
Upset builds in the Force, but the ghost does not release it. Instead, the pressure spreads out like a creeping oil spill.
Vader moves forward again and catches the boy under his arms before he can scramble away. Sand gathers in the folds of his gloves and along the edges of his life support as the child settles against his shoulder. He squirms so that he can look at the water-stained sand he has been removed from and rubs at his eye with fists covered in grit.
He is too young to have predicted this series of consequences, and that is his mystique.
It is what draws Vader to him time and time again.
He brings the child inside and carries him through The Executor’s familiar maze of corridors until they reach his personal quarters. Once there, he sets the boy on the floor and leaves him to scrub even more sand into his eyes.
A nap is in order. But first, as much of a bath as Vader’s ghost will allow.
The dampened cloth he returns with is received with a recoil, as if Vader was standing over his ghost with a raised open palm.
The ghost reacts this way every time. He struggles against Vader’s grip around his wrist as the cloth does it’s work on his face and the one trapped hand. Literal force is needed to uncurl those fingers. The ghost escapes before the same force can be applied to the other hand.
Vader remains where he is, squatting on the ground, as the child tries to find somewhere in this room to hide.
He won’t find anywhere this time. While he was sleeping the night before, Vader swept the place. His previously unlocked cabinets are no longer; the space under the berth has been shuttered. The tangle of pipes and tubing behind the bacta tank are covered with a protective cage now, one that has no room for wriggling ghosts.
All the boy can do is skirt around the wall, crouching and curling in corner after corner. None of them provide sufficient cover, and the realization of this is accompanied by snuffling sounds and finally, once the ghost ended up in front of the freezer-unit housing Vader’s various medications, a slow, submissive lay down.
And a cough.
Vader stands. The ghost puts an arm over his head as he approaches with the damp cloth.
There is no escape, but that doesn’t mean the child makes it easy to clean out his eyes and to get into that other locked fist.
The ghost tries to punch his helmet, and when that doesn’t work out for him, kicks the leg he hasn’t trapped underneath him.
At that point, the majority of the damage has been dealt with, so Vader sits back on his heels and lets the useless kicking happen. It doesn’t connect, and even if it had, it wouldn’t have mattered.
This room of the ship is colder than the rest of it and the ghost’s clothes are soaked through with black melon water. Its sugars will grow tacky soon, but more than that, the boy has no clothing beyond what he is already wearing.
Vader has only managed to have it washed twice in their acquaintance. He knows the boy smells because the officers grimace at him when they think Vader isn’t looking. He knows that a child of this age requires more regular bathing than he gets. Vader is not so old that he has forgotten his rounds in the crèche.
Still, the ghost will not have it. He will instead flood the force with tooth-souring anguish and will contort his body around all grips upon it until his assailant backs off for fear of dislocating a bone from its socket.
Vader is sure that it is because Padmé was with child that he cares about things like dislocated baby bones and blue veiny skin.
That babe would be ten years old by now.
That babe is ten years old. A son, Vader imagines, although reality whispers in his ears that it is a daughter.
One day, he will find them, but until then, it is just him and this ghost, apparently.
“Fish.”
Behind his mask he cannot stop the smile as it comes.
The ghost has taken the opening of his silence to go place his hands against the base of the bacta tank. This is his way of showing forgiveness. Trust.
Vader stands and balls the damp cloth into his glove.
“Fish,” he echoes.
“Fish,” his ghost says to himself, watching the bluish bacta bubbles glug from the tank’s base to its surface.
“Come here, little one,” Vader says. “It’s time for a nap.”
Vader can’t decide how old his ghost is or where he came from. He’s certainly not of desert-stock, Vader has tested his hair.
He’s also scanned the ghost for brands. Detonator chips. Medical bracelets or tokens from long-lost parents.
All to no end.
The ghost is anonymous and seems content to stay that way. He’s old enough to know his name but this, he has not shared with Vader, and at this point, Vader is starting to wonder if anyone ever used it with him.
The only thing he is sure of is that the boy is force-sensitive and, under circumstances made for another epoch, would have been snapped up and dropped into the waiting arms of a Jedi without a moment of hesitation.
“Fish.”
Vader’s lips quirk up again, and he could chomp on his own forearm for the weakness.
“Bacta,” he corrects this time to dispel the feeling in his face. “It’s a bacta tank.”
His ghost curls hands around the wide tube, pressing himself against it. His jaw judders even as he stares Vader straight in the eye.
The judder stem from the lack of clothing. Vader has nothing for him to wear while his putrid clothes run through a sanitization cycle.
“Are you cold?” Vader asks.
The ghost cuddles his cheek against the thick glass and peers around it as if he expects to catch someone watching him on the opposite side.
“Come here and be warm,” Vader orders, holding out a towel that he procured from medical.
The ghost’s shoulders roll through a violent wave of shivers. He squeezes as close as he can to the tank wall, which is baffling because the bacta inside is lukewarm at best and the glass is thick enough that that miniscule heat would certainly not penetrate it.
The ghost coughs and scrubs at his eyes. They’ve become even redder and more swollen than they were in the desert. Vader looks down at the empty towel in his hands.
Bacta is not a cleansing agent, but beggars can’t be choosers, and the ghost isn’t winning any awards for health at the moment, so Vader doesn’t see the harm in submitting to the inevitable.
The boy almost certainly won’t hold his breath or submit to wearing a mask inside the tank, which means that Vader has to be in there with him.
It’s awkward. The tank is Vader-sized and Vader-shaped, not Vader-and-Ghost-sized and Vader-and-Ghost-shaped.
His stumps are unused to being used in this manner. His prosthetics usually do the work of gripping, maneuvering, and untangling. Now, keeping Ghost’s head above the surface has become an all-consuming task.
For his part, however, Ghost is behaving alarmingly well—outside of the slapping.
They are big into slapping at the moment.
Vader is sympathetic. Bacta is thicker than water; he can imagine that the sensation is lighting up all of the pleasure centers in Ghost’s toddler brain.
“No,” he says sharply, pointing at his mask. “No touching.”
Ghost withdraws his curious hand and stares up with green-lit eyes. He looks away abruptly and continues to press his miniscule, slippery body against Vader’s torso.
Even through the bacta, he’s freezing. And bony. For the first time in a decade, Vader feels ribs bumping against his own. Skin against skin. Ghost’s flexing hands press into the side of Vader’s neck as he takes a break from sloshing around and stares directly up into the domed light over the top of the tank.
He lifts one slimy fist and points at it.
“Light,” Vader tells him.
Ghost keeps pointing.
He says a word that Vader can’t make out; it’s certainly not basic.
“Light,” Vader says again. “Like a small sun.”
Ghost loses interest in the light and coughs. Vader can feel the deep spasms of his diaphragm; they are exponentially greater than the sound produced. He leans back to look Ghost in the face. Ghost’s body goes rigid with the new attention. Wet auburn-rooted lashes, glued together by bacta, rim the whites of his eyes.
“You’re sick,” Vader says. “In your lungs.”
Anguish begins to leak into the force. The boy’s chest, no longer hidden by layers of fabric, begins to expand and contact more quickly and more jerkily than Vader has noticed it doing before.
And yet Ghost does not look away from Vader’s face.
He has shown no fear of the stumps or the scars or the sickly pallor of Vader’s skin. He is not afraid of the tank or the breathing mask, but it seems like he can sense an interrogation even when it’s in another language.
The space between their chests increases as Ghost leans away, centimeter by centimeter.
The spell is broken.
They’re back to square one.
Soon, the skin on the child’s fingers has begun to shrivel. By then, whatever grime he brought into the tank seems to have been loosened enough to be wiped away with a towel. Vader regains most of his trust by hefting the boy out of the tank with his elbow stumps. This, for some reason, inspires the force to flare. Just as Vader is preparing to clamber out, the boy purposefully slips off the edge of the tank’s grate right back in.
Panic seizes Vader’s whole body. He snatches Ghost up as best as he can before he sinks and, once safe in the knowledge that the child is secure, finds himself being stared at with anticipation.
It’s a game, he realizes then.
He hefts the boy out. The force again flares.
Ghost coughs and coughs and tries to go in for a third round. Experimentally, Vader lets him. He lets him sink down a little further into the bacta this time before grabbing him and near tossing him back up onto the platform.
For the first time, the kid smiles, and then immediately starts rubbing at his eyes.
Ghost is sicker than Vader expected. Medical says he’s got fluid in his lungs from an infection that looks like it’s been taking over real estate down there for days if not weeks. The sand from Tatooine has scratched his eyes. The medical officer snaps off his gloves and starts tapping out a prescription for antibiotics.
The chip he hands Vader has instructions upon it for two week’s worth of tablets.
Vader holds it in one hand with Ghost dozing in the crook of the opposite arm. The boy shivers. His outer jackets are not yet dry, so he is suffering through wearing only his base-layers; a yellowed tunic with a matching set of cotton leggings.
The benefit of these loose-fitting clothes is that Vader can see the occasionally jerky movements of his chest better now.
The cost is that Ghost keeps trying to dig under his life support. He knows that there is a warm flesh torso underneath.
“These are tablets,” Vader says, holding out the script-chip.
“Antibiotics, sir,” the medical officer confirms.
“He’s not going to take tablets,” Vader says, even though this should be obvious.
“Sir?”
“He’s a toddler. He’s not going to take tablets.”
“Oh. You can crush them and put them in his food, Lord Vader.”
Vader is many things, but a fool is not one of them.
“He doesn’t eat,” he says.
The medical officer’s mouth flaps.
“At-at all?” he asks.
Perhaps ‘at all’ is an exaggeration, but Vader cannot say for certain that Ghost is not powering his body through the force and the occasional sip of water. He has seen him eat three things: dry biscuits, a swallow of mashed fruit, and his thumb (although this foodstuff is both disgusting and questionable in terms of nutrition).
“Sometimes small children are like this,” Vader explains.
Because again, he is not a fool, nor has he forgotten the chaos of the crèche.
“Does it come in a liquid?” he asks, because at least Ghost reliably drinks.
“I—I will see to it, Lord Vader. I’ll have it sent up to your quarters, sir.”
Finally. Competence.
Before Vader takes Ghost with him back to his rooms to see if his jackets are finally dry, an attending medic holds Ghost’s head over an eye-wash.
The resulting cries are garbled. The medic hisses ‘you fucking brat.’
Ghost is given back to Vader with redder eyes than ever. His lips forsake their shaking in favor of full-body convulsions.
Again, his clothes are soaked through.
Sidious arrives while Vader is enduring a young man trying to explain to him how an engine works. It is mystifying the way that these new recruits do not speak to the ones around them. Vader knows all soldiers gossip, so why is it taking so long for these ingrates to get with the program and start yapping.
He is not here to spoonfeed soldiers military culture.
Thankfully, Sidious’s arrival means a reprieve from the displays of idiocy lining these corridors. Vader directs two more senior officers to assist the one in front of him in learning how to waste his time less.
He sets off for Sidious’s preferred rooms, and arrives to find the man pacing, clearly agitated.
“My lord,” he says, kneeling.
Sidious halts his motions to absorb this respect.
“Lord Vader,” he says. “I must cut your efforts here short. The rebels have re-emerged from their den.”
Padmé.
“I understand, my master,” Vader says. “I will deal with them at once.”
This seems to ease the old man’s mind. He straightens up and observes Vader down his nose.
“Tano is among them,” he says.
Of course she is. Why wouldn’t she be?
“And my former apprentice. And your former master. They are gathering, Vader.”
The thought of Qui-Gon is broken by the memory by Ghost tapping away on the bacta tank. Vader tilts his head and allows Sidious to lean into the thought.
“You have taken an apprentice?” Sidious asks.
An apprentice?
Vader’s face scrunches up behind the mask. Even Sidious seems not to know what to make of the unspoken befuddlement.
“You are not plotting against me, are you, Lord Vader?” he asks.
“The force compelled me to take up the child,” Vader explains. “I have not considered his use beyond its present condition.”
“Hm.”
“Is this something that happens to us, Master?”
“Not often. However, our present inquisitors are useless enough that they cannot pick a jedi out of a field of them. Perhaps one trained specifically by yourself might prove helpful to us in the future.”
This is an order. Vader places a hand over his chest and bows.
Ghost had been doing poorly since his time in the medical bay. Vader re-enters his quarters to find him sitting against the bacta tank again, with eyes nearly swollen shut and fingers digging into the skin of his stomach rhythmically.
He does not respond when Vader speaks to him.
He’s stopped coughing, however. So that’s something.
When Vader kneels and tucks a finger under Ghost’s chin, his eyes open slightly more.
“Apprentice,” Vader says.
The word is treason. Sidious did not task him with training an apprentice.
“Fish,” Ghost rasps, pulling his chin away from Vader’s grip and easing himself onto his side on the floor. He snuggles his cheek against his shoulder and closes his eyes all the way.
Step one is naming the ghost-apprentice. Vader has endured thousands of things more painful and yet nothing so unsettling.
Ten years ago, he should have named his and Padmé’s child. The name would have been the beginning of an eventual end—the blazing bright head of a comet forever falling through space until it burned itself into nothing.
A name is a powerful thing.
Ghost cannot be called Ghost for the rest of his burning days. And yet the force whispers that Vader cannot name him. It is not his right nor his place; someone has already sealed this child’s fate.
“Where do you come from?” he asks Ghost time and time again.
Ghost does not answer. He follows as he always does, rubs less at his eyes and coughs wider and stronger every day. Vader has offered him stones and bolts and wrenches and the canteen and, for all that Ghost pours his emotions into the force, he seems utterly uninterested in using it to do as all force-sensitive trainees must: he will not move the stone. The bolt. The canteen.
He instead accepts them and stuffs them into the many pockets of his tattered layers as if Vader is ordering him to hold onto them.
They’ve gone in circles over this point too many times to count now.
The lack of a common language will be the end of Ghost at this rate. Vader cannot tolerate an apprentice who will not do as he is told.
So he finds himself showing Ghost images of real fish on a datapad and repeating the word, pointing at the bacta tube, making an ‘x’ out of his hands, and then pointing at the fish and clapping them.
Ghost understands after only two times.
The rebels launch an offensive attack on Bespin. Vader lands and lights his saber just in time to see, through the fog, Padmé snatch a girl with a pile of dark hair out of the line of fire.
Immediately, the thought rings through Vader’s consciousness.
The daughter.
His daughter.
He shouts at Padmé to cease this foolishness. The girl behind her is swept up into tanned arms. Padmé spreads her body wide and levels her blaster.
“Go,” she orders.
“MOM.”
Ahsoka struggles to contain Vader’s daughter. Vader cannot move. He can only stare at her round face and thick hair. Her button nose—his nose. Once. Before his face was scarred.
Ten years old. She’s ten.
“Don’t you look at her,” Padmé snarls.
Her fury drags his attention back to her. The force thrums. The fight has left him. Soldiers are shouting around them; the fog lights up with blaster fire and the smell of smoke.
It is foolishness—the foolishness that love brings him to time and time and time again.
He lowers his saber and closes his stance. Padmé does not reciprocate. Her soldiers call to her; she calls back without dropping her gaze.
Her hips have grown wider and her waist thicker over the years. Vader cannot feel her building flesh and yet every nerve tries to.
Padmé seems perturbed by his lack of motion.
“What are you doing?” she demands.
He doesn’t know.
The daughter. The daughter. He wants to look at her for longer.
Padmé’s brow goes through several patterns of folds; then her eyes flick down and Vader feels at the same time what she has noticed.
Ghost peeks out from beneath his cloak.
Horror strikes like lightning. Vader did not feel him slip under there. He left him on the transit ship. He must have scurried off it in the chaos, undoubtedly driven by the ever-present impulse to follow Vader’s blazing sun in the force. Vader curses his loyalty now.
He re-covers the boy just as Padmé aims her blaster.
His metal fingers twitch in front of the boy’s face.
Padmé smirks.
“Doesn’t feel good, does it?” she asks.
Her smugness sends ripples of rage through Vader’s body.
“We’ll come for him,” Padmé says.
Vader says nothing. Ghost will be taught never to follow again.
The slap sends Ghost into a posture that, in one moment releases the fury building in Vader’s cavernous chest, but in the next replaces it with a sudden stillness.
A thousand memories of Mom rush in. Memories of slave mothers beating their children and Mom tsking under her breath, ‘how disgusting.’
Vader has killed thousands. Children’s blood has not bothered him since he gave himself to the dark. Blood is blood is blood in this world. That size of its vessel matters only in what others will do in exchange for its containment.
Ghost crawls away and sits by the quarters’ door next to a build-in storage closet with a lip. He sits with his back against the wall and his shoulder against the lip. Blood drips from one nostril.
How disgusting, Mom’s voice hisses. To beat a child.
When Vader stands, Ghost scrambles back, even though there is no further space behind him. He buries himself in his rags and hands as Vader approaches.
His body shakes so hard that Vader can see it through his layers. The blood drips over his lips and onto into the strings of cotton.
“What is your name?” Vader asks.
His life support releases a pumpful of air.
“WHAT IS YOUR NAME?”
Ghost covers his ears. His face. His head. No longer is he a child but a pile of fabric.
Vader knows he understands more than he lets on. He knows Ghost has been watching the soldiers introduce themselves. He mimics them with mumbling and sloppy salutes when he thinks Vader is preoccupied with other matters.
Vader will not rear a traitor.
He will not allow Padmé to control him like this.
The boy cries out sharp and high when Vader seizes his arm and drags him in close.
“What. Is. Your. Name?” he demands one last time.
Ghost tugs fruitlessly on his arm until the pressure of Vader’s grip halts the movement. This time, when Ghost jerks his way, it is with bared teeth.
The suction holding the arm’s prosthetic flush against Vader’s elbow stump inverts. The pain screams in as the connection between the nerves and their transmitting port is stretched.
Ghost tears his arm away as Vader clutches at the connector point.
“NO,” Ghost snarls.
Vader looks up, furious, to find Ghost holding a hand wide out in front of himself.
“No,” Ghost says again.
The force blooms around him, flecked with the sensation of rain, each fragment reflecting some of Vader’s light back at him.
Memories squeeze through the flurry—a girl with the same auburn hair as Ghost leaning over him and saying a prayer. A jedi leans over with long, striped montrals whispers that she will take the child.
Shaak Ti. She was supposed to be dead. Sidious ordered her murder on Kamino. How could she have survived?
Vader cannot look away from Ghost, even as fragmented images of an assault on a shelter filter through his mind. Shaak Ti roars in the memory like undulating thunder, and Ghost cries out for her. But soon she and her roar are gone, and Ghost is left shouting out sobs with his palms flat against a dust-covered road.
Someone grips the back of his head and lifts him by it.
Someone leans in and says, “look at this fuckin’ thing.”
The memories withdraw as if they have been sucked into a black hole.
It is Vader’s turn to stare, speechless. Ghost’s shoulders rise and fall with every breath.
The force around him dances, and one last breath whispers in Vader’s ear as it begins to evaporate.
“Obi-Wan Kenobi,” it says.
Ghost’s body crumples.
Obi-Wan Kenobi is a Stewjoni name, protocol droid TC9-3PO informs Vader while the child is unconscious.
The name is a reference to a mythical hero from one of the planet’s minority cultures. The few words that Vader is able to repeat from Obi-Wan’s ever-present mumbling are apparently so specific that TC9 can cross-reference them to a dialect from a rural community on the east coast of the northern continent.
Vader takes in Obi-Wan’s eerie paleness.
He’s come a long way from home.
In an earlier life, Vader might have gathered his floppy body and set out to drop him back upon the doorstep which he was taken from. But that life is no more. The child is here now. Sidious will have him become an inquisitor, thus an inquisitor Vader will make him into. Somehow.
Ghost—Obi-Wan has not shown much of a propensity for inquisitor behavior.
The next few days are filled with more examples.
The boy, once curious and malleable, becomes stubborn and troublesome.
He soils himself in his sleep, which Vader only discovers when he returns to his quarters after a particularly infuriating discussion with a captain. He catches the cleaning droids going about their business and moves around them to his private office. He removes his helmet and is met with the smell of urine. He follows the scent out to the main room and observes a cleaning droid rucking down the pile of cloth that Obi-Wan has made of the cot Vader procured for him from the field supplies.
From the stains on cot’s linen frame, it is evident that this behavior is not limited to one instance, which is peculiar because, in the three months they have been traveling together, Vader cannot recall a single other incident of bed-wetting on Obi-Wan’s part.
When he confronts Obi-Wan about it, he is met with glass eyes and mumbled utterings, which TC9 translates as disjointed gibberish, even in in the boy’s mother tongue.
It is…aggravating.
The child will not own up to anything. And all that follows that confrontation is more insubordination. Suddenly, Obi-Wan refuses to eat or drink anything that Vader puts in his hands. Not even the mashed fruit.
He turns his head away from the last of his antibiotics and instead takes to wrapping his arms around his middle and insisting to TC9 that his ‘tummy hurts.’
Even TC9’s translations cannot get through to him that it wouldn’t hurt so much if he didn’t spend every second of his day trying to shrink it to the size of a ground nut. Vader tries time and time again to make him see reason on this point, but his efforts are met with fierce resistance, complete with kicking and pushing.
He has half a mind to get one of the high feeding-chairs nobles stuff their children into in restaurants to pin the kid in place while he force-feeds him, but refrains. The holonet says that children won’t starve themselves. Obi-Wan will eat, eventually. And if he must learn this lesson the hard way, so bet it.
Or so Vader tells himself like a mantra for three days.
By the end of the third, Obi-Wan sees him coming with a packet of fruit gels and lays down on his side. He settles his head on his arm and closes his eyes. He mumbles his ‘tummy hurts’ phrase against the linen of his stripped cot. Vader sits on his heels next to him and sighs.
Nothing is working. Perhaps some children do not starve themselves to death. Perhaps even most children do not starve themselves to death. But the holonet does not deal with force-sensitive children. They are built to trust in the Force, to trust its creations—nature, water, air, light. They are built to trust first and foremost, and where there is no trust, they will wilt and wither.
The healers used to diagnose the odd crècheling that faded away in their care with something called ‘failure to thrive.’ They spoke the words as if it was inevitable and, while the crèchemasters wept, would repeat soothing nothings about how some lives are meant to return to the Force sooner than others.
Obi-Wan insists louder that his tummy hurts.
Vader takes off his helmet and hesitantly lays a hand on the boy’s quaking back.
Twice now the boy has cried in his presence. Once in the vision granting Vader his name, now on this fluid-stained cot.
However, Vader’s attempt to offer comfort in this moment serves only to send Obi-Wan into rapid contortions to escape it.
Sickness floods the roots of Vader’s teeth. Mom’s words settle upon his shoulder along with new ones.
Is this how you’d treat your daughter?
Guilt is useful in how it can be transformed into anger and from anger into power, but today all it does is settle like sludge along the outside of Vader’s throbbing heart.
Still, he will not apologize. Obi-Wan does not understand what danger he put himself in when he followed Vader out into the rebel skirmish. Now Padmé will exploit him as a weakness. Worse, she will try to ‘rescue’ him to deliver into the hands of the remaining jedi.
Vader again lays his hand on Obi-Wan’s writhing back. The receptors travel into the nerves in his elbow and present him with the sensation of softness surrounding firm vertebrae even through layers of fabric.
Obi-Wan rolls over and falls off the edge of the cot. Vader winces at the resulting yelp. The crying takes on new volume and intensity. For the first time, Obi-Wan sounds like a true recent-toddler.
“Hey,” Vader rasps, the word thick with nostalgia in his mouth. “Hey, hey. Come on, now.”
Obi-Wan makes no effort to push himself up on the other side of the cot. His distress rises into deep, wracking coughs. Painfully, Vader stands and telegraphs his movements to the boy’s side. The coughing continues as he kneels down and slips a hand under Obi-Wan’s arm to get him to sit up and cough.
This is a mistake.
As soon as he’s sitting, Obi-Wan goes still. His eyes plead with Vader for answers and Vader has only just begun trying to decipher the unasked question when Obi-Wan gags into his lap.
Vomit splatters across his pants and onto the floorpanels.
Strangely, Vader finds himself non-reactive. As a younger man, he would have recoiled in disgust, but now he is overtaken with heavy acceptance.
This might as well happen, his exhausted internal voice says.
Obi-Wan convulses again. Vader doesn’t stop him. He stays by until the hiccups start up again.
“All done?” he asks.
The question seems to interrupt Obi-Wan’s whirlwind of distress. He sniffs and gags. Vader gestures for him to go at it one more time and nods through the next unfortunate downpour.
The boy finishes and blinks streaming eyes.
“All done,” Vader tells him. “No more, okay?”
This is a word that Obi-Wan does understand.
“Okay,” he parrots back, hoarse and warbling.
“Let’s get up,” Vader says.
He holds out a hand and allows Obi-Wan to grasp ahold of it. He pulls the kid up and makes the decision then to have a sonic shower installed in these rooms.
A modicum of trust is regained over the next day. Vader gets to the root of the tummy ache. The holonet insists that nausea is a stress reaction in young children. As is bedwetting.
Mom haunts him for hours, burning the backs of his ears.
You treat him like a slave child, she accuses. Are you Gardulla now?
Anytime now, this guilt can start churning itself into power. Literally any time.
(It doesn’t.)
Vader submits the order for a combined wet/sonic refresher to be built in his rooms. He requests a deep clean from Facilities and resigns himself to what he has been avoiding for the whole of his and Obi-Wan’s companionship: shopping.
Obi-Wan’s clothing is serving no one anymore. Beyond being a health hazard, its odors are unbearable, and it is ill fitting in every way. If Vader must make him into an apprentice inquisitor, then the boy must begin by looking the part.
Maybe all black. Or perhaps all white, like the various imperial princes.
Nevermind on the white, actually. There is no grand stand to take in the face of four-year-old mess-making. Or presumed four-year-old mess-making.
“Ask him how old he really is,” Vader tells TC9.
Obi-Wan, besotted with this droid, responds by showing it all ten of his fingers. This is wishful thinking. Vader puts one finger down at a time until they have gotten to a more feasible number.
“He counts poorly,” TC9 reports.
Obi-Wan insists that he is a full hand old at least.
Vader asks TC9 to test his reading and writing.
TC9 attempts to with a pad and a stylus. ‘Attempts’ is the operative word here. Vader does not need an explanation after the demonstration Obi-Wan doles out for him and the droid. He comes to his own conclusions.
Reading and writing: absent.
Speaking: More or less fluent in mother tongue. Vocabulary: possibly a few thousand words.
Counting: Imaginative. Limited by the number of fingers available at any one time.
This is helpful, to an extent. It does not assist Vader in purchasing clothing for the little beast, but it does provide a sufficient distraction while one of the supply officers takes the boy’s measurements. This officer asks Vader what style of clothing he wants ordered.
This is a baffling question. The answer is plain: washable. Unbelievably washable. The most washable clothing can be.
The officer’s smile takes on a tinge of pain.
“Style, sir?” she asks. “As in, do you want coveralls? A full suit?”
Ah, yes.
Black. He wants black.
“Black, sir?”
Vader is glad they understand each other.
“Black what, sir? Coveralls?”
What even are coveralls?
The supply officer sighs and turns in her chair to retrieve a pad. She brings up several images of civilian children’s clothing—designs that Vader has never seen in his life. There are full-body suits with patterns on them and miniature boilersuits that cut off at the knee. The tunics and loose pants that Vader assumed all children in the galaxy wore until they were of age to purchase their own are apparently ‘out of style’ and ‘meant for poor people, Lord Vader.’
Vader looks down at Obi-Wan’s tangled hair and wonders for a moment how he’s supposed to respond to this insult. Obi-Wan senses his staring and tips his head back.
“Which do you want?” Vader asks him, showing him the officer’s pad.
TC9 translates. Obi-Wan looks at the pad and turns its volume up and down. He discovers he can turn it off as well.
Vader confiscates the pad and tells the supply officer to select whatever she thinks will suit the boy, with the caveat that the majority of it must be in black.
“Say thank you,” he tells Obi-Wan.
Obi-Wan gives the officer a handshake.
The refresher takes 3 days to fully install, which is fine because Vader is preoccupied trying to endure guerilla warfare with the rebels.
Padmé invades the ship for the second time in six months. She almost gets to the control room before she is caught and placed in a cell. Vader stands outside the white cell with his hands planted on his hips—the same pose she has adopted on the opposite side of the electro-grate.
“Must we?” he asks.
“We must,” Padmé says. “You’re under arrest.”
“Am I?”
“For treason. For murder. For betraying your wife and children. For adultery.”
“Adultery is new,” Vader points out.
“For child abuse,” Padmé lobs at him.
She knows just how to grind his gears.
“He is doing well, thank you,” Vader says.
“I know he isn’t. That boy is a jedi child. He was stolen from us.”
“I distinctly recall you counting Shaak Ti among your fatalities.”
“We lied, Anakin. You know, like you do. She intends to become his master. The Force told her it is meant to be.”
“Did it?” Vader scoffs. “Well, tell her that she is too late. I have already taken the boy as my apprentice.”
Padmé blinks.
“A sith’s apprentice?” she deadpans.
Vader hates that he falters.
“An inquisitor,” he says.
“Like the others you keep throwing at us?”
“He will be superior to them,” Vader says. “Consider your days numbered.”
“You’d rear an inquisitor to murder your own son and daughter?”
…don’t.
“I would not have to if you saw reason,” Vader says. “I am giving you an opportunity, General Amidala.”
Padmé shifts her weight, unwilling to move the conversation forward. She knows Vader’s heart is attacking itself under his life support at the mortifying realization that there is a daughter and a son. She, blasted woman, knew it would ruin him before she even spoke.
She knows how badly he wanted a son.
“You will never see them, so long as you stand opposite me,” Padmé says.
“Then you will be the one who has deprived our children of their father,” Vader says.
He turns to leave.
Padmé shouts after him.
The son’s name is Luke. It takes a full month to find out. The daughter’s name is Leia. She looks like Vader before the life-support suit. Her eyes are dark like her mother’s. Her hair is long in the Alderaanian style—that fool Organa adopted her as his princess to give her a cover to the wider galaxy.
Vadr could chew through the arms of his console chair at the very thought.
Luke, however, is less tainted, although frustratingly this is because Padmé had the godsdamned nerve to deliver him to Vader’s very own step-brother on Tatooine under the false premise that Vader had died and Padmé was in too much danger to mind the boy herself for eight and a half years.
The console chair’s arms are not strong enough to withstand this level of insult.
Vader is not dead. Vader is right here. And Luke looks so much like Mom that he could weep.
The suggestion that Vader would tear this galaxy apart with his elbow stumps alone to hold these two babies is an understatement worthy of ten years imprisonment and hard labor. All he has to cope with this aggression, however, is a kid obsessed with Snarro the Counting Bat.
Obi-Wan now knows approximately a hundred words in Basic and is no longer mistakeable as a stringy tumbleweed. His education is a painstaking effort. Vader experimented with giving him a saber knife as a practice object and quickly found a need to order new boots.
They aren’t ready for real weapons yet. But one day, they will be. And when that day comes, Padmé will rue the day.
“Can you be angry?” Vader finds himself asking during a training session with Obi-Wan, who he knows is capable of stress-induced force control.
“Okay,” Obi-Wan says.
This is a lie. Obi-Wan will say ‘okay’ to any question posed to him.
Vader pushes his fingers into his forehead as hard as he can without self-maiming.
“I know you’re trying,” he says, “But we are six years behind schedule, apprentice. We need to speed this up.”
At this point, Obi-Wan is going to get creamed by Leia when they encounter each other in the field.
“Okay,” Obi-Wan says.
The corner of his tongue sticks out of his mouth when he holds his hands in front of the rock Vader has set in front of him.
Nothing happens. Obi-Wan lowers his hands and looks to Vader.
“No, I’m not going to do it for you,” Vader says. “You have to move it. Visualize moving it. Imagine lifting it like this.”
He demonstrates.
Obi-Wan, affronted, rushes forward and snatches the rock out of the air, only to plonk it down where it was before. He glares at Vader and points at it furiously, letting loose a stream of Stewjoni admonishments.
They have reached yet another impasse, it would seem. Vader reaches around the boy to take the rock into custody and is cursed for having the gall to do so. Obi-Wan latches his whole body onto Vader’s arm and squeezes his tiny muscles.
Vader wonders if maybe he should have started with something less prone to being anthropomorphized. Or meditation.
Meditation is probably the best call.
With some effort, he detaches Obi-Wan from his arm and holds him at eyelevel by the back of his collar.
“We are going to sit with Force now,” he says. “We are not going to nap.”
Obi-Wan swats at his mask.
“No. Promise. No napping,” Vader says, holding out stern pinky.
Grumpily, Obi-Wan assents and shakes pinkies to promise.
The boy is a liar and double-crosser. He lasts three minutes in meditation.
Rearing an apprentice is not what it is cracked up to be. Vader interrogates Sidious about it and receives only bafflement that he is having such difficulty. Sidious asks him if he has not yet broken the child’s spirit.
And yes, yes. Vader’s broken it. He broke it weeks ago.
Sidious asks if he’s sure he’s broken it. He describes the breaking as a process of establishing total obedience and a bottomless desire to please the one in power. He asks if Vader has established this desire.
That is a harder question to answer because Obi-Wan is full of many competing desires from moment to moment. The majority of them are concerned with being involved in things that do not concern him and doing things he is most certainly not old or big enough to do.
Further, Vader can’t say that Obi-Wan is filled with a bottomless need to please him, since he is competing here with Snarro the Counting Bat and Snarro the Counting Bat is a man-sized orange hairball tailor-made to appeal to three to five-year-old sentients.
Vader asks Sidious if there is an age-based breakdown of the whole spirit-cracking timeline. Preferably something that includes advice on how to break through a language barrier the height of a particularly inconvenient step-stool.
Sidious stares at him.
Vader walks it back and says that he’ll figure it out on his own.
He doesn’t.
Obi-Wan shows no interest in having his spirit broken. He has other things in life that are more important to him, such as literally any type of animal. Half his day is consumed with seeking these out on the ship. A good third of the remaining time is dedicated to not spilling liquids poured from one vessel to another. Whatever remains of that overall time is mostly comprised of Vader attempting to prevent him from doing those two things.
Vader tries, he does. But the most progress they make after a full month of training is Obi-Wan not falling asleep for ten whole minutes of meditation.
They don’t pick up any rocks.
They haven’t made any headway on strategy development. Obi-Wan doesn’t know a single kata, although he can follow along awkwardly when Vader prompts him to imitate him.
Vader finds himself holding his head in his quarters, trying desperately to drive the Alphabet song out of it when he should be launching another initiative against the rebels. Something has to give.
He trashes the old plan for training the apprentice. The old plan isn’t working, and furthermore, it’s Sidious’s. He is too far out of the game of training anyone to be helpful now. They’re starting over. Obi-Wan learns by the tried and true ‘monkey see, monkey do’ method. This is how Vader taught him to say ‘okay,’ and ‘you pathetic worm.’
He makes a pact with Obi-Wan that if he comes with Vader on various assignments, he must stay hidden and has to stay behind when Vader tells him to.
Obi-Wan consents to this far too quickly. Vader makes him retract the consent until he has painstakingly provided several example scenarios and quizzed the child on how he is meant to react in them.
“Say yes,” he says at the end of it.
“Okay,” Obi-Wan says.
“No, not okay. Say ‘yes.’”
“Okay!”
Vader takes the boy’s face between his two hands.
“Say ‘yes, master,’” he says.
Obi-Wan puts his hands on top of Vader’s.
“Okay,” he says.
There’s no fucking point. Vader stands up and tells everyone to get moving.
The first few times he and Obi-Wan go out together are a resounding success. Obi-Wan sticks close and ducks under Vader’s cloak when combatants approach. He retreats when ordered to do so, and once, he even throws a rock at an approaching tank. This time, however, is different. In the chaos of troops marching ahead and two inquisitors running back and forth, herding civilians to the edge of their village, Vader loses his apprentice.
It’s a rookie mistake, a costly one, and one he should have seen coming since Obi-Wan tends to fall back into old skittish habits when presented with a new environment.
While the soldiers rifle through dwellings up and down the street, Vader finds himself searching through kitchen gardens and animal pens with the Force. At first, he is sure the boy simply became overwhelmed by the cacophony of imperial and civilian shouting—he assumes he’s darted back to the ship’s ramp to take cover underneath.
The only thing hiding under the ramp, however, is a hissing lothcat.
Vader tries feeling his way through the training bond he and Obi-Wan have been threading together over the last few months, but all he gets is a muddled static of sorts, which more or less feels like the same static that Obi-Wan sends him when he’s watching Snarro.
Not helpful.
The gardens? The animal pens?
Bereft of human children.
Vader ends up doing circles in place and trying to think. He must put himself into the frame of mind of his apprentice.
He turns around and makes his second very costly mistake of the day.
Padmé sits on the other side of the electrograte this time, leaning forward so that the back two legs of her chair are suspended in the air. Her sharp chin sits cushioned on the plush palm of her hand.
“We’ve got all night,” she says.
Vader can’t hear her over the sound of comm feedback in his mind.
Sidious is livid on Mustafar. Vader would rather collapse into a heap than deal with him right now. His mind keeps circling back to that godsdamned apprentice.
“He’s safe, if you’re wondering,” Padmé says. “He remembers Shaak Ti.”
Motherfucker.
“Precious little thing,” Padmé says. “I remember when Luke was that little.”
She taunts him. He’s already down and she kicks him.
“He’s got a lot of jedi energy for someone stuck in sith’s hell with you, don’t you think?” Padmé asks.
And for once, Vader cannot argue. Obi-Wan is, no matter what Vader does, unerringly jedi-like in his mannerisms and interests.
He whimpers in the face of anger and puts himself between raised fists and stupid troopers. He fights Vader when he’s carried away from disciplinary executions and sobs himself to sleep in his neck over the sudden emptiness in the force that follows.
Sidious no longer feels the boy can be trained. He calls him a distraction. He’s ordered Vader to ‘deal with it’ twice now.
Vader has failed here both times. He’s raised his arm to strike Obi-Wan once since then and found it frozen in place; his mind racing with memories of Gardulla and Obi-Wan scrambling away from him, vomiting out of fear.
It would be kinder to them both to smother the boy’s little light at this point.
“Anakin.”
“He’s yours,” Vader says. “Take him. He serves no purpose to me. Interrogate him if you want. He knows nothing. He is incapable of learning.”
Padmé’s chair halts its rocking.
“He’s a baby,” she says dangerously.
Vader tosses his cape over his shoulder and shrugs.
“You wouldn’t care if he died? Is that what you’re saying?” Padmé demands.
Again, Vader shrugs. The chair’s legs drop onto the floor. Padmé stands.
“I thought,” she says, leaning into the grate, “That there might be a chance that the man I loved was still there inside you. I thought that there might be hope that one day, maybe a long time from now, but one day, that you could be a father to our children. That boy was my sign. I told everyone who’d listen that he was proof that you weren’t a hollowed-out shell after all.”
“Your impressions don’t concern me, Rebel Scum,” Vader says.
Padmé recoils.
“Unbelievable,” she says. “What would your mother think of you now?”
Vader knows exactly what she’d think. She’s haunting him as they speak.
“You talk grandly for a woman who sold our daughter to Alderaan,” he says.
“How dare you.”
“How dare you,” Vader hurls back. “You have living relatives on Naboo. If you could not bear the thought of rearing your children, you could have at least left them to be raised with their own blood.”
“And risk you murdering my sister and her children, too?” Padmé snaps.
“Your sister does not merit my attention.”
“I don’t believe you. I gave the boy to your blood. Is that not enough for you?”
Coldness rises in Vader’s heart. It brings with it relief.
“Those people,” he says, “They are not my blood.”
“Unbelievable,” Padmé says again. “You have the gall to criticize me as a parent after beating the shit out of that little boy.”
The coldness is purged by white hot rage.
“I DID NOT BEAT HIM,” Vader bellows.
“YOU DID,” Padmé hurls back. “You. Did. The jedi saw it. He’s terrified of you.”
That’s not true. Vader slapped him one time, yes, but never did he beat the child. He wouldn’t. They’ve moved past that. He got the boy clothes. He feeds him. There’s a whole refresher in his quarters now to keep the brat as clean as he allows himself to be.
“Anakin, you’re delusional,” Padmé says.
“I do not know that name.”
“He can barely talk.”
“He’s bilingual,” Vader says.
“He doesn’t know how old he is. He doesn’t know his shapes.”
“He’s four years old. He can count to ten.”
“The only thing he’s not afraid of is C-3PO.”
…well she might have him there, but Vader stands by everything else.
Padmé’s mouth hangs half-open; her brow has folded twice in on itself.
“We’re taking him,” she finally says.
“Good,” Vader says.
“Your master’s heart will break when he hears what you have said here.”
“That man is not my master.”
“You’re right,” Padmé says. “You’re right. I’ll send in some water.”
The rebels really think that they’ve found their joker. When they can no longer hold Vader, they bring Obi-Wan into the cell in one last ditch effort.
If it was just Obi-Wan, Vader could have tolerated it.
But it isn’t.
That would be too kind.
Instead, his former master stands in the doorway of the cellblock with Obi-Wan in his arms. Qui-Gon’s once-brown hair streaked with white has become white streaked with brown. His eyes, already deep set, seem to have sunken even further into his face. Their irises appear black until he arrives before Vader’s cell and the overhead light grants them a glint of blue again.
In his arms, Obi-Wan is sucking on his thumb, the way he does sometimes before he falls asleep on his cot.
He’s always done that, hasn’t he?
“Padawan,” Qui-Gon breathes.
He is of no consequence, usually. Vader has not missed his infuriating calmness nor his insistence on ever-listening to the Force. He focuses in on Obi-Wan instead. His life support hisses furiously as he stares at the boy’s cheeks while the child steadfastly observes the hair growing behind Qui-Gon’s ear.
This is betrayal.
To sit so quietly in the arms of a stranger when all he does is fight Vader’s grip. To lay his cheek against Qui-Gon’s thinning beige robes and blink so slowly, so much like he is going to fall asleep, when he makes Vader waste hours bouncing him and promising him that the world will not collapse when he closes his eyes.
Every nap has been a battle.
He should have known how quickly the little monster would turn when presented with the other side. He should have listened to Sidious and tried harder to break the boy’s so-called spirit.
“Padawan.”
Shut. UP.
“What is his name?”
His—
They don’t know?
Obi-Wan takes his thumb out of his mouth and holds the same hand out to Vader. His glass bottle eyes aren’t even that anymore. They’re just grey.
“Ghost,” Vader says.
“Ghost,” Qui-Gon echoes.
Obi-Wan tilts his head to the side and points at his chest.
“Ghost,” Vader says again, imagining himself to be the one digging his finger into the skin and cartilage of that grubby sternum.
Obi-Wan shakes his head.
“Obi-Wan,” he says.
Qui-Gon looks at him in surprise.
“Obi-Wan,” he says.
Vader feels it—the same thing he knows Qui-Gon is feeling. The unraveling of fibers and their reshaping in the Force.
“No,” he says.
But Obi-Wan is looking into Qui-Gon’s blue eyes. Fibers in the force begin to re-twine themselves—they slip out of the tenuous bond that Vader has spent weeks stringing together between himself and Obi-Wan and, as a bud unfurls itself into a blossom, they begin to slip into place between the thicker strands that Vader knows as well as he knows the roof of his own mouth.
Vader knows at the same moment that Qui-Gon does the awful truth: Obi-Wan was not meant be Shaak Ti’s apprentice at all.
Vader brought him here. Vader drove him here. He placed his former-master’s final apprentice right into his arms.
Qui-Gon smiles. Vader knows before he even opens his mouth what he is going to say.
“This is the will of the Force.”
Qui-Gon looks back to Anakin; joy falls from his eyes.
“I thought it might be Luke,” he says. “But I suppose I can wait a few more years.”
FUCK. YOU.
“You have such a talent for refilling our crèche, Anakin. We should have made you a seeker.”
Vader should have left the boy on Da’nor. He should have left him in the dunes on Tatooine. He should have let him drown in the bacta tube.
“I fear Obi-Wan may not miss you,” Qui-Gon says, smoothing a hand over the boy’s hair, “But we are grateful for his return. May the force be with you, my apprentice.”
Infuriating man. He doesn’t even flinch when Vader’s fury cracks the floor of the cell and begins mangling the edges of its entrance. The metal corners of the sealed door crumple slightly, but Qui-Gon simply snaps at them, and they straighten out.
“Don’t be a bad loser, Ani,” he says over his shoulder.
“I did not make you an apprentice,” Vader snarls after him.
“No?” Qui-Gon asks in the doorway. “Unfortunate.”
The door slams closed behind him, and that’s it.
Vader draws on every shred of his power to destroy the room.
He returns to The Executor somewhat worse for wear and sweeps through the halls. Soldiers slide out of his way left and right. No one stops him on his thunderous journey to his quarters. Once there, the doors do not open quickly enough. He rips them open with the force and throws them closed behind him.
The first thing he sees is the cot.
It lays there, bare but for a piece of wrinkled drawing-paper folded at the head.
His stomach drops.
He snatches it up and unfolds it to reveal shaky, misshapen letters that read, ‘do not be scary please bye.’
Scary.
That’s how Obi-Wan thinks of him.
Scary. After all he’s done for the boy. He incinerates the note and calls in TC9 to clear the room of its cot and the clothing left over.
The apprentice has joined the rebels. The only place he will be returning to now is the Force.