There was no question in his mind – the thief would die.
A certain kind of relief came with this knowledge. How much easier it was to give the command to blast down the door, to march into the seedy apartment with a sense of purpose and the knowledge that no matter what, no matter what he found inside, the thief must be punished.
It wasn't really murder if countless others could be saved by it. Because disorder brought chaos, and chaos brought death. And if thieves – this thief, who had been passing information to a shadow of a rebellion for Force knows how long – brought disorder, there was only one thing to do.
So the order was given. The door was blast clean off its hinges. He expected nothing as he marched into the seedy apartment, and was unsurprised by the scene before him.
The Corellian woman's hair was purple, and the children that took refuge behind her were far too many, and then there was a boy of maybe sixteen or seventeen with vacant eyes, a deathstick still dangling from his hand (more littering the floor). The boy only seemed to register what was happening when his mother was ripped away, enough to catch another boy, his brother perhaps, who had decided to play the hero.
"It was merely set to stun," Vader informed the mother.
She threw her head back, garish hair out of her face, and there sat a shower of tiny blue stars at the corner of either eye. Those stars… they were a chance encounter on a boardwalk, a friendship that shouldn't have been, a couple shots of yellow something, a young man's first time, a girl who had shown a "braid-boy" what youth on Coruscant could be like.
And where it could end.
He inhaled slowly and reached out a gloved hand (to what? – to touch those stars? impossible), but her eyes never left the dark expanse he knew his own now were. Could she possibly…?
No.
No. Whoever her Imperial paramour was, he would not be high enough to know, to tell her. Bithia didn't have that kind of class. The last she knew of Anakin Skywalker, he was twenty-one years old, married, and had gently refused her. He had died a year later, just as he had for the rest of the galaxy. Just as he had for Vader.
And Bithia Reems was nothing to Darth Vader.
He pulled back his hand and brought it to his side, clenching it into a fist. The children would be better off without that kind of mother bringing them down. The young ones would go to the Academy under Imperial charity, the oldest boy… he'd have to be rehabilitated first, and Vader would think of something to do with him after. Something productive.
She spat in his direction as the troopers forced her outside, but he was unperturbed – it had missed anyway.
Disorder had to be overcome.