DECLARATION: This fiction is written just for fun and I'm not making money with it. Characters and Star Wars galaxy belong to Lucasfilm and Disney, of course. The names Asha and Ujjain are taken from the real world, but I chose them just because they sound good in this fiction and so they aren't related to any real person or historical fact: any resemblance is purely coincidental.

NOTE:

This fiction was written originally in Italian on efpfanficNET for an Italian contest called "Forgotten (or Remembered) Suffs and Toys?" by Biancarcano. Requirement of the contest was to write a fanfiction about an object (possibly a toy) having some special meaning for the main character, because of its connection with some important part or memory of his/her life.

Since it was allowed, I set the fiction as a missing moment into my AU series The Sith Apprentice. If you read my serie this fiction fits at the end of chapter 4 in The Sith Apprentice 2: Death Star. If you didn't read it this is what you need to know to follow this present fiction:

Darth Vader found out Luke when the child is three years old and he raised him harshly as a Sith apprentice. In spite of growing in a very cold background and subjected to a hard discipline, when Luke is twenty, he hasn't wholly turned to the Dark Side and when he watches the first test of the Death Star, he felt such qualms that he decides to stole its plans and give them to the Rebel Alliance. Meanwhile, for reasons of political alliances, Palpatine forces Luke to marry Asha, the princess of the indipendent Ujjain System, whom the boy has never met before. The missing moment of the present fiction is set the day after the wedding. Luke has given Leia the stolen plans since a very few hours and he has just gone into a fight with Asha, telling her openly that he didn't wish to marry her. But then the two spouses sorted things up and Luke understood that, in spite the way he was forced into the marriage, Asha is well-disposed towards him and she is his only chance to start a friendship with someone.

Toys for a Sith child

Luke half lied on the sofa in the living room of his apartment and pondered what had happened that day. The hugeness of the treason he had just carried on began to weight on his counsciousness and a strong unease had raised inside him. He couldn't help but wonder whether he had been wrong to give Death Star plans to Senator Organa. He had followed his feelings without second thoughts. But if that had been found out, consequeces for him would have been just horrible. There couldn't be doubts how his death penalty would have been executed. The strong memory of the last time Palpatine had used Force lighting on him made him to shiver and an intense shudder run through him. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply. He had to bury those thoughts as soon as possibile, forgetting what he had done. He couldn't allow himself to brood about them, because – sooner or later – his mind shields would naturally falter for a few moments and if his fear had been too outward, Vader would have easily felt it.

The relax he force himself into made him more aware of his background and he noticed the continuous noise of opening and closing drawers coming from his bedroom. He turned absent-mindedly to the door, although he couldn't really see a lot from his point of view. How many dresses could Asha put inside the scarse forniture? But, above all, how many of them would exceed? Because – when he had seen her suitcases – Luke hadn't had doubts there wasn't enough space for all that stuffs. He wondered even whether every women needed so many dresses, but thinking at the sumptuous gowns he had seen at the court parties, he guessed ladies from upper class did and so he didn't utter a word about that.

Besides, at the moment he felt guilty bacause of the terrible start he had given to their relationship. Telling her the first day after the wedding that he hadn't wished to marry her was an unforgivable slip and although their argument had ended well all things considered, he still wanted to amend somehow. So, he had allowed her to do and undo in his – their – bedroom as she wished and now he was fighting the urge to stand up and go to check what she was doing in the room which had been owned esclusively by himself since seventeen years.

"I can't, do you know!" Asha commented at some point from the other room.

"Uhm?" Luke grunted, not understanding what she was talking about.

She appeared on the threshold with a couple of dresses resting in her arm. "I just can't put everything into the few drawers under the bed," she explained, shaking slightly her head.

Just he had known it would be like, he thought and straighted to sit in a more proper manner. "Although the bed is double, indeed the room is single," he explained. "Wedding had been arranged so suddenly that we could neither organize for this kind of problems."

She nodded and turned back the room as if she was considering something. "There would be enough space to add a wardrobe," she said at last and she looked askingly again to him.

Luke shrugged – it seemed a most reasonable demand. "Tomorrow I will get one," he agreed immediately. But, then, an other idea struck him. This evening coming back home, he had resolved to try and make his marriage to work, in spite of the way he had been forced into it. It could be surely a good start making her to understand that was also her home, so he ammended, "Rather, go to choose and buy it by yourself."

Happily amazed, she lightened up. "Can I really?," she asked.

"Of course", he answered, glad for her reaction. "Do you live here now, don't you? I'm sure your taste in interior design is better than mine."

Asha blushed awkwardly. "I hope I will choose something you'll like as well". Then, she looked like having a second thought and she added: "I have also some stuffs that I can't put in a wardrobe."

"Such as?" The young Sith couldn't figure anything.

"Bottles, decorative objects, books, holograms – stuff like that," she explained.
He hinted with his head to the cupboard of the living room. "Except one drawer, it's empty. You can put them there."

She nodded. Then she went back to the bedroom just to come back immediately in the living room with a bag in her hands and neared to the cupboard.

Luke stood up and he also went in front of it. He opened the first drawer on the left and showed her the contents. "This one is mine, because I store here my notepad and lightsabers."

At the word "lightsabers", Asha cast an inquiring look inside the drawer and then to his hip.

He was so used to carry his lightsaber that he never unhooked it, even at home. "They are of different kinds and it's always better having a spare one, if it's needed," he answered her silent question without explaining further. "So I own three of them." He closed the drawer. "You can use the whole remaining drawers and shelves as you wish."

The woman opened one of the doors and noted: "Here there are other two objects."

"Ah, yes! True. I've forgotten," the young Sith amended. "My toys."

"Toys?!" she laughed amusedly.

"Mmh," Luke confirmed smiling. He took out a wooden box to show her.

"Is it recent?" Asha asked looking at it. "It looks like it's new."

"Indeed it's here since ever," he answered and lowered his glance gloomily. "I guess it was put here when the rooms were arranged, because I have memories of playing with it since I was very young."

"But what kind of game is it?" Her eyes fixed on the odd box.

"Pathes for marbles." The young Sith opened a shutter, revealing an irremovable transparent plastic cover, that permitted to look – but not to touch – what was inside the box. Under the cover, there were two game levels (transparent as well) painted with red lines that defined several pathes spaced out by small holes. The latters connected a level to the other one, permitting to pass up and down three coloured marbles that at the moment lied at the bottom of the box.

"Ah!" she murmured, realizing the possible inner workings. "But I don't understand, do the marmbles come up with some kind of machinery? Or is there a lever to move the levels?"

"No," Luke shook his head, "there is no machinery to control the path."

"So how can you play with it?"

"With the Force."

Asha looked at him opening her eyes wide. She didn't understand and he wasn't amazed at all – from their converstations of that day, he had grasped that her idea of Sith and their powers was quite vague.

"Come," he gestured her as he sat near the table and put the box on its middle.

She sat on the other side of the table, just in front of him.

The Sith looked at the three marmbles and took mind control on them. He made them to raise on the first level and, making them follow different complex paths, he moved them from a level to the other one. Bewitched, the woman stared the moving marmbles and once in a while she cast a glance into his eyes, trying to understand the connection between him and the game. "Do you control them with your mind?"

"Yep," he nodded.

"And how is it?"

"How is what?" He didn't understand the question.

"What do you feel?" she explained. "What does your mind experience?"

The young Sith couldn't answer immediately – he was so used that he had never thought about it. Carrying on moving the marmbles, he tried and pondered. "When I was young it was hard, I had to focus a lot. But it was a sort of funny challenge learning how to move the marmbles together and to attempt new paths. Now it's easy: it's a kind of activity that you do automatically and it relaxes you at the same time. While you is doing, you think at nothing in particular, but at everything in general." He wondered if that explanation made any sense for whom was listening to it.

Asha seemed to grasp the idea and she nodded seriously. "Therefore, it's like embroidering."

"I haven't a clue," Luke snickered astonishly, "I've never tried to embroider." Amused, he guessed what Palpatine and Vader would have commented in front of a such impious simile. Thinking about his father made him to ponder why he owned that toy. "Maybe I was given it for his instructive purpose."

"Do you mean to train you with the Force?" she asked.

He nodded, still following with his eyes the paths he was making the marmbles to run. He hadn't played with it since a lot of time and he had almost forgotten how funny it was.

"And the model?" Asha asked, turning to the other toy, that still lied inside the cupboard.

Luke left the marmbles, that fall in the bottom of the box, and stood up to go in front of the cupboard. He took up the toy and look affectionately at it. Then he came back to sit in front of the woman and put it on the wooden box. "It's a scale model of a Tie fighter."

Asha nodded, although it was obvious that she didn't know much about spaceships. But surely she had seen yet that particular fighter, there were some even there in the home hangar. "This one is really spoiled," she noted, looking at numerous dents and scratches covered the model everywhere.

"It was really hard to fly at the beginning," the young Sith explained, smiling at the memory. "I couldn't control it well and it fell so many times–" he laughed openly now, "not counting how many times it crushed against the wall!"

Bowing her head to observe the details, but not daring to touch it, his wife asked, "Have you a remote control to make it fly?"

He shook his head.

"How–?"

"Again with the Force," he cut her question and in order to explain better, without any other comments, he took control of the fighter with his mind, making it to take off from the table.

"Wow!" Asha started amazedly and her glance followed the small Tie fighter twirling into the room.

Luke rose his glance too, to check the path of his vehicle, focusing as much as if he had been really flying. He felt his wife's eyes run repeatedly – in growing admiration – from him to the moving model and vice versa. Proud because of her reaction, he suddenly longed to boast. With the selfconfident attitude of an expert pilot, he make the fighter to fly nearer and nearer to the walls, then he dive it and he saved it at last moment from the impact with a swirling spiral return up.

The woman clapped, openly smiling at the wonderful show of the control the young Sith could master on a powerless tin piece. "How is that?" she asked. "What do you feel?"

In order to answer, Luke should reduce the focus on the model movement, so he made it to fly back in an easy circle path in the middle of the room. Still looking up, he tried and understood what he felt. "This–" How could he explain the feeling to really fly, even if he was sitting in his living room? "This makes you to feel free even inside a prison," he affirmed at last with dreamy eyes.

"Were you in prison?" Asha asked bewildered.

Floored, Luke cast a glance to her, but then he looked back again to his small model fighter, because he didn't want – can't – stare back into her questioning eyes. He landed softly and accurately his fighter on the middle of the table, just on the wooden box still between them. Did he really look such a prisoner that she had immediately understood literally his sentence? The truth was that his whole life was an endless long-lasting incarceration, subjected to Palpatine's dangerous whims and his father's obsessive iron discipline. Yet it was better not to tell her. He had freightened her enough a few hours before, when he had warned her against Coruscant plots. It was pointless making her afraid even in their home. So, he also answered literally, smiling conspiratorially, "Twice. For a few days."

His wife got surprised by both the answer itself and the relaxed attitude he showed about it. "Why?" she pressed.

The young Sith shrugged. "I was late to come back home after some leaves." Noting she didn't understand, he added, "I'm in the army, I must conform to military protocol to leave."

She nodded, but she was puzzled as well. "No exceptions for the crown prince?"

Exceptions for the crown–? Luke thought in Ujjain they hadn't really a clue about Lord Vader. But he was still alive, wasn't he? Surely, staff in the base thought that as a remarkable exception. But this detail wasn't important now. He had just resolved not to freighten her and so he wouldn't. He shook his head chuckling and answered light-heartedly, "No."

Her amused and conspirational look made him to understand his boast was rewarded. Deep down, any girl felt kind of involved for the guy who went into troubles sometimes.

But Luke wasn't boaster to the last, so the idea she could really like him made him to blush slightly and he looked away back to his model fighter. He brushed softly its fuselage. In spite of the marks of the many crushes, he admired – not for the first time – its extraordinary high quality. It wasn't factory-made, but a skilled caftsman's work. Both his toys were unique pieces, conceived specifically for the entertainment of a Force sensitive child by someone who had known how you could have fun handling the energy field–

"Are you fond of them?"

The question broke thorugh Luke's brooding and he looked at her.

"Are you really fond of these two toys, aren't you?" Asha asked again, watching him curiously.

The young Sith didn't know what say. He had grown now and he did neither play with them since some time. He looked at the two toys, lying one on the other one, trying to understand what he really felt. He wasn't presented with them nicely wrapping, he wasn't given them with a hug and affectionate words. They were just left in the room with the forniture. Surely nothing could enter his apartment without his father's approval. Their "instructive purpose" – as he himself had just called it – could really explain why the standoffish Sith had felt the need to give him them? Indeed, Luke didn't know what had happened; yet, when he looked at them, he couldn't help but imagine the silhouette of a man creating something special for his own little child. This concept hardly fit into the ruthless training, the continual despotic orders, the harsh punishments. Was it just a fantasy? His hopeless need to see a feeling when it had never clearly shown? Yet, the mere physical existence of the two toys proved that – in a some indeterminable time – the Sith should have thought at Luke as a mere child needing to play– "Yes," he tried and answered. But his voice came choked and he get aware of the lump forming in his throat. He cleared it and tried again, "Yes, that's true, I'm very fond of them."