At Mos Bina
by TwinEnigma
Chapter 3:
stir the dust of memories lost
"What is your bidding, my master?"
He kneels on mechanical legs that feel nothing, his cloak falling around him like a death shroud, and bows his head as much as he is able to with the respirator. It is not that far, but it has never been meant to be.
Above him, the hologram of Palpatine's face twists with something akin to amusement. "My spies inform me that something interesting has happened on Tatooine."
Darth Vader does not move and only the sound of his respirator is proof of his continued existence. He knows Tatooine, but only vaguely. It exists as little more than a dim, unwanted memory to him now. Even if he had wanted to return – which he most certainly did not-, it would be unwise now.
But it is not his choice anymore. There is no way but the path his Master has set before him and he already guesses he will be going there shortly, though he does not yet know why.
"There's been a slave revolt," Palpatine informs him at last, with a cruel smile. "Put it down."
He bows mechanically and feels nothing. The taunt of slavery lost its sting when the world was still bright and not tinted in shades of red. He is numb to it.
"Yes, my master," he says.
He is surprised that he has forgotten how much he hates sand.
The respirator rattles again and his service droid sputters in distress. The sand – coarse, rough, irritating a distant memory whispers – gets everywhere and into everything. It necessitates frequent scrubbing of his respirator filters and limits him to the relative safety of the local garrison, a minor inconvenience that rapidly transcends into an annoyance that startles him.
He can go almost nowhere on this cursed rock, it seems.
At the desk across from him, the garrison's commanding officer squirms uncomfortably. He, like everyone here, is covered in dusty traces of sand that don't quite come out and drips with sweat in the heat of double-noon.
Sand has clogged the air cooling units again. In the distance, there is the steady shriek and thump of an impact drill as the base mechanics strip the aging, battered units down in silence. It isn't likely they'll ever get a replacement this far out on the Rim. But this is how things have always been on Tatooine. Empire or Republic, it doesn't much matter: things hardly ever change and the sand doesn't care either way.
"Where did the revolt start?" he asks.
The commanding officer's answer is quick, almost automatic: "We traced it north, to one of the Hutt palaces in Mos Bina. It seems the violence erupted after they tried to reclaim a large number of slaves lost in a bet."
Vader turns, approaching the flimsiplast map tacked on the wall. It's an all-too-familiar situation. Hutts are notoriously greedy and aren't known for losing gracefully, so it's hardly out of the ordinary that something like this has happened. What is unusual is that this time instead of petering out, the violence has spread like brushfire. The whole atmosphere of Tatooine feels charged, primed to explode at a moment's notice. Even the Force feels agitated somehow, churning restlessly on the edge of his awareness.
Idly, he traces the pattern of pins indicating the spread of the violence and finds it familiar somehow. Perhaps an Alliance tactic? But why their sudden interest in the slavery on Tatooine and why now? What had changed?
"What do we know about the Hutt's slaves?" he asks.
"A mix of various bipedal sentients," the commander pauses, looking at his datapad again. "Only one recent acquisition stuck out – a shipment of Alderaanian survivors, majority human."
Beneath his mask, he narrows his eyes, considering. Bail Organa had been a known Rebel sympathizer and he'd passed his shameless anti-Imperial politics on to his eldest heir, the young senator Leia. And while Bail had met his end with Alderaan, there had been reports that she had avoided that fate, if only just, and had approached multiple planets with requests for aid. The last reports had placed her ad hoc fleet of survivors headed for the Outer Rim. If she had made it to the Rim and been picked up by space pirates or slavers, then that surely might tempt the rebels into action.
Except that gambling for slaves didn't fit with their tactics. It's too risky, too attention-grabbing for a high level operative retrieval, and the rebels are far too good at subterfuge to take those kinds of risks when there are other, better options available to them. No, it's far more likely that if they were involved, they would have chosen a low profile method, such as sending a single operative to either buy her freedom or help her escape and use the smugglers to get her offworld. This couldn't have been their handiwork.
Still, absolutely none of his intelligence suggested she had even made it here and so there would be no reason for the rebels to become involved.
Maybe this had been a personal matter. It wouldn't be the first time someone tried to stage a rescue for family and it went sour. Strange, though, that it would have generated such a violent reaction and one that has persisted so long. There had to be something special about this incident or maybe the individual involved.
"What about the gambler?" he asks. "What do we know about them?"
The commander stills. Then, in an even, neutral voice: "Nothing, sir."
Vader turns, glaring at him from beneath his mask.
This time, the commander does not squirm. He stands at half-ease, his expression blank and wordlessly offers the datapad.
He takes it, scans the report, and it is exactly as said: there is nothing. "You are dismissed, commander."
"Sir," the commander bows.
In the back of his mind, a vague sense of familiarity stirs, but it is gone before he can grasp at it.
He travels north to Mos Bina via transport, taking a detachment from the garrison with him, and finds the district where the revolt started. The Hutt palaces here are abandoned, sand spilling into the untended structures, and the few people remaining watch them move through the area with wary looks. Long scorch marks from blaster fire stain the walls and there's clear evidence of looting. In the distance, the market bustles loudly as if nothing has happened.
His medical droid blats angrily at him, reminding him that he has only a few minutes before he must return and have his filter scrubbed again.
He ignores it.
Stepping into the palace, he finds more evidence of violence, though the sand has long since swallowed the blood and bodies alike and everything of any value is gone. He kneels stiffly, picking up a handful of sand, and lets it sift through his fingers as he takes in the room.
"Commander Fremant, have your men search the area for surveillance systems," he orders.
The commander's crisp "sir" is punctuated with an equally crisp bow and the stormtroopers move out.
He rises, straining against the suit's limitations to look up towards the ceiling.
Hutts were greedy, but they could also be clever.
There, among the eaves, he could see the faint shape of a holorecorder lens.
The recording isn't as helpful as he had anticipated. It had been aimed straight down at the card tables below. From this vantage point, it was very easy to see the player's hands and determine if they were cheating, but it was absolutely abysmal for identifying individual players.
He scrolls back through the recording, idly watching the looting and violence play out in reverse, until at last things appeared to suddenly calm. Stopping the recording, he begins to play it back.
On the screen, the Hutt is playing Sabacc. Their opponent is bipedal, possibly a human, but it is difficult to assess their true nature due to the camera angle. Dressed in the traditional hooded, heavy robes of a commonplace desert traveler, only the hands and cards of the Hutt's opponent are readily visible. Their Sabacc hands are poor overall or middling, but it is clear there was some strategy to this individual's actions.
He goes back further and watches the opponent again, this time from the time they sat down.
This person, whoever they were, definitely had some kind of plan in mind from the moment they sat down, but what it was and what their motivation was is hard to discern. What is obvious is that this person used what looked like gems of some kind to deliberately trick the Hutt into raising the pot as high as it could possibly go.
And then, the lucky bastard managed to somehow pull off an Idiot's Array.
Truly, that must have been the will of the Force itself, considering the odds stacked against them.
The Hutt is, unsurprisingly, infuriated and chaos erupts. A bright flash washes out the recording for a moment – a blaster shot likely fired too close to the lens – and the Hutt is being strangled, dragged out of frame by a chain looped around their neck while their opponent, hood now fallen, quickly swipes up a device that the Hutt had dropped. It looks like the chip controller. They are then helped to their feet and out of frame by a human boy in desert clothes and an aging R2 unit. A moment later, the boy returns to the frame, quickly sweeping the money and gems into a bag before he disappears again.
He pauses the recording, rolling it back frame-by-frame until they both appear again, and looks at the top of the opponent's head.
Human or near-human male, possibly older, traveling with a boy – a teen most likely; both were of fair coloration and had short hair, though the older male's hair was considerably darker than the boy's and cropped much closer to the scalp. It's a cut that he distantly recalls is common on Tatooine, particularly with the moisture farms.
They are disappointingly unremarkable in every way possible.
It is very possible that what he's looking at is the luckiest pair of vaporator jockeys on the planet, who somehow managed to bungle their way from a rescue to a revolution with a deck of cards and bag of trinkets. Stranger things have certainly happened on Tatooine, as he very well knows. Then there is the fact that some people, either by sheer accident, profound dumb luck, or a weird quirk of personality, just happen to embody the most chaotic aspect of the Force and spread that chaos wherever they go.
Still, there's something that keeps him from dismissing them altogether: he can't quite put a finger on it, but they are familiar, if only in the vaguest sense of the word. He frowns beneath his mask and replays the recording, watching closely. Again and again, he replays the sequence, but he is no closer to identifying either the man or the boy.
And yet, the sense of familiarity nags at him still. He feels, somehow, like he should know this man and the boy. He is sure of it.
He stares at the screen for a long time, but no answers come.
"Sir," Commander Fremant states from the doorway.
Vader shoots a glance at him out of the corner of his eye. The medical droid working on his filters beeps in annoyance at the distraction.
"We've captured a boy," Fremant reports. "His ID check matches a Hutt inventory record from Mos Bina. He was trying to sneak into the slave quarter by the port. He was carrying one of these, along with some medical supplies."
The commander holds out a small device. It's a crude, homemade bio-scanner. It's lighter than it looks, barely registering as a load on his arms when he takes it, and it is designed to be broken down quickly into its component parts.
"And his chip?" he asks.
"Removed," Fremant replies. "He won't say by whom."
Of course he won't, Vader thinks and shoos away the medical droid. "I want to speak to him – alone."
"Sir," Fremant says, bowing.
He rises and follows the commander out of the room.
There's a small scar on the back of the commander's neck, about the size of a chip. The word free is tattooed below it in Aurebesh.
Vader finds it somehow deeply ironic.
"He's unlikely to talk," Fremant comments dryly, "even with encouragement."
It is unsaid but implied that they don't even deem it worth trying.
Vader ignores him, instead moving to turn off the holorecorder lens for the cell.
Commander Fremant inclines his head in silent acknowledgement and turns his back to the observation console. He waves his hand sharply and the Stormtroopers on guard quickly file out of the room. With a sharp bow, the commander then leaves as well.
Now it is just Vader and the prisoner.
Inside the cell, the prisoner sits quietly. He is of Mirialan ancestry and young, too, from the look of it, but that means nothing. On Tatooine, youth is no indicator of innocence or naivety. He is already bruised and battered, brown splotches beneath his yellow-green skin, and he does not flinch when he sees him enter – rather, he steels himself for more of the same.
Vader stares down at him, letting the deep hiss of the respirator fill the void of silence.
There are other ways to gain information.
He taps into the Force, letting it flow through him and grasping it with old familiar ease, letting the prisoner's fear and anger become a channel by which to dredge up his own and feed the power of the Dark Side.
There.
He grasps at the power and then digs down, deep into the place in his soul where only ashes of his former self remain. The words come out through his modulator slowly, jarringly stilted and rusty as he stumbles to recall them: "Who is the man, the one at Mos Bina?"
The prisoner stills, eyes wide in horror that he should know this secret tongue. Then, his eyes harden as he draws his lips in a thin line and juts out his chin defiantly.
He raises a hand, clenching his fingers, and the prisoner gasps for air, clutching desperately at his throat and garbling out a prayer for strength as he is pulled upwards.
"Tell me," he orders, relaxing his grip on the Force by a fraction, just enough to let him speak.
An image flickers through the prisoner's mind: a figure, face indistinct and shadowed by a hood, dressed in the robes of a common desert traveler. Somehow, there is something familiar about this man, but he cannot place him.
"You will tell me," he says.
The prisoner glares at him, still struggling, and grins, haltingly grinding out the words, "You… speak this tongue? Then… you… should know."
Somewhere, deep in the ashes of his once self, something of Anakin stirs in sluggish recognition, as if awakening from some great sleep, and supplies a dusty, dim recollection of stories he heard once upon a lifetime ago.
"A children's tale," he intones bitterly and squeezes.
There is no room for such things in the Empire. There is no room for anything but the way forward.
And yet, in Mos Bina, this is one story that had become truth.
Vader snarls in sudden fury, turning and storming out of the cell.
The prisoner's corpse collapses to the floor, as if it were a doll with its strings cut.
He smiles still.
He does not know what brings him out of his temporary quarters in the garrison – restlessness, perhaps. Sleep hasn't ever come easily, not for a long time. He can't remember if it ever did.
The garrison is eerily quiet as he walks out to the compound yard, devoid even of the incessant thrum of the air cooling system. Many of the rooms look empty, sand piling higher and higher in the corners as the wind kicks up.
In the distance, a fast-moving storm gathers. It will be here soon.
Where is the commander? Where are the Stormtroopers? There is no sign of them, no indication of where they might have gotten to. Even the map is gone.
On the table in the mess hall, he notices a pile of small, bloodied chips and a discarded portable holocron projector. When he plays it, Commander Fremant's image wavers into view.
"I had a master once," the recording says, features relaxed. It is the most honest the man has ever looked. "I bought my freedom and joined up. I thought I was free. It turns out that I merely exchanged one master for another."
A dead man's voice, the voice of the prisoner he'd killed, issues from the speakers: "One master was enough, don't you think?"
There is a shriek of metal and hiss of sparks as he crushes the small device in his hand. With a scowl, he stalks out of the mess hall and into the yard. How is it that he hadn't seen this?
We show our masters only what they expect, a faded memory murmurs quietly. And they do not look any further for we are beneath their notice - this is sad but it is true and it is the way of things.
Rage bubbles through him, boiling hot, and he flexes the Force around him. Every bit of abandoned equipment in the yard crumples.
It's a poor substitute.
The wind grows stronger and his cape flaps against him. He knows, in the way that all born to Tatooine know, that he should get inside: the storm is almost on him, but he is angry and insulted and his wrath is far from sated.
His suit's moisture alarm registers a sudden spike in the humidity and, frowning, he reaches to deactivate it. Sand's probably gotten into the casing again, causing it to malfunction. Then, he pauses, eyes widening beneath his mask.
At the gate to the compound, there's a figure, clad in the plain hooded brown robes of a desert traveler. His face is indistinct, covered by the shadows of the hood, but Vader knows him, somehow, he is sure of it.
Come and see, the whirling sands seem to say.
The wind flares up and crosswise, whipping off the hood of the figure, and he freezes completely, a horrified awe flooding him. He knows this face, though he has not seen it in years, has not seen it since before Mustafar: it is his face, youthful and bright, free of scars and suffering. In his hand is a homemade chip scanner, like the one the prisoner had.
The Force whispers words long forgotten in his ears as he stares, dumbfounded, at a children's story come to life.
This cannot be real, he thinks, but it is. He can feel the radiance of them through the Force, feel the Light side flowing through them, and it floods him with terror he hasn't known for years.
The figure with his face smiles. He shines like the twin suns at double-noon.
Come and see, the wind whispers and the sand rises in the growing gale, obscuring his vision for a moment. When it clears, the figure is gone.
There is nothing but the wind and the sand and the silence.
A drop of water pelts against the ground, hissing as it turns into steam. Then, another and another, a spattering that travels quickly across the broiling sand. The distant crack of lighting and rumble of thunder is the only warning he gets before the sky completely blackens and the sacred, life-giving rain comes down in a torrent unlike anything he has ever seen.
Still, he remains, as if rooted to the spot.
He wants, desperately, to laugh, but he cannot laugh anymore. He is not capable. A low, rattling sound comes out of the respirator instead.
He knows this tale, distantly, an echo of brighter times, and now he is in it – this is true, it must be, but it is sand-madness to think it; it is all sand-madness! And now it rains – it rains on Tatooine, something in the back of his mind shrieks in disbelief, for this, too, is a story come to life. But these things don't make any sense – none of it makes any sense! He'd killed all that is Anakin in him long ago and buried it with Padmé and their child. How then is this all possible? Why do these stories come to life now, of all times, long past when the man he buried had needed them most?
He doesn't understand and the Force yields no answers.
He just doesn't understand.
It is the old litany that spills forth from his lips in his near complete hysteria. It is the old litany that finds him when all else that his masters have given him fail. And with it, he begs forgiveness for he has been lost and he could see no other way forward. But now, now the stories are coming to life and all things are possible and it is too much to bear.
Forgive me.
I am so lost.
He screams in pain and, through the modulator, it becomes a roar.
Notes:
I edited a fair amount in this chapter for clarity, which was kind of what I'd wanted to do anyway - plus the med droid had to stick around to scrub Vader's filters everywhere he went!
Anyway, though it's subtle, the newer thread in this is that of there being "the only way forward," which ties into some excellent commentary the comics have gotten into with Vadar about how he's literally being confronted with people who had similar choices to make and... made better ones, which just makes him mad as hell and kill them that much harder because for him he's literally convinced himself he never had a choice and that he was always going to be on this one path.
And then come the kid's stories that appear to be coming alive and the Force is like "¯\_(ツ)_/¯" so he just sits there, because there's all this possibility being shoved in his face and...
Well, that's a mental breakdown about to happen, folks.