Chapter Four
I
Emmel Degathield—"Mel" to those who knew her more informally—was the kind of woman that people noticed, and not always for positive reasons. She was tall, for one. Her clothing assured that her body shape was a narrow rectangle, thin but curveless, leanly muscled, and unusually uniform in width from bosom to knee. Her hairline was shaved to fuzz from widow's peak to the topmost part of her head, and the rest was a rose-tinted honey ponytail of pin-straight hair jutting out in spikes.
Her face was nothing short of stunning to the more attentive passerby. Her eyes—artificial lenses—glowed pearl white at the iris, circled with a rim of her natural gray-green. They had a squint to them, as if she was always thinking, always calculating. A tight but beautiful mouth rested atop a narrow jaw and small, pointed chin. Where her chin met her neck, black tattooed stripes raked all the way up to her buzzed hairline like cell bars, trapping the human behind them.
Leia watched those bars dance in front of her through the red-orange glow of her lightsaber. They effectively weakened her ability to anchor focus onto one eye.
Leia rolled the handle of her sword over the top of her hand, popping it into the air just long enough to twist her wrist and catch the weapon in a reverse grip. She snapped her lightsaber up to collide with Mel's, pulling with both hands until Mel's arms buckled and slacked, allowing Leia to throw her opponent's weapon up and out of the way. Leia then spun the sword in the direction of Mel's stomach for defeat, stopping the blade as soon as it touched the armor.
"Good," Mel said, nodding slightly. Leia held her position to be analyzed. "Just make sure you prep for something like..." Emmel slowly and smoothly returned her left hand to her lightsaber handle and demonstrated how she could have swept down to slice Leia's head in two. "This. Just a nitpick, though. You woulda had me before I could do anything."
The girls disengaged their weapons and returned to Luke, who was fumbling with the wires of a prototype combat training holodroid. Leia watched her brother's focus move from the droid to Mel, burning a slight blush onto his cheek.
Mel picked up the scratch of instructions that sat in front of Luke. She whistled.
"Hell of a lot of modifications your dad's making. I thought Tarky was getting along just fine." She dropped her hand noisily onto the droid's silver shoulder plate—the droid whom the three of them had mockingly named after General Tarkin.
"He did all the work, I'm just putting the mods he made where they need to go," Luke explained, unplugging a gray wire and removing the green sheet of sockets it was connected to. "Father says the droid has become too predictable."
"Sorry kids," Leia grunted in a low voice that mocked her father. "Thought the murder droid would have killed you by now. Here, throw this in there. Now he'll poison your food."
Luke forced a smile, though his eyes disagreed and made her feel a little guilty.
"Now, that's enough of that," Mel warned Leia.
Leia pursed her lips in unwilling retreat from the topic. She rested the balls of her hands on the table next to Luke, eying the yellow slip of her father's handwriting. She pensively reached across the table to flip the note around and draw it to herself for inspection. She read it quickly, then slid it back.
"Nothing fancy," she shrugged. "You can do that in your sleep, Skywalker." Leia rolled her neck and wrists. "Come on, we haven't sparred in forever." Her lightsaber engaged in her hands, a challenge in her grin.
"I get enough practice," Luke said shortly. He did not even lift his eyes. Leia made no attempt to hide her disappointment, scoffing and sinking dramatically into a chair. She reached for her bacta sleeve and applied it over her wrist. Her stomach knotted for a moment when she remembered her upcoming surgery.
The past couple of nights, she had dreamt she woke from anesthesia with a robotic hand. Like her father's, but with no rubbery imitation of skin or glove. Just crackling, sparking wires running from the elbow down. A sputter of electric shocks throughout her body when she tried to clench a fist. The night before last, it had disturbed her so much that her unconscious fear had woken Luke.
As if he knew what she was thinking—and he often did—Luke glanced over the droid's shoulder at his sister. She averted him, and he compliantly returned his attention to their father's instructions.
"You're gonna do something with a sword today, hot shot," Mel told Luke. "Your father pays me to keep both of you alive, and I don't care how much experience you've got—classic sword training behind the saber never hurt anyone."
Only slightly resigned to a break, Mel sat down beside Leia and slid the girl a thick textbook of recent history titled 'The Modern Galactic Empire'. Leia looked up at Emmel with a groan, though they both knew that Leia enjoyed her studies more than she let on.
Then a chill.
Pin hairs on her arms.
And Luke's eyes. A lifeless gray film descending over the blue.
Mel had no affiliation with the Force, but she knew the twins enough to know that something was coming. Luke bolted to a stand and leapt to the middle of the room as a veteran of war would leap into battle. Brave, automatic, but with a dwindling hope so fair that he had already resigned himself to some dark fate. Their father's name—a question, directed towards Leia—formed silently on Emmel's lips. Luke shook his head.
"The Master."
"Here?!" Mel's reaction came out of her throat like a cough. Her confusion was not lost on Leia, and the younger girl set her trainer at Luke's side. Mel had never met the Emperor. Leia's arms and legs moved independent from her mind now. They had stopped too long to act as if they had not sensed him coming.
He knows. Luke's words in his sister's head, the stress of them far too heavy for the circumstances, even for Luke. Of course he knew. He always knew. But Luke's fear was something greater. She allowed herself a single breath of fear.
Just one...
She inhaled. Took in terror's sour taste. Throbbed from the inside, convulsing beneath a still frame, hyperventilating without a sound... And then she released it in an exhale of a fire's last embers floating away orange-gold, dissipating with the cool, blue night. And the blue became black. Blind black. But her eyes would adjust. They had to adjust. Just a moment more...gods...Force...let them adjust...
The entrance to the training gymnasium swept open, the Emperor at its mouth. He was bookended by two redrobe bodyguards. His cloak was a deep purple, hoodless but with a stiff, high collar, allowing his public face to be featured. The warmer lighting in the room brought realism to the makeup and wig that was lacking under the harsh white lighting of their last dinner together. The Emperor's public face immediately summoned Leia's public tongue. Her entire body followed suit, falling into it and settling inside like liquid into a mold.
"Grandfather!" she exclaimed enthusiastically. "What a pleasant surprise!" He responded with a smile and the opening of arms. She rushed forward to embrace him. She could feel Luke and Mel's collective unease, almost like a magnet trying to pull her out of her ruse, but it was clear that the Emperor had called for this side of her. Whatever his reasons were for it.
Leia removed herself from the embrace only partially, keeping herself attached to him by linking his arm. She gestured her other arm towards Mel.
"Grandfather, this is my trainer, Emmel Degathield. She works with Luke when he's home, too."
The Emperor replied to Mel's shock-tinted eyes with a polite smile.
"Charmed to finally meet you, Miss Degathield. I have heard all good things." A turn in his voice—almost a pique of wasted time. "I'm afraid I will be borrowing one of your students this evening, if you don't mind."
Leia's heart sank to her ankles, and she could feel Luke's do the same.
I just got him back.
But Luke had not yet raised his foot before Palpatine clarified his intentions.
"Mind your trainer, my young apprentice. You are skilled, but you must never undervalue the importance of your physical preparedness."
A shift to Leia. A small impatience behind his words that left an unsettled feeling in her stomach.
"I would very much love for you to join me for lunch, my dear. As I told you at last week's dinner, I feel as if we have been out of touch." The proposal was not a true request, but Leia nodded anyway.
Don't. Luke.
I don't have a choice.
Make an excuse!
The Emperor's forehead twisted slightly and Leia smothered her panic. She whispered Luke a telepathic response as if through the bedroom walls of their childhoods, engaging in forbidden conversation long after bedtime. Sincere. Cautious. An urgency. If he replied again, the Emperor would surely know.
I know what I'm doing.
And Luke was silent, outwardly and inwardly.
And Leia left with the Emperor.
II
A shuttle retrieved them outside of the apartment building and took them to a restaurant that Leia vaguely recognized. Perhaps she had been once or twice. She couldn't remember. Maybe she had just seen it from the outside enough to think she had attended. It was a singular establishment with its own walls on all sides, unlike central Coruscant where strings of stores and restaurants fell beside, above, under, in front of, and behind each other in any given direction. A gold glow shone through the translucent windows, blurred diamond shapes carved into the glass, indistinguishable blurbs of color moving behind it. The bustle of an active dining hall.
The Emperor held off on the conversation until their arrival, at which point he handed her a black garment bag. Her automatic self engaged, she did not allot herself a moment to process Palpatine's intentions, even when he left her in the shuttle to change out of her training clothes. Still, she was operating on enough thought and calculation to bypass the fear.
She was surprised—offended, even—to find a woman's dress inside the garment bag. Brown, and with an open V at the back that stopped dangerously close to the tailbone. The fabric was gathered between the breasts she barely had. The silk material was skin-tight against the beginnings of what would one day be curves on the young brunette, alluding to such a future. The style of the gown was a foreign entity on the girl who welcomed her slightness. Her size made her fast. Agile. It made people underestimate her, to their detriment. This costume did the opposite.
She had been dressed by Palpatine before, but this was nothing like the elegant, almost royal modesty he typically provided. Vader had once showed the twins holos of himself and their mother on Naboo the year they were married. The year the Clone Wars rose up around the galaxy. Leia remembered disliking the stringy golds and greens and blues her mother wore in these holos, with the sun reflecting off the stranger's bare bronze shoulders. Padmé was beautiful, but a sort of beauty that left Leia uncomfortable. The girl somehow knew even then that despite their resemblance, the woman in those pictures would never be her.
Leia wore the gown nonetheless and let it consume her, embodying the creature that Palpatine wished her to be. She released the long braid in her hair, dropping ringlets of dark chestnut around her shoulders and down to cover the open V on her back. The restaurant host recognized her and escorted her through excitable whispers to a private dining room. He opened twin glass doors framed with brown wood, inviting her inside.
The Emperor waited for Leia at a small table set for two. Meals had already been decoratively set. The host pulled out Leia's chair for her to sit, then finally left them, the doors closing in his wake. The voices outside the doors muffled instantly, and then quieted down. And finally, Leia connected eyes with the Emperor.
"Hello," he said evenly. It was formal and fraught, as if he was introducing himself to a stranger.
"Hello," she echoed. Her usual certainty teetered on uneven ground. She was at once aware of every inch of exposed skin, the feeling of nakedness raising frozen bumps on her fair arms.
Gods, Leia, stop it!
Why was she so nervous? The Emperor had never even suggested harm to her, physical or otherwise. He treated her like his pet. But something about the way he spoke to her was terrifying. Confusing.
This dag kriffing harem dress...
And then a click of realization. This was exactly how he wanted her to feel. He was not that kind of evil, but he wanted her to maybe feel like he was. He wanted her confused. Vulnerable. And it almost worked.
Almost.
The Emperor began to eat, and Leia welcomed the broken eye contact.
"Are you cold, my dear?" he said while chewing. That suggestion of a tone he used helped to put her back on the stage, this time knowing her part.
"Not terribly, but a little," Leia answered. She willed her outward vulnerability to stay—to disguise her—while her blood warmed itself again. She watched him intentionally ignore her response. An internal smile formed as she felt herself slide back on track.
"I will get straight to the point," Palpatine announced. He chewed, swallowed, and returned his utensils to either side of his plate. "I have a task for your father that I would like you to oversee."
Leia's brows lifted. She did not lose a beat.
"Oversee?"
"Yes," continued Palpatine. "Your father is losing my trust, you see. In my switch of focus from him to your brother, he has become reckless and self-serving. His temper supersedes his political competence, and I sense he has begun to...forget that he is an extension of the Empire."
"I see," Leia nodded slowly. "Rest assured I do not share in my father's sentiments."
"I know you do not, which is why I share this with you. And why I have some instructions for an upcoming political visit you will make with your father. If I may have your discretion…" His final word was a bitter, unwilling addition that beckoned for familial loyalty that never truly existed. "Granddaughter."
Palpatine's long fingers interlocked above his full plate. His eyes serious. Dark silver. The manner he affected was not quite his true terrible self, but far from the grandfather she feigned affection for. She slipped professionally into the counterpart to this new Emperor too naturally to even process the inner workings of her mind, or what lead to such dangerous compliance. Even if such compliance was still a mask.
"What is thy bidding, my Master?"
III
"Oversee?!" Luke cried. "What the hell does that even mean—oversee?!" His fingernails gnawed violently at his arms.
Leia was on her hands and knees, picking up the broken pieces of her bedroom camera, which her brother had destroyed moments ago. Artoo and Threepio were in the doorway, having retrieved a broom and dustpan but unsure of whether to use them yet. The protocol droid looked to Leia for a response, for once at a loss for words.
"It's a trick—or…a distraction," she explained quickly. "Something to keep me off guard. It's nothing, he's got something up his sleeve we're not falling for. Don't worry. And for sake of the Force, Luke, would you keep your damn voice down?!" Leia hissed. "There are still cameras in—"
She was interrupted by the crack of detaching metals and the clash of their fall to the floor. All of the cameras at once, destroyed. Threepio glanced around, his eyes falling into the living room.
"Come along, Artoo, we will clean up the ones out here first." And the droids tried to excuse themselves.
"Stay here," Leia ordered them. She didn't know why—she just wanted them there.
A small part of Leia was relieved that they could speak freely, but most of her was scared of the repercussions. And as usual, her fear manifested itself as anger. She dropped the pieces of metal and threw the camera's dislodged viewport at Luke. It knocked on his shoulder, and he stopped raking his raw arm to gape at her.
"You idiot!" she screamed at him. "We're all on thin ice! You probably just made it worse!" She went to snatch his hand away from his arm—gods, that scratching drove her insane—but he clocked her in the chin with his elbow. Leia fell backwards onto Luke's bed—mostly in surprise. She immediately recovered, using her hands and the spring of the mattress to bounce back to her feet. She used the momentum to punch Luke in the face.
Artoo beeped in protest.
"Master Luke, Mistress Leia, this has gone far enough!" Threepio snapped. "You are far too old to be—" A lamp missed Leia's head and collided with Threepio before he could finish, knocking him to the ground. By the time he recovered, the fight had moved to the main room of the apartment.
Each twin got another hit in—Luke with a punch to his sister's lip and Leia to her brother's nose—then they each had one hand locked around the other's wrist. Luke rammed Leia's tailbone into the countertop, fighting to free his wrist and grab her. Biting a bleeding lip, Leia swept her ankle behind Luke`s knee and forced it to buckle. She shoved him onto the floor, gave him a barefoot kick in the side that probably did nothing but satisfy her, then dropped on top of him to pin his arms. She tried to tell him his nose was bleeding and offer truce, but before she could, she found herself flying upwards. The ground flew away from her and her back hit the ceiling with a thwuck. She fell like a rag doll on top of the dining table. A crack—was that bone or a table leg?—and the table bowed at its southeast end, sliding Leia halfway onto the floor.
With the wind knocked out of her, Leia was unable to move; her eyes bulged impatiently as she waited for her lungs to let her gasp for air. Before they could, she felt Luke's hands on her shoulders. He flipped her onto her back and then he was on top of her, his nose bleeding onto her face.
They had at least two or three fights per year. More, when they were younger. They had granted each other broken bones, dislocated joints, even caused internal bleeding once or twice. In fact, Leia had normally done the most damage, particularly when she was the one who started it.
They had always gone by the same unspoken rules in their brawls: no biting, no hair pulling, no groin kicks or nipple twists, no lightsabers, no lethality such as toxic gas or fire; certainly nothing that would render either of them unable to breathe.
But now, Luke did something he had never done before. He pinned her arms under his knees, bent his arm in a V shape, and pressed his forearm into her neck.
Leia hadn't even caught her breath after the fall before he put all his weight into crushing her windpipe. She could almost feel red veins branching into the irises in her eyes, blood rushing into her head. She tried to convey her terror—surely, he didn't realize what he was doing—but her brother's eyes were fixed predatorily on her neck. And she realized he did know.
Leia first raked at his hands, then waved her arms to either side of her, gripping the air and reaching out through the Force for anything to help her fight back. Panic had set in. Survival instinct. She knew there had been a knife on this table and she intended to use it. Finally, her hands found the cool silver of a utensil and she immediately shot it into Luke's arm. It slipped right off the fabric of his shirt and fell out of her hands. A spoon. She reached again—this time more through the Force—acutely aware of the frantic droids trying to decide what to do.
Her vision was blurring now. Darkening.
Luke, let go!
Another spoon. Gods, when did they get so many kriffing spoons?!
Luke, I can't breathe! Stop!
A napkin, a plastic straw…
LUKE, YOU'RE KILLING ME!
She found her hands wrapped around another utensil and with her last moment of strength, stabbed Luke in the stomach. The kitchen knife plunged into its target.
Leia watched her brother's eyes blink, flutter, then finally fall downwards towards the wound. His grip loosened enough for her to swallow a sweet gulp of oxygen. She was forced to exhale early when Luke dropped his weight on top of her like one would drop a towel. His forehead connected with hers. She could feel his blood dampening the front of her gray coveralls. Had she been able to think about more than breathing, she knew she would be reeling at the fact that she had just stabbed her brother. And the connected horror that doing so may have just saved her life.
Luke rolled off of her on his own volition, his hands padding his wound. His shirt had taken most of the damage, Leia realized with relief. He lifted the shirt, examining an oval patch of skin that had been pulled up in a sharp slice—shallow, but bleeding profusely until he held the skin back in place.
Artoo barreled into the kitchen from Leia's bathroom with a beeping, burping string of low expletives. A bolt of electricity shot out from the droid onto Luke's leg.
"Ow!" the boy exclaimed. Artoo punched Luke in the face with his grabber—or rather, pushed his face so that Luke was knocked backwards—dropping a wash rag for his master begrudgingly. The astromech left him to aid his sister.
Leia hoisted herself to a seated position with the assistance of Artoo's offered grabber. Adrenaline drained away, leaving only pain behind it. Her neck flared first, then all at once her body felt like one giant bruise. She leaned forward, planted her hands on the cool hardwood, brought herself into a crawling position, breathed, then stood. She leaned heavily on Artoo as she surveyed the room's damage. Then Luke's. Seeing he would live, a swell of heat returned to her blood. Leia stumbled to her brother and drove her foot hard into his groin. He doubled over with his hands between his legs and she fought the urge to spit on him. And the following urge to wrap him in an embrace.
Leia scanned the room for their golden protocol droid.
"Where's Threepio?" her voice came out dryly.
Artoo beeped that his counterpart had gone to retrieve their father from four floors down. Leia ignored the sharp pang of unpreparedness in favor of a small, surprising relief. Relief that in a few moments, she would not be alone with Luke. This fear of her brother was so foreign that she did not even recognize it as fear. She dismissed it as one would dismiss the creak of a stair or a window left unopened—mostly sure that the events were coincidence and there was no danger, but with a nagging whisper of "What if?" behind it all.
She told her feet to find her bedroom. To finish packing, and be ready when their father arrived. Or to take a shower, leaving Luke to decide how to confront him for once. But when Leia heard the clap of the entrance pad lock, she found herself planted in between the door and her brother—a barrier between Vader and his son.
The Sith surveyed the scene quickly and methodically with his eyes, his face slipping into the disingenuous mask that became their father figure on occasion. Leia let him touch her shoulder, turn her chin to examine her cut lip, look her over—all the while stealing glances at his son. Leia found a childish voice within herself that wanted to tell Vader everything in that moment. Lies emerged instead.
"It was stupid. We were practicing some fight—"
"Son," Vader snapped at Luke. "Come." Leia heard Luke approach while her father's hand met the back of her neck. She was acutely aware that it was his artificial hand. When Luke reached Leia's side, Vader looked at him. His gloved black hand lifted into the air.
Luke's breathing hitched. He coughed. His eyes darting, the boy's feet rose slowly off the ground. He gripped his hands around his neck.
"That's not necessary…" Leia rushed, pushing down Vader's slightly raised hand.
"It is entirely," Vader shot back. A wave of his hand, and Luke flew back against the wall. Leia tried to come to her brother's aid, but then found herself kicked to the other side of the room through the Force.
"Father, enough!" Leia cried out. "We had a disagreement—nothing more!"
"Leia Skywalker, one more lie from your mouth and you'll live to regret it."
She silenced. Vader directed his attention to Luke, though he spoke to both of his children.
"There is much I have grown to tolerate from you and your sister. Secrets, for one. You two have libraries of those, I'm sure. Many of them simple. Harmless. I have not said a thing concerning them—though rest assured, I know they exist. But you also have secrets that are more complex, I gather. Secrets to protect each other. Such as those your sister holds onto in this very moment, under the pretense that she is protecting you." Leia's heart clenched at her father's short glare. It only lasted a moment before he turned back to Luke. "Tell me, son, how many times have you witnessed demonstrations of my ability to choke the life from someone with nothing more than a raise of my hand?"
Luke did not answer.
"Many?" Vader filled.
"Yes, Father."
"And aside from tonight, have I ever once demonstrated this ability on you?"
"No, Father."
"And why do you think that is?"
Again, Luke could not find an answer behind his trembling chin. Vader offered Leia an opportunity, but she uncharacteristically favored silence as well.
"It is because this family does not turn on each other," he continued. "We do not overpower each other, or compete with each other. We are stronger together. And despite the Master's incessant attempts to pit my children against each other, you have remained together. You are twins. Connected in ways only the Force itself can fathom. You were born into this world together." Vader widened to address both his children. "And I will only say this once. Should either of you cause the other's demise—should you yourself be the death of this other half of your soul that stands across the room from you in this very moment—then my children will both be dead." Vader eyed each child pointedly. "Do you understand." A statement, not a question.
"Yes, Father," Luke whispered, his chin tucked into his chest.
Leia's thoughts left through her lips.
"And if Palpatine kills one of us?"
Vader turned to his daughter. Slowly, darkly, he took steps to approach her, his gray eyes dark. Leia caught her brother's tentative step forward at the other side of the room.
"Get your things," Vader hissed. "We are going to Alderaan."