Disclaimer
The dark is generous, and it is patient, and it always wins–but in the heart of its strength lies weakness: one lone candle is enough to hold it back. Love is more than a candle. Love can ignite the stars.
Chapter 10:
Father and daughter circled.
Leia held her lightsaber high above her head, reading to attack. Vader held his in a lateral stance. Leia brought her blade straight down and when Vader moved to parry, Leia feinted and cut low. Vader counterparried, letting the impact direct his sword toward her threat. Leia met the riposte and stepped back. Again, they circled.
Vader was impressed with her speed, pleased even, but she was not ready yet to destroy the Emperor and so needed further tutelage.
Leia attacked again, much more aggressively, advancing in a flurry of lunges—each of which were met by Vader's saber. The Dark Lord retreated a step at every slash, only once attempting a riposte that Leia batted away and used to push her back yet again. Vader lost his footing on the stairs and tumbled backwards.
Leia stood at the stop of the stairs, heady with her own power; she could do it, now, she knew it; she could kill Vader. Kill him. Kill the Emperor, rule the galaxy. She didn't try to bury the thought this time but reveled it and gorged herself on it, allowed it to obliterate all other thoughts. She started forward.
Vader stood, astonishment turning to humiliation, surprise, fear and then finally anger. He lunged up the stairs and Leia met his blade. Again and again, they battered away at each other, enthralled in the throes of their rage.
(*)
Gripping her purple lightsaber with both hands, Mara tried to press the attack to force the clone back but the clone riposted viciously; his next strike would have taken one of her hands if she hadn't pulled it back from the lightsaber and so instead it severed the hilt in half. Mara responded with a rising kick in the clone's stomach that turned into a disengage, leaping up onto the overhead gantry, dropping the rest of the now useless hilt as she did so.
The clone threw his lightsaber towards her, it sliced through the supports holding the gantry up, causing it to tilt down. Mara lost her footing and fell into the shadows underneath the stairs. Mara spotted the lightsaber clattered to the ground, still active, and called it to her hand.
Mara's eyes hardened but she pushed away the whispers of the Dark Side and leapt upwards, arcing back over the clone; the blue lightsaber moved in a blur and when Mara landed behind it, bent down on one knee and breathing heavily, the clone's body separated into two pieces along the cut she had made through it from torso to shoulder.
Luke abruptly went on the offensive, riposting savagely against Shira's latest attack and forcing her to step back; Luke advanced, a blow with every step and every step a blow. Methodically and relentlessly, Luke backed Shira into a corner and then smashed through her defense...taking off her arm in the process, then followed through by severing her head. Luke turned towards the approaching Mara, eyes still full of rage, and raised his lightsaber.
"Luke!" Mara exclaimed, desperately blocking his unexpected attacks, "Stop! It's me! Stop!"
Their lightsaber blades, blue and green, locked for one moment and Mara stared into his eyes, trying to snap him out of it.
"Yes, yes," the Emperor exclaimed, "Use your aggressive feelings, let the hate flow through you."
Luke faltered for a moment and then realized what was happening. He stepped back and lowered his lightsaber, horrified at what he'd done...and almost done, and then he saw Leia and Vader.
(*)
Leia was attacking with a frenzy she had never knowing, pressing Vader back and pursuing him relentlessly. Blow upon blow, stroke by stroke, Leia pummeled Vader closer and closer to a seemingly bottomless shaft to the power core. Vader was finally forced to his knees and raised his blade to block yet another onslaught…and Leia slashed Vader's right hand off at the wrist.
The hand, along with the attached bits of metal and wires, clattered over into the chasm along with Vader's lightsaber. Leia stood above Vader, holding him at the point of her glowing blade, she raised it for a killing blow…that was interrupted by a green blade held by Luke, a focused and determined expression on his face.
Leia savagely turned on her brother and began attacking him with the same unstoppable fury she'd just used on Vader; like his father, Luke was forced backwards towards the stairs.
Mara raised her own lightsaber only to be forced to turn it to block an assault of Sith Lightning from the approaching Emperor that forced her back to her knees and sent her tumbling down the stairs.
Leia cut through Luke's artificial hand, sending it and his lightsaber flying, and now held her brother at the tip of her blade.
The Emperor laughed. "Good, good; now kill them and take your father's place at my side!"
Leia blinked and then stared at Luke, then at Vader, then at the Emperor, then back at Luke.
'No!' She would not give in to the darkness; the darkness that was within Vader, within the Emperor…and within her. The darkness that she hated and that wanted to consume her as well. She knew now that you could not use darkness to fight darkness, else it would also consume you. But now she would destroy it the only way she could: by renouncing it.
She straightened up, shut off her lightsaber and tossed it aside.
Mara came up beside her and they helped Luke to stand, then turned to face the Emperor.
"Never!" Leia said, "We will never turn to the dark side."
"You've failed, Your Highness," Luke continued.
"We are Jedi," Mara finished.
The Emperor's glee turned into rage.
"So be it…Jedi!"
(*)
Han snatched up his comlink and spoke into it: "Hurry up, Goldenrod; we're out of time."
"It's done Master Solo," said Threepio. "Artoo has programmed the shuttle autopilot and it is has taken off."
The wait seemed to last forever but finally they spotted the shuttle Tydirium zoom overhead and towards the generator dish. As expected the garrison TIE's quickly intercepted it but the shuttle's shields were up and they lasted long enough. The Tydirium collided with the deflector dish in a massive explosion.
(*)
Onboard Home One, Ackbar was relieved by the sudden change in sensor readings. "The shield is down. Commence attack on the Death Star's main reactor."
"We're on our way," Lando replied and banked the Falcon towards the Death Star. "Red Group, Gold Group, follow me." And then he laughed, saying to his co-pilot, "I told you they'd do it."
(*)
In the auxiliary bridge of the Executor Grand Admiral Thrawn frowned at how the Rebels had somehow, once again, beaten the odds. He pressed a button on his chair.
"Baron Fel, this is Grand Admiral Thrawn."
"Fel, here," came a gruff voice. "What is it Admiral?"
"The Death Star's shield is down and several Rebel fighters have broken off from the battle; send one of your squadrons to stop them."
"At once Admiral."
(*)
"If you will not be turned," the Emperor was saying, raising his hands towards them, "then you will be destroyed."
Bolts of Sith Lightning leapt from his fingertips. The three young Jedi linked together through the Force…and caught the bolts with their own hands, deflecting them away. The Emperor began ramping up the power and speed of his assaults but the stalemate continued. Any one of them alone would have been swiftly overwhelmed, but the three of them together could more than match even the Emperor's power, their own power further augmented because they had a strength that the old Jedi had not possessed, and had in fact denied, and one that the Emperor did not understand.
That strength was the strength of love. Not merely compassion, as the Jedi of old, but love. In Luke and Leia's case, the love of two siblings; in Luke and Mara's case that of lovers; in Leia and Mara's case, the love of a friendship forged in adversity. The old Jedi had also felt those emotions but they had denied them, tried to control them and suppress them; that had crippled them and turned them into a parody of their enemy. And just as the Sith had once defeated the Jedi by remaking themselves, now were the scales flipped and the Dark Lord of the Sith was facing a new breed of Jedi.
Except that unlike the old Jedi, Palpatine was too fundamentally arrogant to recognize or admit that he had made the same mistake that they had—indeed no longer was he even capable of admitting that he might have made that mistake; both he and Vader had assumed that Luke, Leia and Mara would have been taught to repress their emotions instead of accepting and even, to a degree, embracing them. The old Jedi had been afraid of facing the dark and so had tried to deny the battle completely; but fear of the dark is still fear and in fearing the dark the old Jedi had given it power over themselves. But that was not the case of the new Jedi, for they had accepted their own darkness, faced it and gone past it.
Darth Vader had slowly gotten to his feet and limped over to his master's side, watching the struggle; watched his son and daughter resist his master and at last he acted. Vader grabbed the Emperor from behind, picked him up and began carrying him over to the chasm. Vader was weaker than he'd ever been before and became still weaker when some of the Emperor's Sith Lightning began spraying back him. But Vader refused to be denied, refused to submit again; focused every fiber of his being, into this one act.
The Royal Guards flanking the turbolift rushed forward toward Vader and their master but Luke, Leia and Mara, still united in the Force, moved as one; they retrieved their lightsbers and cut them down.
Vader reached the chasm and, with his last bit of strength, hurled Palpatine into the abyss. Palpatine, still spewing bolts of energy, spun down and down out of sight; but then at last a distant explosion sent a rush of air billowing back out of the shaft, knocking back Vader as he tried to follow his master to the end. Luke pulled him back away from the edge of chasm, then nearly collapsed from his own exhaustion.
(*)
The Millennium Falcon led a group of Rebel fighters across the surface of the Death Star to the unfinished portion. They were pursued by a dozen TIE Interceptors, each of them with the blood red stripe of the 181st Imperial Fighter Wing.
"I'm going in," said Wedge.
"Here goes nothing," Lando said.
Wedge's X-Wing led the Falcon through an ever narrowing shaft, followed by four other fighters—two X-Wings, two A-Wings—plus six pursuing TIE Fighters who kept up a constant barrage of fire at the Rebels.
"Now lock onto the strongest power source," said Lando, "it should be the power generator."
"Form up," said Wedge, "and stay alert. We could run out of space real fast."
The chase continued through the tunnel, still pursued by the TIEs; one of the X-Wings was hit from behind and exploded.
"Split up and head back to the surface," Lando told the other fighters, "And see if you can get a few of those TIE Interceptors to follow you."
"Copy Gold Leader," said Tycho Celchu, one of the A-Wing pilots and a member of Rogue Squadron. Celchu and the other two Rebel fighters peeled off into intersecting corridors, half of the TIEs followed them while the rest kept pursuing the Falcon and Wedge. The main tunnel abruptly narrowed and the Falcon only barely scraped through it, losing its rectenna dish in the process.
"That was too close," Lando said and his co-pilot agreed.
(*)
Luke, Leia, and Mara carried the crippled body of Vader into an Imperial shuttle; no one noticed them or the shuttles rapid departure soon thereafter. With Mara at the controls, Leia went back to be with Luke and their dying father.
"Help me take this mask off," he said.
"But you'll die," Luke replied.
"Nothing can stop that now," Vader said. "Just this once, let me look on you with my own eyes.
Slowly, hesitatingly, Leia and Luke began removing the mask. Underneath they saw the sad face of an old man, bald, beardless and scarred, with unfocused eyes and pasty-white skin. A face that had not seen the sun in over two decades. A face full of emotions: regret, anguish and shame but also love; a face full of memories: of a time long gone, a brotherhood betrayed, a dear wife, and of slavery and freedom.
All these things and more flashed in the face of Anakin Skywalker in his final moments.
"Now, go," Anakin gasped out weakly, "Leave me."
"No, I'm going to save you," Luke said.
"You already have, Luke," said Anakin, "You were right. You were right about me." And in his final breath Anakin spoke the name he hadn't allowed himself to say or think for over two decades: "Padme, my love, she was right. Padme…"
His head fell back and Anakin Skywalker, once the Dark Lord of the Sith Darth Vader, breathed his last and died.
(*)
Back at the Rebel fleet, Admiral Ackbar was continuing to direct the battle.
"We've got to give those fighters more time. Concentrate all fire on that Super Star Destroyer."
Rebel ships, including B-Wings and Skiprays, swooped in and unleashed a barrage of proton torpedoes and concussion missiles that briefly overwhelmed the already taxed shields of the Eclipse, allowing several of the missiles to get through and damage the ship.
"Sir," a controller said to the captain, "We've lost our bridge deflector shield."
"Intensify the forward batteries," he ordered immediately, "I don't want anything to get through." Through the window he could see a damaged A-Wing out of control and heading towards the bridge. "Intensify forward firepower!"
"Too late!"
The A-Wing crashed into the bridge; this combined with the continued barrage on the ship set off a chain reaction that sent the Super Star Destroyer, no longer able to resist the natural gravity field caused by station the size of a celestial body, slowing falling towards the Death Star and eventually crashing into it and exploding—the impact enough to actually jolt the battle station and set off internal explosions, plunging the station and its crew into chaos.
A lone X-Wing and the Millennium Falcon, still pursued by a pair of TIE Interceptors, finally reached the reactor core.
"There it is," Wedge said.
"All right, Wedge," said Lando, "Go for the power regulator on the north tower."
"Copy Gold Leader," said Wedge, "I'm already on my way out."
Wedge fired a series of proton torpedoes at the power regulator, causing a series of small explosions, and then headed out. Lando fired the Falcon's concussion missiles, which hit directly at the center of the main reactor. Wincing at the dangerously close explosion, Lando maneuvered the Falcon after Wedge, through the winding superstructure just ahead of the escalating chain reaction of explosions.
On the bridge of Home One, Admiral Ackbar gave the order. "Move the fleet away from the Death Star."
Wedge's X-Wing managed to escape the Death Star ahead of the explosions; the Falcon almost did not make it but finally shot out of the exploding superstructure only a moment before the entire station exploded.
Lando and Nien Numb laughed and cheered in relief...a relief that was very short-lived when they spotted the Rebel fleet still engaged in battle with the Imperial fleet over Endor.