"Mr Sahtou." Vader always greeted him that way. 'Mr Sahtou.' Neutral and as non-committal as his voice would allow.

The implied respectfulness set Harvan's teeth on edge. He clenched his mouth tightly shut and took his seat. Part of the problem was the implied requirement to respond in kind and he had yet to come up with a form of address that made the slightest sense in the current context. 'Lord Vader' seemed out of the question and beyond that, what was there?

"You came to no harm during the attack?"

His head jerked up, astonishment temporarily driving away his persisting reluctance to look at Vader directly. The query sounded bizarre and uncomfortable coming through the mask's voice box. Surely as uncomfortable as it must have sat in the mouth of the man behind it.

"I . . . n-no," Harvan stammered, "Th-thank you."

The surreality of the exchange wrecked his composure for a good half-minute. Only then did the appropriate response fight its way to his lips. "And you?"

"No." Of course not. And if he had, Harvan would have known about it. "It seems this ship was kept safely at the edge of the battle. The skill of the crew prevented any serious damage."

Was he fishing for details? Harvan did not know how much he had been told, by the crew, by Skywalker, by whoever had been assigned to gather intelligence from him. Statements that invited confirmation or denial were the enemy of the interrogator and this seemed to fit the type. Yet if that was the intent, there was little effort behind it. Vader lapsed into silence, seemingly unconcerned with pursuing the subject further.

Harven looked down at this notes. The sketched details of the Imperial side of the Battle of Yavin stared up at him. His insides clenched. The eighteenth year of the Empire. The year everything had changed for the Alliance. The year everything had changed for him.

And perhaps for Vader too.

He forced the memories from his mind, hoping against hope that any waver in his emotions would stay hidden. "Was it on the Emperor's command that you sought out the pilot who destroyed the Death Star?"

From the lack of reaction, he knew Vader had anticipated the question. There was something a bit too composed in his posture and in the slow tilt of his helmet. That made sense. It was an obvious question to ask.

"I chose to pursue him on my own account. It was not at the Emperor's bidding."

"And he . . . permitted that?"

A pause. The brief silence of someone searching for the right words. "I searched discreetly at first. I could mask my actions within the wider search for the rebel leaders."

"But you were looking for that pilot?"

"Yes."

The Alliance had learned only slowly of Vader's search for Commander Skywalker, largely after the fact. A trail of bounty hunters and hired spies stretched across the Outer Rim, all of them in some way employed to track down that one singular pilot. Much of the speculation placed the dark lord's reasons as wounded pride and spite. The gradual expansion of Skywalker's apparent Jedi abilities threw a new light on the subject but to many nursing old nightmares and wounds inflicted by the Empire's Inquisitors, the apparent personal attention hinted at something more. As rumours spread like wild-fire following the disaster on Hoth – the public murder of an Imperial Admiral, an unusually vicious act even by Vader's capricious standards, the open hiring of bounty hunters to track not the fleeing command staff but the Millennium Falcon specifically, the invasion of the Bespin refineries – it became clear that this was a personal matter, something that drove the Emperor's Fist to strike out against one man regardless of the cost in ships and troops.

"Why?"

Harvan sat, waiting for the answer, the sound of Vader's breathing cutting the silence apart with new keenness. He watched and listened for every slight change, for all those little tells that exposed the lingering humanity behind the mask. For once, the other man's fearsome aspect did not matter in the slightest. All thoughts of either manners or menace were driven away as Harven suddenly needed more than anything to hear the answer to the question. To hear him say it.

Vader's head rose fractionally, an almost proud gesture. "Because he is my son."


Note: Just to clear something up regarding the chapter lengths - I know they're all quite short but unfortunately, I couldn't come up with a way to break the story into larger chunks that consistently worked. The ends of scenes are pretty much the only place it seemed to me to be natural to break the story. Sorry about that - but I hope the frequent updates salve at least some of that problem.