Author's Note: Opted for much later update rather than bring the angst in the immediate aftermath of Carrie Fisher's death. (You may still want to avoid these updates for the time being.) Can't express here just how I feel about the untimely loss of this unique, brilliant, brave, multi-talented, kind and funny woman, and what she's signified to me—but I know you all feel the same for her, so I don't have to try.

Thanks for hanging with me on this long trip, friends, and for understanding. One more cycle of chapters to go after this one.

And now we return to our soap. Xo!

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Ben kept his gaze on the painting as he began to talk. His speech was soft, halting, one corner of his mouth tugged slightly askew. But he seemed to draw strength from Leia and Luke, returned stunned to his sides, each holding one of his familiar gnarled hands—and mostly from the glowing image of Breha Naberrie, fuelling him like a solar cell.

Leia sat only half-absorbing Ben's words. She'd already known that Ben's family was the only one in New Hope that lived all year at Alder Glen, that they were very poor; that Ben's father was a nature guide for rich families that owned vacation cabins. Ben had mentioned once, in self-deprecating explanation of his shaky arithmetic, that he hadn't begun formal schooling until he was nine, because he was needed on his father's traplines. Ben's rare personal stories had been curios to the young cousins, fragments to be compared and fit together. But tonight, Leia knew Ben was extracting something whole from his past. Something insistently of a piece, inescapable. For the first time in her life, Leia's inquisitive mind balked at fact.

Luke, though, seemed starved for Ben's narrative. His eyes on his mentor were grieving, yes, but compassionate and encouraging, even relieved. Was there anything anyone could say to Luke, Leia wondered, that would shake him from his faithful, eager embrace of the world? When Leia's own confusion resounded so deeply it dazed her. Her focus returned to the laughing young woman rising from the lake, living a lovely, lost loop of a life that Leia could never have conjured. Ben and...Breha? Leia could not think Mama in this context, not without Papa, could not begin to consider—

For a time Ben paused, eyes closed. Her innate practicality battling back at shock, Leia whispered to Luke that Ben had to have called her from somewhere—was there a phone here? They had to call for an ambulance, call Han. No, Luke muttered, it must have been a payphone, they had to find it—when Ben began to speak again, quiet but resolute.

No. Listen. Please.

Leia hesitated. She had the powerful sense that it would be a gross indignity, even an abuse, to interrupt Ben now, even with the aim of saving his life. And how? Would she drop Ben's hand and run off into the night, through this huge industrial parking lot, or down along the riverbank, looking for a telephone booth? Would Luke? Knowing that one of them would have to stay with Ben, unless he—if—until when—

The only thing that seemed possible was to hear the truth.

XXXXXXXXXX

Summertime, Alder Lake. Ben had never had a friend before he met Padmé Naberrie on the beach. He was six. Ben was drawing, Padmé came to look, and declared her twin sister, Breha, the better artist. Padmé waved hesitant Breha over. The girls were identical, strikingly pretty, and very close, but vastly different in temperament. Twelve minutes older, Padmé was social. Assertive. Funny, whip-smart. Fearless, even hungry for risk. Breha was intuitive, sensitive, anxious, and deeply empathetic.

At first Ben only saw the girls at holidays, when the rich Naberries stayed at their cabin, but they became fast friends. Mr. Naberrie insisted, despite multiple corrections, that the trapper's boy was named Ken Kenobi. This mortified Breha, and Padmé found it so ludicrous that she forever, fondly called him Kenny. He felt he could talk to them. Ben's father, Jim, took the children on walks; he was tickled by Padmé's precocious humor and when Breha presented him with a sketch of a fox, he pinned it up next to Ben's in the Kenobi kitchen. As a trio they climbed in the orchards, swam in the lake, sledded down the hill. Breha and Ben drew fruit, trees, birds; Padmé sat with them and read her books.

"When I started school, Breha and I. We drew together." Leia winced at this poignant, unintentional pun. "Traded off winning art prizes. Learning together, library art books. Trying to copy what we saw."

Ben looked affectionately at Luke, and Leia remembered a very young, wheat-haired boy at the Organas' kitchen table, crayon clutched in his fingers, stubbornly rendering a bowl of apples. Breha had brought little Luke paper after fresh paper, pencils, pens, never teasing him, smiling in a soft, delighted way that Leia now knew was recognition.

"In our teens I was afraid Padmé would resent me. I loved Breha by then, you see; and Padmé knew, too. Before Breha did, even."

Leia fought the rising lump in her throat to think of her young mother, falling in love as obliviously, inadvertently and obviously as her daughter one day would.

"But Padmé was generous. More wilful than Breha, more defiant, but as kind." He squeezed each cousin's hand. "And it was innocent, then, Breha and me. We were so young. Breha's art still very respectable, to her parents. As long as she was sketching roses. But painting is...is..."

Ben's voice dropped off into—what, Leia wondered. Modesty? Reticence? No, it was a kind of shame. Still in ways a boy of his era, Ben looked to Luke as though for help. Luke shot Leia a newly worldly glance communicating that painting could be lustiness, texture, earthiness, touch.

"The life force," Luke said, so gently and sweetly, so without condemnation, that Leia bowed her head before her cousin's natural sense of mercy. Ben nodded, breathless and reprieved.

"We started painting together. Your workshop, Leia—your young man's—her father never used it. Something happened to our work when we learned together that was greater...truer than when we were apart." Ben let his eyes close into memory. "One day on the beach I told her—oh I knew I was poor, had nothing to give her but—I told Breha I loved her. And she told me."

His eyes opened, now intensely blue. Leia followed Ben's gaze onto the Breha he'd—no, not captured, not created; no word was quite right to describe whatever excruciating and exalting process Ben had endured to call this Breha forth on canvas. Perhaps channelled was the closest. Leia stared at this young woman who was her mother. And almost rose, then, on a wave of dizziness. How could she stand this? But Ben seemed newly electrified, energized enough that Leia hid in a rare bout of magical thinking. She told one of the only lies of her life, told it to herself: that Ben was getting better with his telling. She had to stand this. If Ben could just free his secret, once precious but now poisoning him, then surely, surely, he would be all right.

Desperately Leia braced herself against her own pain. Reached across Ben's chest to take Luke's free hand. She and Luke would shoulder Ben's story and this would fix Ben, somehow, yes...or at least soothe him enough that he could be bidden into R2 and to the hospital in Mantell. Leia could endure this talking cure, whatever it meant about her parents' marriage, whatever her protective feelings for Bail. Leia was not a child, after all, she rallied herself; she was a woman, she knew love. She had Han, a job, a life. Leia could approach Breha not as her daughter, not see Breha as mother or wife, but as another woman with a right to her own past, ambitions, passions, truths.

Urgency eased Ben's labored speech. He got the scholarship to the New York School of Art. That prize wasn't open to girls at New Hope High School but kind Breha was overjoyed for him. She wanted to go to art school, too, got the nerve to ask her parents. They refused. "Said it was unseemly." An anger Leia had never perceived in Ben tinged his voice, and she had a vision of how he was then: talented but generous, intense but kindly. Messy auburn hair, faint copper freckles across the bridge of his nose. A ready smile almost too broad for his face.

Ben said they should run away together. They'd read how artists travelled, penniless, lived in attics—Amsterdam, Paris— starving, making love and art.

"All very romantic to us, when we were still...when we were utter innocents."

Leia looked again at the objects surrounding them, stubbornly warming a corner of this dark space. Plump silk cushions, Moroccan hangings, two high, armless chairs of Indian teak. The significance of these accoutrements struck painfully at Leia's heart. She pictured Breha accruing them not only as lovers' comforts but as symbolic promise to herself that they would have that worldly artists' life: almost little postcards from the future.

"Come with me, I said. Like it was simple." Ben gave his young self a tiny, harsh scoff. But Breha couldn't hurt her parents like that. Padmé was adventurous, gave the Naberries fits, but Breha was fragile, empathetic to the point of pain. More dependent on their approval. Breha was quietly resentful of her parents, though, for obstructing her painting. Not angry enough to leave, but angry enough to, she said, live a little. And Leia felt a new pang to remember the authentic generosity and support in her mother's voice whenever Leia emerged from Priscilla's dressing room in some wonderful frock. "Oh go on, darling: let's get it. Let's live a little." Even as she shied away from Leia's plans for a career, hated Leia learning to drive.

The summer before Ben left for New York, the twins hatched a plan. They applied to study as legal secretaries at Mantell College, then petitioned their parents to let them live in the small city, together, at a very correct ladies' boarding house. The Naberries at first refused—no girls of their status should even leave home before marriage, let alone work. Padmé switched tactics. She heavily implied one night at dinner that if the sisters weren't allowed some freedom, they could become...fractious. Running her fingers through her newly bobbed hair for emphasis. And Breha stared down their parents in stony silence, when usually her reliable obedience moderated the fiery drive of her sister. One rebellious daughter the Naberries could only just manage. But two? They agreed, grudgingly, to let the girls go, and Mrs. Naberrie only because she hoped they would meet eligible lawyers.

"I got the lease on this place," Ben said. It used to be a loggers' apartment house; there was plumbing then, a kitchenette. Docks down the river, the sawmill. Nothing else. "No one we knew would see us. I lived here most of the summer, painting, waiting for her." Often Breha skipped classes to join Ben, to work with him; Padmé was so bright she tore through the course for both of them, made up whatever Breha missed. Even pretended to be Breha, for a few makeup tests.

Learning was too easy for Padmé, and her path to challenging education blocked. She wanted something she couldn't find, something intense. In Mantell she went to jazz clubs alone and danced; sometimes she just drove around all night in her Packard convertible, smoking cigarettes. "But Breha and I, we were so happy." Ben glowed and winced, transported in time. "We'd work, we'd talk, play the gramophone, we'd—"

The way Ben's eyes moved over the melted candles, the soft surfaces, made a tender history clear: not to mention that he'd preserved this space for so many years.

Leia thought of Han, lathing new hickory legs for the big easy chair when it developed a recent list to the left. When he proudly put the chair back in its place under the window, slinging his arm around her waist, expecting praise—y'know, sometimes I amaze even myself—Leia slyly said they could have just replaced it. Han was aghast, as if Leia had suggested tossing a basket of pups into the Kessel River, then narrowed his eyes. "Aahhh-hah, funny girl," he said, ticking his index finger side to side like a scolding metronome. "Makin' fun of me, my favorite chair." Han swept Leia up into bridal grasp so fast that her laughter was lost in her gasp, lost in his kiss. "Now, that ain't nice, Princess," Han murmured against her mouth. "Maybe we all oughta get reacquainted."

Love. Want. Commitment; these seemed to Leia, in this moment, like inalienable rights, both desperately precious and so far passed from this dark, lonely place that Leia could only yearn for them herself. She squeezed her eyes shut against the sudden thought of Han's loss, so breath-stealing and terrible that it felt almost premonitory.

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August 26, 1933. The night before Ben left for New York. With his scholarship money he took the twins for a fancy dinner, then to the Mantell Cinema. At the restaurant, Breha had been cheerful, even giddy, which was a relief to Ben. He so loved her, and she was so emotionally delicate, that he'd been dreading leaving her—even as he felt stealthily, guiltily excited for his adventure.

The trio drank so much champagne that they were tipsy through most of the film, a musical. Padmé kept everyone around them in stitches with droll, witty commentary on the silly love story. But when the dance sequence began, the frames shifted with no warning from black-and-white to Technicolor, which no one outside Indianapolis had seen before. The theater gasped. It was glorious, everything all at once and all together: the saturated spectrum in motion; waves of sound; the uncanny, fluid unison of the dancers. Padmé clapped her hands to her face, a habit she had when overwhelmed. Ben laughed in awe, squeezing Breha's hand. But Breha gave a little cry—a sound she made, sometimes, when they were alone together, as though she could not withstand so much feeling at once. As though too much beauty pained her. This sound so familiar and dear and secret to Ben that he'd felt blood heat his neck as he turned to Breha. Her lovely face was luminous with Technicolor, refracted through what Ben realized were tears.

And Breha had broken down, then, crying silently, ceaselessly even as Ben and Padmé hurried her from the theater, wrapped in their arms. On the streetcar Padmé softly sang the film's big song, "Happy Days Are Here Again," stroking her sister's hair in a way that Ben understood, by now, was unconscious. Back in their hideaway, Breha had gripped Ben's hand so hard through her sleep that he'd left for New York with lurid red marks in his palm.

But Ben had left. Left her. Breha never asked him not to; even insisted he go, rearranging herself into glassy morning calm.

He'd known better. And he had still gone.

XXXXXXXXXX

"It was so cheap we kept up the rent, even with me in New York. A place for Breha to create, work—oh, her work—did you see it, Luke?" The intensity in Ben's voice touched Leia, and so did the conviction in Luke's simple, "Yes." The exchange spoke of how shaken both artists were by the magnitude of Breha's talent. How had her mother repressed a power, a sensibility like that? That drive to create was irrepressible, Leia knew herself. Yet neither she nor Luke had ever guessed that Breha Organa felt, or suppressed, any impulse of the sort.

Ben and Breha wrote one another every day. And then Breha wrote that she and Padmé had passed their secretarial course and they would visit New York over the winter break, just after Christmas. Ben's father had died, leaving him his land, but other than Breha Ben had no other reason to go back for the holidays. He was overjoyed that they would come to him instead. The girls had told their delighted parents they were going to New York to investigate elite finishing schools.

Meanwhile Padmé was dangerously bored in New Hope, bored with Mantell, with lack of outlet for her ravenous intellect. And Breha, seized by growing sense of her talent and missing Ben, thought of the trip as a taste of the romantic artist's life she yearned for. Padmé would stay in their uptown hotel, and Breha would, she wrote with uncharacteristic boldness, lodge with Ben in his attic flat in Greenwich Village.

After that, Breha planned to go home and break the news to her parents that she was going to become an artist, marry Ben. They would be angry at first, Breha wrote—they'd been amassing suitable bachelors for the girls, planning debutante events—but they'd come around, surely. And in the meantime she'd been saving her small allowance for years; Ben had his scholarship stipend. They could have a life—bare-bones, to be sure, but together, and making art. What did Ben think?

Ben carefully lettered back page after page of one repeated word in beautiful, exuberant, ridiculously elaborate fonts and colored inks: yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

Pain and tenderness moved across Ben's face. Leia had the absurd but mounting hope—and saw it reflected in Luke—that Ben would stop speaking, here, somehow fixing the young lovers in a happy ending. But Ben moved on, as Leia knew, by fact of her own existence, that he must.

"In the end," Ben said hoarsely, "Breha and I had two perfect weeks in New York City. Love, work. Freedom. Youth. And it was then, it must have been—"

Ben stopped again—this time for a long while, eyes closed, his breathing shallow. Was Ben losing strength, or mustering it for a last, terrible trial? Or choosing to look just a bit longer into the castoff light of some lost life?

"We were young, reckless. Now I think...we believed our talent protected us."

Leia could feel new heat rising from Ben's skin, enough to burn away the last of Leia's lie to herself. Ben was not getting better. Luke pressed the back of his paint-webbed hand to Ben's forehead, and looked at Leia with mute helplessness. We both love Ben too much, Leia thought, bleakly. We need Han. Han who had no patience for sentiment, or what he called speechifyin'—Han who'd once snorted at Luke's notion of heaven as living forever in your happiest memory. Sorry, kid. Dead is dead. Yes, that was in the first week she'd known Han, when he was busily promoting himself as the embodiment of callousness—he was softer now. Still, Leia knew Han would wrangle Ben to the hospital without any concerns of respect for the older man's essential self.

But Han didn't know Ben as she and Luke did. Didn't know his dignity, integrity, his quiet, resolute pursuit of visible truths. Ben's eyes on hers, on Luke's, were so knowing, pained, and trusting at once. Please. Don't further wound a dying man.

XXXXXXXXXX

Together the young lovers had explored New York, joined by Padmé. Both girls were free, gleeful, Padmé's impatience diluted in the city that ran fast as her mind. At night the trio would meet with Ben's art school friends for drinks, for the kind of talk that seemed important. Love, art. Politics. How to set the world to rights. Ben squinted into shadowed iron rafters, as though seeking some other answer. "This is how Padmé met Anakin Skywalker."

Luke froze. "You were." He gulped. "Friends? With my father?"

"Yes." Ben cancelled this statement with a flick of his eyelids. "No. I was the closest to him, but Anakin did not allow anyone to be his friend. He pushed away. Burned up. Everything, too much. We all drank; he drank like he wanted to die. We all worked hard; Anakin painted until he collapsed at his easel."

Luke sat suddenly forward, eyes almost turquoise in the candlelight. "Father—? Father was an—"

"The most talented natural artist I ever knew." Ben held Luke's eyes. "Until you."

And there it was, the slightest flicker of disquiet, of mistrust, in Luke's open face. Maybe the first ever. Leia saw it, could almost hear Luke's stalling thoughts—how could, you never, how could—and tightened her hand on his.

The prodigy, Anakin Skywalker. He was Californian, tall and blond, tanned; skinny, then. Very young he'd won awards, even sold work in a gallery, and none of it seemed to make him happy. None of it seemed to nourish him. He never slept. His work raged with energy. Anakin didn't speak of his past but the rumor was he'd won a scholarship for severely disadvantaged boys. Ben felt the award made Anakin defensive. He liked Anakin; he was charismatic, clever, competitive. Extraordinarily wilful. Darkly witty, a tremendous mimic.

He was also aggressive. Endlessly provoked by a world that denied him what he would not admit he needed. Anakin Skywalker never even seemed to want anything, until the night he met Padmé Naberrie. New Year's Eve. The two had clasped hands in meeting at Ben's attic, and shocked the party with literal sparks, eerie blue static at their touch. The pair laughed. And then they'd stared at one another, stricken, not sure who'd first had the lightning in their fingers.

Breha hated Anakin on sight.

It was unlike gentle Breha to muster such vehement dislike, but she said she didn't trust Anakin, that when he looked at her sister, his eyes got strange. Possessed, was the word Breha used. But Padmé hotly returned the young artist's desire. He was handsome, magnetic, wildly talented, but mostly it was as if Anakin's contentiousness felt to Padmé like autonomy. Loving him felt like the freedom and action she'd have enacted her own life, had she shared his gender. They began spending every day together, every night in Anakin's shabby Bowery flat. Padmé became inaccessible—Ben was happy for his friends, but Breha believed Anakin was deliberately isolating her.

In Ben's apartment, the night before the girls were due to return to New Hope, Padmé and Anakin announced that they had married and she was staying in New York. Married? Ben was shocked, though he rallied, shaking Anakin's hand, hugging Padmé. But Breha got sick, literally sick, barely making it to the porcelain sink where they washed their paintbrushes. Anakin's face flared with outraged pride, calling Breha a snob even before she'd straightened up. It's not that, man, was all Ben could say, rubbing Breha's back—he, more that anyone else, knew that Breha was no snob.

The twins threw themselves into their first and only fight. Breha was maddened by premonition of harm befalling her sister at her new bridegroom's hands—she cried this right in front of Anakin, he'll hurt you, P, he'll hurt you. And Padmé sobbed, stunned, betrayed; she had thought Breha of all people would understand, after she had so supported Breha's own clandestine love affair. She accused Breha of disloyalty, hypocrisy, before Anakin dragged her out.

It was almost worse that the girls had never clashed before, Ben thought, because their unique organism hadn't been inoculated against conflict. Breha was so distraught that Ben tried to convince her to stay in New York, too—whether they married or not was up to her, but it upset him to imagine sensitive Breha, who had never truly been alone, travelling home on the train in such a state. But their parents couldn't be abandoned by both daughters at once, Breha said, and steeled her nerves for the solitary trip.

The Naberries cut Padmé's allowance off, thinking this would bring their wayward daughter to heel; with her new certification, Padmé marched out and got a job at a Midtown law firm called Organa Hill Myerson.

From New Hope, Breha and Ben wrote each other for three months. Breha said she was committed to their marriage plans, but was shaken by her parents' punitive rage at her sister, which she hadn't anticipated. What would it do to her mother and father if Breha also disappointed them?

You can't live for anyone else, Ben wrote back. An artist chooses an artist's life. The older Ben spat out these lofty young words as though they were corrosive, now, in his mouth.

She was terrifically lonely, Breha wrote, without him, without Padmé. Her conciliatory letters to her twin were returned unopened, marked not at this address, drawing ink letters carved into the envelope so hard they were visible in the stationery beneath. And Breha couldn't get to their makeshift Yavin nest to work. Her parents kept a close eye on her now, after Padmé's defection, and Breha didn't drive: her twin had been the one spirited enough to earn her license. Ben missed Breha too, and often told her, but she didn't seem to believe him, and in retrospect, why would she? He had perfect freedom, he was sure of her love; he had inspiring work; he even saw his friends, though Anakin and Padmé avoided him.

In her dutiful isolation, Breha began spending time with her next-door neighbor, her childhood classmate. When they were girls, Erin Palpatine used to steal: mostly trinkets from Breha's vanity table. Kindly Breha claimed poor Erin craved the notice of her father, the ruthless corporate raider Sheev Palpatine; Padmé countered, Don't be a sucker, B. Padmé said Erin just loved the power. The power to take, have, conquer.

When Erin saw Ben talking to Breha at school, she began stealing from him—the richest girl in town stealing from the poorest boy. Quietly Ben laughed, something ugly crackling in his chest. He'd thought he had nothing to to steal, but leave it to Erin; she'd tear the buttons from Ben's jacket. Take the mittens his mother knitted and soak them in the bathroom sink. Break his best pencil and put it in his coat pocket, where he'd be sure to find it. Despite her aggression toward him, Ben didn't consider Erin Palpatine much at all, and this had seemed to spur her further—she damaged his homework, took his textbooks. In eighth grade, Ben's mother died of cancer, and where Breha earnestly entreated Erin to be kinder to him, Padmé told Erin if she ever touched anything of Kenny's again, she'd slap her down Main Street. Ben allowed himself a fond smile at this, letting his eyes linger on first Luke's face, then Leia's.

But Erin had changed as an adult, Breha wrote to Ben. Her declarations that Erin was a supportive friend had a frantic edge. Ben wrote back he'd come home for a bit, that he missed her, that he'd take time off school. Too quickly, Breha refused, and Ben accepted her refusal. Then, in the last letters, Breha wasn't herself. Anxiety and despair had completely overwhelmed her rich creative force. The final letter was cryptic, frantic. Ben choked, now, to repeat Breha's self-abuse. Said she'd ruined everything. Called herself a bad daughter, bad lover, bad artist, a failure. Said he'd probably hate her, one day. Useless. Stupid, weak. Cowardly. Unable to cope.

Horror-stricken, Ben telephoned the Naberrie house at once, which she'd made him promise never to do; the maid said she was out with her neighbor, Erin Palpatine—Erin Isolder by then, married off to one of her father's business partners, 25 years her senior. The letters stopped. Ben called every day. The maid said Miss Naberrie had gone on a trip, then began to hang up when she heard his voice. Ben met with Padmé in a Greenwich coffee shop; Padmé brought Anakin, who was edgy, snappish, wouldn't look Ben in the eye. Anakin brought up Breha's condemnation of their relationship when Padmé immediately said she'd go home to find her twin. Ben was shocked when headstrong, loyal Padmé changed her mind.

He began to see Anakin through Breha's eyes.

Ben left for New Hope in a panic. Missed a final project; his advisor, Professor Jinn, covered for him. He turned up on the Naberries' doorstep. Mr. Naberrie, whom Ben had always known as courtly if staid, threatened to break your damned nose, Ken if he ever came back. Strangely, Ben was happy at the threat—it must mean Breha's father had found out about the affair and was enraged, which was a hell of a lot better than grieving. It relieved the pressure of the word that Ben hadn't allowed himself to think about Breha, which was suicide. Ben did go back, and back, and back, but now the gates to the big house were locked, and no one ever answered the intercom. It was the same next door, at the Palpatine place—but then, their gates had always been closed to the likes of him.

He tried their Yavin studio, of course. It was dusty; hadn't been used for months, and he couldn't stay for long. It hurt too much.

Padmé called home, but her parents refused to speak to her, she told Ben when he reached her at work in New York. She and Anakin did not have a phone in their artist's flat. Ben suspected she didn't want Anakin to know she was trying to find her twin. Tell me what to do, I'll do it, Ben begged Padmé. I'll do anything, anything for her. But neither of them knew where to look. Ben began to believe Breha—yes, meek Breha—had gone after that artist's life on her own. He went back to New York, but neglected his studies, spending all his change at the payphone, calling art schools across the United States. Padmé telephoned all the major schools in Europe from her office; she said Bail Organa, the kind young lawyer she worked for, footed the long-distance charges. Nothing.

For months this went on, desperate searching. Anakin did not help, glowering when Ben came by his flat, though he didn't confront him in front of Padmé. No, Anakin cornered Ben at school, where Ben was trying to make up the minimum of work to keep his scholarship, and told him to stay away from his wife. Ben was a patient man, but he was exhausted. As though the twins were interchangeable? Ben spat. If Ben lost one, he'd simply take up with the other? Ben and Padmé were childhood friends. Friends, Anakin.

Friends? Childhood? None of this registered with Anakin.

Ben dragged a hand through his hair, indicated a thinned arm. "Christ, man, look at me, do I look like—I've lost ten pounds, worrying ov—I'm about to flunk ou—" Ben tried again. "I love Padmé, of course, of course, but. As a sister."

"She's mine," Anakin snarled.

His eyes were hot, volatile, and empty, the way they sometimes got when another artist received attention or prizes Anakin felt entitled to. Ben had never taken his selfishness personally, especially after Padmé let slip that Anakin had grown up in some hellish institution. But Anakin's greed alienated their friends. Anakin didn't mean it, Ben protested at the pub, he was a nice guy when you got to know him. Oh, Anakin means it all right, Professor Jinn finally roared at them: Skywalker would rip out their throats if it meant a crumb for himself. He isn't a nice guy, Kenobi: you're a nice guy. Skywalker is a ruthless prick, and brilliant! So what if Anakin saw others' good fortune as theft from him. So what if he pissed like some beast around every prize. They could all shut their gobs if they didn't like it. Or get busy sculpting weapons of their own genius.

Well, that was Jinn. He had interesting methods of motivation.

"I love her. She's mine." Anakin repeated this with biting emphasis, his voice grinding and deep, setting Ben's teeth on edge. Ben stepped forward into the taller man. "If you believe I would do...that," Ben said, his voice trembling with restraint, "then you don't know enough to love anyone."