I'm back!
Thank you to everyone for being patient! I hope to continue the previous updating schedule of one chapter every Sunday, real life permitting.
And for the warnings from now on: from here on out, this fic will contain torture and its effects, manipulation, gaslighting, abuse... If any of these pose a problem, I ask you to look after yourself and not read it; likewise, I'm trying to depict them all as accurately and sensitively as I can, so if you have any ideas on how to improve it then please let me know. The same with if you think any other warnings need to be included that I've missed out; I'll be happy to add them.
Thank you all for reading so far, and I hope you continue to enjoy it!
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Part II: Justice
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The stump of his hand was a bright spark of pain. It dragged him out of the blissful peace of unconsciousness into the fraught horror that was his reality, and he groaned the moment it felt like his vocal cords wouldn't shred themselves to pieces if they so much as trembled.
He felt like shavit.
There was a sharp clip on the back of his head. Agony both pounded in his skull and lanced down his spine. "Quiet!"
Despite the trooper's order, the man's actions. . . were not conducive to his aim. The pain of it all just made Luke groan again.
That time he got a fist to the face and he reared back, what little white vision he'd had flushing to red. Once he'd finally blinked all the blood out of his eyes and squinted against the artificial lights of the city-planet, the Imperial Palace loomed on the horizon and the first hints of dawn were just starting to touch the sky.
That wasn't what held his gaze, though.
His father stood at the front of the speeder, not quite in the pilot's seat but towering over the trooper who was. Luke idly wondered why he hadn't deigned to fly himself, as he always loved to do, then he flicked his gaze up to meet his. Even with the red eye plates in the way, he could tell his father was glaring.
He felt colder than the depths of hyperspace.
"F—" He opened his mouth to say, and got a blaster butt to the gut for his troubles. He doubled over, wheezing past an already-ruined throat, and saw stars for a good few minutes.
The Force lurked at the back of his head, but he couldn't touch it through the daze. It could only touch him, and the metaphysical shackles his father cinched around him lay heavier than the binders at his wrists. At least he could undo those.
They were nearing the palace now. Setting down on one of the royal landing pads. Luke knew it intrinsically.
And, he had to admit, he was afraid.
Father? he probed, though he couldn't tell if Vader was ignoring him or if it had even gone through, the Force being as unresponsive as it was. Father, you have to let me explain—
I will accept no explanations.
The words thundered. They bulldozed his fragile calm and stampeded like a herd of banthas. He had to wince.
Father—
If you are so desperate to explain yourself, I am sure the Emperor will listen to your mewling.
Luke scoffed. Mewling?
He knew it was a bad idea the moment it came to mind, but he had to jab back— So you're deferring back to your slaver, now?
SILENCE!
Yep. It was a bad idea.
His vision actually whited out from the mental assault; tears instinctively spilled from his eyes to track through the grime and blood on his face. He sensed no flicker of regret or sympathy from him.
Luke tried to think of one last parting shot, but they'd set down now and suddenly there were hands behind him, twisting his arms uncomfortably. He staggered out of the speeder under the force of them.
His legs were trembling. He would've fallen over were it not for the troopers gripping him tightly.
He did when his father executed them all with a wave of his hand.
He hit the duracrete hard and grimaced when he tasted blood, but the most distasteful of all was the sound of the snapping necks—and the sound of bodies hitting the duracrete around them.
He spat blood. "Was that necessary?"
"I am not required to explain myself to traitors and Rebel scum."
Luke swallowed and scoffed. "Uh huh. So what, are you trying to keep this a secret or something?" he asked. He hoped it wasn't because they—despite his new Rebel scum status—had abused him. He had enough blood on his conscience.
The subtle twitch in his father's shoulders betrayed him and Luke scoffed again. "Hundreds of troopers went searching for me and Leia, you can't just—"
A metaphysical grip around his throat and suddenly his legs were kicking in the air—only a few metres above the ground, not thousands of levels, a few metres, not thousands of levels—
Then there was duracrete underfoot again and he staggered, coughing.
A steel hand clamped onto his shoulder. "Get up and move," his father growled.
Luke scowled at him.
Then his gaze flicked down, and he realised—his lightsaber was on his father's belt.
His gaze flicked back up and he lunged.
Vader took a split-second to act, and that split-second would've been all he needed to rearm himself, to fight back, to flee and get away and rejoin Leia—
But he lunged for it with his sword arm.
And he had no hand to grab it with.
A leather grip around his neck then thrown back—Luke staggered, staring at the stump of his own wrist. It was numb in that it was so painful his brain had chosen to stop feeling it. It was so detached from any of his reality that it just. . . wouldn't compute.
He'd. . . almost forgotten about that. How had he—
"Don't test me, boy," Vader snarled.
Luke snapped his eyes up and glared. "You cut off my hand."
"I told you," his father growled back, "that I will not have a Rebel son."
He gripped the collar of Luke's shirt and dragged him into the turbolift on the edge of the landing pad. Luke didn't bother resisting.
He just said, quietly, "Then you will have a dead one."
The turbolift doors hissed shut.
Luke had been in the throne room a mere few hours before. It was largely unchanged: shadows still hung on the air like drapes; Palpatine still sat in his throne like a pale, wrinkled pile of rags; even Mara Jade still knelt at the foot of the throne, her visor open and yellowish eyes fixed on Luke with the fury of an injured nexu.
She was favouring her right leg to stand on, he noted.
Force lightning was not exactly gentle, even when not intended to kill.
Vader dragged him right forward, to just below the shallow steps up to the dais, and chucked him to the ground. He himself knelt stately, off to the side, the stiffness to the motion as much a product of his mechanical limbs as reluctance or loathing, but Luke was left sprawling, knees to the cold, hard floor, head bowed and shuddering.
The moment it stopped ringing, he made to lift it, to snarl some defiant words before Palpatine voiced whatever chilling monologue he was concocting. . . but there was the freezing touch of the Force against his crown, forcing him to stay down.
Most galling of all, he couldn't tell if it was Palpatine, his father, or even Mara.
It wasn't like he was among friends, here.
He heard the rustle of cloth and the rhythmic tap-tap-tap of the cane that meant Palpatine had risen, was approaching him. He heard Mara shuffle back, but Luke just focused on his breathing as the temperature plummeted further, ice crystals forming on the air—soothing and scorching his throat simultaneously.
The footsteps stopped at the top of the steps, the crack of the cane against the floor intentionally loud; he flinched unwittingly. He sensed no glee through the Force, but knew that Palpatine was feeling it nonetheless.
Palpatine sighed, long, loud and gentle.
"Child," he said, almost reverently, "you and your sister ran before we could discuss this like civilised people, so I shall ask you now: why did you decide to betray everything you swore your life to?"
Luke gritted his head and tried to raise his head, to look him in the eye, to do anything that wasn't kneel here trembling and broken. The force on his neck vanished suddenly and his head snapped back painfully; he gasped out a whimper before he managed to bite his tongue.
Palpatine laughed.
Hatred kindled in the pit of his stomach. Luke glared up into those sickly yellow eyes and snapped, "Because you are evil."
Palpatine laughed again, the sound uglier and uglier with every passing moment. "My dear boy," he said, "haven't you learnt this lesson already? Evil is a point of view."
"It is." He lifted his chin. "And my point of view changed— agh!"
Quick as a whip, lightning blasted him back and Luke stared at the stars in his visions. They faded, only to be replaced by the diamonds in the ceiling—the stars of all the galaxy.
The galaxy he'd sworn to protect, and help, and cherish.
He'd only changed his mind about how.
The crack of cane against the floor was an explicit threat, this time.
"You grew a spine, boy. It inconveniences me."
He didn't flicker his gaze—not from the stars in his sky. He wondered which one Leia was flying towards now.
"But I'm sure the situation can still be salvaged," Palpatine continued smoothly. "You are young, and foolish. I am certain that this flight of fancy will pass—you'll return to sense and to us soon—but you do understand that until then you have to face the consequences of your actions, yes?"
Luke didn't bother responding to the first part—he couldn't think of something to say that would get him taken seriously. So he just said, "Of course, Palpatine."
His lack of respect earned him another brief electrocution. The stump of his wrist banged against the floor this time; he screamed until his vocal cords were raw.
His father stood there and did nothing.
"Good," Palpatine said pleasantly. "Take him to a cell. Treat his wrist, but don't replace his hand yet. I will set to work on him in the morning."
A red guard approached. Luke glared up at them, limbs still twitching and trembling and too weak to stand on, and didn't even resist when they drove the point of their Force pike into his back.
Agony eclipsed consciousness.
The hyperspace journey they'd plotted took eight days. Leia didn't emerge from the cabin for three of them.
On the fourth day, she waited until Biggs was asleep and Ahsoka was on the watch, then slipped into the cockpit. She didn't say anything; just sat there and watched the stars wheel by in a silence as dead and hollow as the hole in her chest.
Tears leaked from her eyes intermittently. She didn't move to wipe them away.
Ahsoka said nothing to her, either—the bleakness in the Force was enough to warn her away—but when the watch changed and Biggs came to sit in her seat, he couldn't weather the atmosphere for more than fifteen minutes.
"You're really Leia Skywalker?" he asked. It seemed like a bit of an inane question. She just glowered and nodded in response. "Do— do you remember me?"
She tucked her hands in her lap. "As of recently."
"What does that mean?"
No reply.
He sighed. Ran a hand through his black hair—shaggier now, she noted, than when she'd seen him on Tatooine. Than when he'd been attending Skystrike.
"Did you remember me on Tatooine?" he asked quietly.
She shook her head.
"Why—"
"It's a long story," she said, and her throat seized up. "I don't know the whole of it. I'd need— my brother would tell—"
She swallowed.
Looked away.
She did not say anything more to anyone until they landed.
The base was on Dantooine. Huh.
Leia didn't have the energy within her to be surprised, or to fake surprise, or. . . do anything with that knowledge, really.
She left the cockpit as they landed, though she knew that nobody would have minded her presence; if Biggs could fly well enough to get into Skystrike, he could fly well enough to deal with a morose passenger. But. . .
She didn't want to look out the viewport as they descended. Didn't want to risk someone looking in, spotting her, taking note.
Her face had not been advertised in the Empire. It wasn't anywhere near as notorious as her father's or the Emperor's visage. Only people in the upper echelons of the Imperial Court, or people she and Luke had dealt with on missions, would recognise her.
She. . . wanted to hang onto that anonymity a little longer. She got the feeling that if she vanished off the face of the galaxy, she wouldn't particular mind that either.
She already felt like she'd left half her soul behind—
—because she had—
—so what was the other half worth to her now?
Ahsoka emerged from the cockpit to clap her on the shoulder—gently, in a reassuring way. Leia didn't shrug it off; she didn't have the energy for that, either.
"Come on," she said, then paused.
"Padmé is waiting for us."
Leia wordlessly let her lead her down the ramp.
The hangar was deserted, save for a few droids trundling about, and she was glad of it. It was a small hangar, after all, clearly intended for personal use by some of the Rebellion's leaders. But when they ducked out of it, into the corridors of a building that. . . struck her as nothing more than an abandoned hospital, to be quite honest, people started to mill about. Rush past.
A few paused to greet Ahsoka in very respectful tones, not casting Leia or Biggs a second glance. They were the pilots, or the spies, or the other invisible workers; they were not worth a glance the way the coordinator for all Rebel intelligence was.
Luke would have bristled. Leia would have smiled, if not for his absence.
It was the third person to greet Ahsoka that made her heart start to pound.
The woman's hair was dyed blonde for the moment, her smile broad and genuine when she looked at Ahsoka—a far cry from the guarded brunette Leia had met on Naboo—but she recognised her anyway.
Her presence was too familiar by now, shields or no shields.
Sabé's gaze slid past Ahsoka to rest on Leia. Her wide, genuine smile didn't fade in the slightest, though there was a touch of melancholy to it as well.
"Hello, Leia," she said. "She's waiting for you."
Leia, who did not need to guess who she was, swallowed.
The rest of the walk was made in tense silence. Leia bit her lip as they went but didn't dare break it.
It was a short walk. They soon arrived at a door—almost identical to all the others they'd passed—which even Ahsoka paused at. She stepped forward and rapped six times. Rattatat. Rattatat.
Leia wondered what that was code for. She decided she didn't care.
"Come in," said a voice. A woman's voice, light and smooth but taut with tension. It was a familiar voice—not just from the hundreds of recordings Leia had watched, but from something deeper, earlier, a memory she couldn't access even without the mind block—and Leia imagined a familiar gesture in the clenching of her hands around her datapad, the tightening of her lips, the way her eyelids fluttered when she took a deep breath.
She was projecting, of course. She didn't know nearly enough about her mother to think she could guess her mannerisms, but Luke clenched his hands like that; Leia pinched her lips like that; they both sighed like that. She wanted at least some part of them to have come from the greatest champion of democracy in modern galactic history—not just from the father who was the monster under everyone's beds.
A shadow in the night, wind catching at the cloak so it flickered like a hologram, Luke jerked upright like a puppet—
Her thoughts whirled a parsec a minute.
But eventually she straightened up, reached to press the button to open the door, then stepped through.
And froze.
The office didn't seem relatively large, but from what Leia had seen of the cramped base it probably was. It was. . . littered with datapads, supplies, cabinets, maps and charts, but they were orderly. Each put in the right place on a desk or chair or file, they were just. . . everywhere.
The logistics of even running this base made Leia's head hurt to think about. She didn't want to consider what her— what Amidala was dealing with in order to run the entire Rebellion.
Her gaze was riveted to one map in particular. It looked vaguely familiar, a little like the famous swirl their galaxy formed, but it was clearly. . . different. Massive chunks were missing, or shaded out, with one strange, winding route looping around some of the planets like a ball of string a tooka had been playing with. She narrowed her eyes—
"Leia?"
Right.
She. . . was doing something.
She looked to the woman seated in the centre of the office. No—not seated anymore; she'd risen to her feet while Leia avoided taking her in, and was now hovering uncertainly, ready to approach but unwilling to overstep any boundaries. . .
Leia looked her in the eye.
She was short.
Leia shook herself mentally. She'd known that. She'd known that Padmé Amidala Naberrie was only slightly taller than Leia herself, that Vader was a behemoth and that she and Luke had to have received their short stature from someone. But. . .
Padmé was short, for such a powerful, charismatic leader of the Rebellion.
She didn't know why she was so hung up on this.
But she looked longer, and harder, and saw all the same superficial similarities Luke had pointed out to her so many months ago. Leia's hair; Luke's nose; their height. . . It went on and on and Leia found it unnerving that a woman she'd never met—well, not that she remembered—could be so, so similar to her.
You two look more alike than we do, Luke had said.
She added to it in her mind, words she'd heard him say a hundred times but never heard him say to this, when she needed it the most: I told you so.
She wished she didn't have to imagine it, but her brother wasn't there. And. . . she was.
She hadn't been there before.
She'd chosen not to be there.
How dare she be there now?
Padmé's eyes were full of tears when she stopped, about a step away from Leia, and held out her hand.
No hugs. Either she didn't want to frighten Leia, like a skittish animal who'd bolt at the first sign of the unknown, or she didn't think she deserved it.
It was exactly what Luke or Leia would have done.
And Leia didn't know how true that last part was—didn't know whether she was more angry or relieved or betrayed at seeing her lost mother again—but she did know one thing: she was not a skittish animal.
She would not be treated as one.
So she threw herself the last step and wrapped her arms around her mother's torso.
Everyone had tensed, but she just buried her face in her shoulder and—
And sobbed.
She. . . couldn't remember the last time an adult—a parental figure, one of warm, gentle flesh and bone rather than a man of unyielding durasteel who she'd loved, but who wasn't big on affection—had hugged her. Aunt Beru? Uncle Owen?
Padmé's arms were solid and tight and real around her and didn't expect Leia to be strong, for once.
She cried.
"Luke," she whispered through a suddenly clogged throat, because the trip through hyperspace had not left her dry and she still had infinite grief to be shared if there was only someone willing to share it.
The arms tightened around her; the hands started rubbing circles on her back. Leia realised that Ahsoka, Sabé and Biggs weren't at the door anymore—they were gone, off to witness something that wasn't as damningly private as this.
"I know," Padmé whispered back. Her voice cracked. "We'll get him back, Leia, I promise."
"Where were you?"
The question tumbled out before Leia could stop herself. Padmé tensed, but Leia didn't wait for an answer as another wail tore from her throat and she just buried her face further into her shoulder.
Padmé's motions turned rocking—cradling. "We'll get him back," she repeated. "Put together a team—"
"I want to be on it."
"And I suspect you'll have to be; we need your inside knowledge. But tomorrow." Padmé drew back slightly, holding Leia just inside arm's length so their eyes—identical shades of brown—could meet. She kept rubbing soothing circles on her arm. "You need to go to a room and rest. You're exhausted."
Leia shook her head. "Luke's in danger—"
"And you will be too if you go haring off after him without pause for planning and recuperation. Go and sleep, Leia. I will start organising it while you do." A gentle hand—once soft, now callused from two decades of rebellion—brushed her cheek. "Leia. . . you're not responsible for every problem in the galaxy, and you're not alone. We can cover for you when you can't do it yourself."
Leia whispered, in a defeated sort of way, "That was what Luke used to do."
His anger hadn't abated.
His anger never abated. That was the point. He was Sith, and he was good at it; anger was his closest companion, the only thing he could rely on to always serve him, always be on his side, even when every person he knew of betrayed him.
Including his children.
Vader stood at the viewport to the Executor, peering down at the jewel-like city-planet below him. Luke was someone down there, no doubt getting. . . his just desserts for his treason, while Leia was somewhere in the stars he saw beyond the planet, dimmer and dimmer with every parsec.
His anger had cooled towards them enough that he could think more clearly—enough to wonder why they'd betrayed him, what they'd seen in a band of terrorists that Leia could not bring to an empire she would head, what it was that Luke had been so desperate to explain to him, before he'd shut him out and their time was up. . .
But Vader had also spent eighteen years wondering why Padmé had truly been on Mustafar—to save or to slaughter him?—and he knew all too well the perils of pointless thought.
Palpatine would get through to Luke. He— he wouldn't hurt him too badly, not unless necessary; he didn't want to risk driving him further away, surely?
Surely?
So. . .
Vader glanced down at the datapad in his hand. His orders were stark and clear across the screen: retrace the twins' recent steps across the galaxy, and inspect any of the Imperial facilities they'd visited in the last year. They had no idea how new their treason was, but they were fairly sure it hadn't existed upon the unfortunate incident with the Velts.
It was a standard thing to do; Luke and Leia had done much the same thing themselves, multiple times. But Vader balked at having to do it now.
Palpatine was sending him away.
Good.
Good that he would be sent away, that he would not have to deal with Luke's petty pleas and resistance before his stubbornness gave way to sense and he rejoined them. Good that he would be able to return to a loyal son again, who would help him find his daughter and restore order to their family.
So Vader gave the order to jump to Kuat, and only felt the slightest tinge of regret when Luke's Force presence vanished behind them.