A/N: I just had to post this on May 4th in some time zone of the Earth. That is all.

Oh, no, that is not all — Disney should have premiered the Obi-Wan Kenobi show today, not the trailer. What's one month?

"You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else. We're all part of the same compost heap. We're all singing, all dancing crap of the world." — Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk

Chapter III

Pillagers and Plunderers

Leia frowns at the blunt edge of the scythe with its handle in her grip as sweat beads on her forehead. She runs her finger over its curved blade, glancing at the agri-kit beside her as if it would grow a spare one or even some sharpeners. Then she eyes her harvesting basket — which is barely full — and stares up at the long rows of wheat basking in the midday heat. Groaning, Leia glares back down at the scythe in her hand. Sunlight glints off the dull blade.

It would be so easy to just use the Force to push the scythe across the rows of wheat and decapitate them from where they're rooted. She imagines the rhythmic thwock, thwock, thwock of cut wheat interrupting the hum of zicx bugs would sound incredibly satisfying. Sighing, Leia returns the blunt edge of the scythe to the group of wheat she'd started on and starts sawing away.

For the past few months, she has been resisting her urge to resort to the Force. She doesn't try to use it: to pluck hubba gourd from the crevices of rocks; to clean the banthas' pen; to detect desert plums in the miles of sand surrounding their property where hydrated sand can be collected; and, of course, to cut their rows and rows of wheat. Ever since her encounter with Vader, she has taken her training seriously. They've now been allocated to Primeday, Taungsday and Benduday nights, so she's more likely to know something's amiss if she gets hit with a familiar feeling on any other day.

Anakin has taught her a lot about the ways of the Sith. Unlike the Jedi, they took shortcuts and used their powerful emotions to unleash the Force. "The Force should be reigned," Anakin had said one training night, when she had gotten angry and caused the stick she was instructed to Force push at him to splinter. She realized he had been testing her temper by not allowing her stick to go farther than midway between them. "You should control it, not the other way around."

The wheat finally comes loose, and she marvels at the straight cut she'd done. After placing it in the basket, Leia turns to the next set of wheat with the scythe. Her eyelids droop a little. Her mind begins to wander.

Darth Vader is one of the remaining Sith since the Clone Wars, according to Anakin. He is the only Sith condoned to use the Force by the Emperor; however, Anakin warns her that he has an organization of agents known as Red Blades who will use the dark side of the Force to gain whatever they wish to achieve. There aren't very many members, but they are still a threat. One of the tasks of these agents is to hunt down Force-sensitive children.

Leia shivers under the scorching twin suns.

"Vader likes to recruit the more powerful children to become one of his Red Blade Inquisitors," Anakin's voice echoes in her mind, "which is why he hasn't sent any of them to kill you."

She'll never succumb to Vader again. It's a promise she makes to herself at the start of every training night. Like Anakin said, he's just a half-machine getting others to do his bidding while the Emperor puppeteers him. She's not afraid of him.

The rumble of a ship interrupts her laborious work and causes the rows of wheat to quiver. Something, clouds, maybe, block the twin suns; darkness drapes her farm as she looks up, dropping the scythe. It's a giant ship that's disturbing the sand around them, drowning the merry chirps of the zicx bugs, forcing the air to howl. Leia's heartbeat accelerates so fast that blood rushes in her ears as she watches it land.

When the ship's door gapes open with a puff of smoke, she already knows who is going to be standing there.

"Weak." His high voice carries over her silent, chilly farm. Her hands are clenching into fists even as fear crashes over her like a sandstorm. Leia glares as the smoke dissipates and reveals an old man leaning on his cane. He raises one hand to stroke his white beard as he regards her farm with a wrinkle of his nose. "Weak," repeats Obi-Wan Kenobi, "just like your father was."

It's not real. There is no Force in the air apart from hers. For weeks, she's been sleeping even less than usual to avoid her frequent nightmares. Now Obi-Wan has decided to find another way to invade her peace. She looks down, swipes the scythe from the sand she's crouched on and resumes her work on the stock-still wheat. Leia resists the urge to glance up, even as the twin suns reemerge and the zicx bugs awaken again.

/-|-\

\-|-/

That evening, Uncle Owen serves dinner just as Aunt Beru arrives from an end of week trade. Her presence always eases the tense silence between uncle and niece. Apart from during her lessons — and she's noticed that they've become considerably shorter — her uncle hardly says a word to her. Leia quietly stares down at her plate of ahrisa, the knot in her stomach loosening, while Aunt Beru grumbles and takes a seat beside her. "The Tuskens are growing impatient with us."

"Have you told them we have no water?" Uncle Owen replies, and Leia hears the hollow sloshing of their jug. When she glances up, her uncle is shaking it for obvious emphasis. Then his eyes find hers. Although his brows draw together, his expression remains stern. He beckons her to pass her cup.

"I'm not thirsty," Leia insists, for the third time this evening. She is extremely thirsty. But she's picked up from eavesdropping on their muffled arguments behind closed doors and Zir's increasing complaints that the price of water has risen with growing inflation; lately, her aunt and uncle sometimes go a day without a drink. Today is one of those days. She knows they prioritize their crops over everything else, but how will their crops survive if they don't?

Uncle Owen gives her a skeptical look. She expects him to say nothing like before, but she supposes the presence of her (frowning, as per usual) aunt has forced him to address her. "You've been harvesting all afternoon," he grunts, and without asking Aunt Beru pushes Leia's cup to him. He pours the water till it's dribbling in her half-full glass and her aunt passes it back to her.

Leia is both grateful and frustrated as she takes a long gulp of the lukewarm liquid. She can feel her uncle's eyes on her. Placing the nearly empty cup back down next to her untouched plate, she stares down again.

"They don't believe it," Aunt Beru continues, and judging by the violent snap that comes from next to Leia, she's jabbed into her ahrisa with the memory still fresh in mind. "The Jawas talk. Somehow it fell onto Tusken ears that we have an outstanding yield of crops."

"Do the Tuskens even have ears?" her uncle asks, eliciting a small and unexpected giggle from Leia.

She glances up and his beard twitches and for the first time in months, they are united in something. They share a knowing look. Sure enough, Aunt Beru snaps: "This isn't the time to joke, Owen."

"I know, dearest." He sighs. Leia's small smirk disappears. She can sense the unease in the air. She stares down at her food.

"Eat up, little one," Aunt Beru suddenly prompts. She does as she asks. They eat their meal in silence, and the unease coils around them like sandsnakes. The ahrisa feels like carpet in her mouth.

"I'd like to congratulate you on your work, Leia." Swallowing the food down heavily, she jerks her head up and turns to her aunt, eyes wide. Surely she misheard… "Your wheat cuttings are immaculate, but our quantity is also higher than normal. I haven't seen a missed detail on anything — not even a bit of fodder left over in the bantha pen. I've watched you tracking galoomps for where you can find desert plums." She nods to the direction of Leia's cup; she continues to stare at her aunt like she's morphed into a large and jiggly Hutt. Aunt Beru never congratulates anything. "So well done."

Leia can feel herself going red. Despite the unease in her mind and in the air around them, she's fighting to keep a smile off her lips. She looks down bashedly at her half-finished food and mumbles her thanks. Uncle Owen doesn't say a word.

But come nighttime the unease slithers around her in the dark of her bedroom, as she waits for her aunt's and uncle's muffled arguing from their own room to fade. Even when they do go quiet, she waits. She's glad she does: maybe ten minutes goes by when the heavy shuffling that she knows belongs to Uncle Owen approaches down the hallway. When he stops right outside her room, her heart hammers in her chest. She expects him to knock on her door, but after three clicks he's shuffling back towards the direction of his room. Her brows furrow in the dark.

It's only when the unease settles into a heavy slumber that she knows they're asleep. When she pads quietly out of her room, her bare foot lands on something sharply cold that makes her squeak — Leia claps her hands over her mouth, her head turning to her aunt and uncle's closed bedroom door at the end of the hall. When she's convinced they haven't woken up, she releases her bated breath.

Then she peers down.

Beneath the crevices of her toes, something is glittering in the dark. She bends down and shifts her foot away, revealing a silver chain. Her mouth is agape — she's only ever seen jewelry whenever she visits the market with her aunt or uncle, protected on their respective stalls by the unfriendly faces of the locals of the Jundland Wastes — but it's the paper beneath it that piques her curiosity. Leia gently picks it up and caresses it in her palms; the metal is soft, like water, weaving through her fingers. Then she lifts the paper with her other hand and unfolds it. But she can't make out the words in the gloom of the house; silently, Leia rushes over to the door, puts her robes and shoes on and steps out into the night where the stars shine bright.

Your grandmother passed down this necklace to me. She said it was a worthless piece of junk upon inspection. Old, and not even real silver. Tin, maybe. But to her it was priceless. Despite everything life took from her, it could never get its hands on this necklace. It was her secret resistance.

Leia, you are so much like her. Fierce, stubborn and strong. This necklace truly belongs to you.

Love,

Uncle Owen

Leia smiles down at the letter in her hands as the chain of the tin necklace interwoven between her fingers twinkles in the starlight.

/-|-\

\-|-/

The N1-Starfighter glows blue as Leia's sweat-soaked palms grip her weapon. She paces back and forth, while her opponent remains still. Patience ticks thinner within her as more clicks go by. Finally, she charges first, her shoes scuffing the debris of metal and sand beneath her as Anakin lowers his staff defensively.

Leia's staff clashes against his when he steps forward; Anakin pushes her back, taking a swing at her. Ducking, Leia swipes her weapon at his shins but Anakin jumps out of its way. She feels a whoosh and stumbles to the right just as his staff greets the ground where she'd been standing with a dull thwock.

Still crouched and bent down, Anakin whips his head towards her. His scar blazes over his eye. "Focus, Leia. I shouldn't have ever gotten the chance to try to strike you."

She puffs out a breath, wiping sweat from her brow with the back of her hand. Without warning she races straight to him — she swears she catches a glimpse of him smirking, but as she throws her staff down and it comes to a stop with a violent clatter against his, Anakin's face is focused and determined. Leia mimics him, narrowing her eyes.

She raises her staff abruptly, swirling out of the way before he can swing on her. As she orientates herself towards him she strikes towards his back. Anakin's staff stops hers, and, astonished, she raises her eyes to where his arms strain over his head, keeping his staff in its position.

"I'll teach you that trick later," he says, as if reading her mind. Leia grins, knocking his staff away with all the strength she can muster; Anakin spins around and parries her before she can deliver her blow.

As they continue to duel, her smiles gradually become shorter. It is always the same story: she thinks she's getting somewhere, then Anakin surprises her with another trick each time and then she eventually loses her weapon in some way. Sometimes Anakin uses the Force; sometimes he knocks her staff out of her hand; there was even this one very embarrassing instant when she'd gotten so sweaty trying to beat him, that her staff flew right out of her slippery grip when she'd attempted to strike upwards at him and missed.

Eventually Anakin manages to (of course) surprise her, swiping his staff at her legs and knocking her right off her feet. Leia falls on her back, the wind blowing out of her lungs and she drops her staff in the process. As she gasps for breath, she dejectedly watches it roll away from where she lays. Sweat drenches her forehead.

Thwock.

Leia's breathing pauses. Eyes wide, they zero in on the end of the staff that's punctured the sand an inch from her head. Incredulously, she turns her stare to Anakin: towering taller than ever above her, wearing his usual blank expression over his hard-edged face.

"Losing your weapon doesn't mean the fight is over. In fact your opponent now has the opportunity to get what they want — to steal from you, to take you prisoner, or to kill you. If you lose your weapon, Leia," and his voice has become much darker, "you have to do everything you can to get it back, or find another. Life is like droidwork; you are just a mechanism in one of the many cogs and circuits that make it up. Time will not revolve around you. You have to be quick, or you may lose something more vital than your weapon." He rips his right glove off; her eyes widen as large as saucers when they land on his blue-glowing mechanical hand glinting in the gloom. "Do you understand me?"

Leia glances up to meet his burning eyes. She nods.

"Another," he says firmly. Scrambling up as he steps back, she stumbles to grab her staff from the floor; as she turns around Anakin is already striking at her. Her muscles ache from hours of harvesting wheat and hours more of training, but Leia doesn't let up as she dodges, parries, strikes, and even once manages to land a blow on Anakin's ankle while spinning out of the way of his impending staff. She keeps it a secret that it was an accidental strike, but as Anakin rolls his ankle and readies his weapon again she gets the feeling he already knows that.

By the time the stars begin to fade and the skies bleed purple, her exhaustion becomes apparent with her half-hearted strikes and clumsy defenses. Anakin takes pity on her and ends the duel without disarming her. But he doesn't look disappointed; in fact, he's grinning in a way that makes his blue-glowing eyes twinkle.

"That was better. Much better," he praises. Leia's aching arms and multiple bruises doesn't make it feel that way.

His eyes fall onto her throat. For a moment, there is a startling spike in the Force that makes her chest pang, but then it disappears as his stiff smile grows soft. "Nice necklace." Brows drawing together, Leia looks down her nose and realizes she had been fiddling with the tin necklace. She thinks of Aunt Beru, and of Uncle Owen, and she too smiles.

/-|-\

\-|-/

About three-quarters of the journey home, Anakin stops sprinting as abruptly as he does speaking. Leia finds herself rather disappointed because he had just described a part of his story where a Padawan nearly crushed him with a wall while eliminating the surrounding battle droids — she has about a galaxy of stars' worth of questions already — but then she senses something unsettled in the Force.

"What's happening?" she asks, lifting her chin from his shoulder. Anakin's thumbs draw faint circles on her knees. His shoulders are tense beneath her arms.

"Will you be fine making the rest of the way back home?" he abruptly questions.

Leia frowns, tilting her head. She can't see his face but she can tell he's clenching his jaw. "Sure."

Anakin bends down. Leia climbs off his back, still frowning. He shuffles around to face her. For a moment, he looks as if he's going to say something important — there's a resolve in his eyes and a furrow in his brows, his mouth opening with an intake of breath. But then, his lips seal and he sighs through his nose. Anakin extends his hand (the one she knows isn't metallic under his glove) and tenderly brushes a strand of her stray hair out of her face. She abruptly forgets his odd demeanor and giggles when he places it behind her ear. As his fingers pause, he looks fascinated.

"I'm ticklish there, too."

Leia's lips tremble as his fingers hover behind her ear. "Don't you dare!" she squeaks. With a flash of a grin, Anakin mercilessly tickles her behind her ear. Uncontrollably, Leia giggles; she dodges his other hand trying to keep her in place, jumping onto his knee, grabbing his shoulder with one hand and reaching behind his ear with the other. When Leia's fingers flutter behind his ear Anakin throws his head back and a laugh rumbles deep from his chest.

When she's grown breathless with laughter and he's holding her on his lap, she asks if the Jedi have ever used tickling as a distraction. Anakin looks amused by the question, telling her that she can be the first one to do it. Leia departs with the image of her wielding a lightsaber and donning Jedi robes in her mind's eyes.

As she approaches closer to her home, however, her stomach twists more and more as she wonders what had unsettled Anakin. Her heart bangs against her ribcage as she stares down at her boots scuffling the sand more hesitantly with each step. When she reaches out to sense the Force she's advancing to, dread turns her blood to ice. This is no nightmare. Obi-Wan is visiting.

Maybe he wants to take her away for good this time… In fact, he might even be working for Vader. Whisking her away from Aunt Beru and Uncle Owen to be trained as an Inquisitor. That's what he mentioned the last time he came to visit, wasn't it? 'The sooner that she's trained…' Anakin says he doubts there's a connection between the traveler and the Empire's tyrant whenever she asks, but she's learned that he has a tendency to hide a lot of truths from her. She would bet all the banthas on her farm that Obi-Wan Kenobi works for Darth Vader. That would explain why the caped demon knows who her father was.

The acrid scent of smoke cuts off her thoughts — she looks up, and feels the blood drain from her face. Leia doesn't remember when her feet started sprinting. She's pretty sure she stumbles and trips a few times on the way there, maybe that's why her palms are stinging. It's all a blur. All, except for the roaring flames that her eyes are fixed on. They flicker high towards the purple dawn and spit sparks at the sky. Even from here she can hear the panicked bellows of the banthas.

"Uncle Owen!" she screams. Her necklace swings wildly over her robes. "Aunt Beru!" It feels like the fire roars louder. She can just make out the crumbling outline of her house, where it once stood simple and unremarkable. When she gets close enough the blazing heat of the fire raging in the air makes her stomach twist. Her throat goes raw as she screams the names of her aunt and uncle over and over and over again. Leia darts over to the crippled front door with the full intention to race straight inside; but with a violent shudder, her house coughs out flames that make her stumble backwards and fall.

A movement in her peripheral vision fuels hope within her; she whips her head around to the wall hiding her main farm, hoping to see Aunt Beru and Uncle Owen rushing over to her. Instead, she watches in horror as the hooded man swerves round the corner of the wall, his cane greeting the sand violently, his eyes zeroing in on her. She is as stiff as stone, caught in time like she's a desert rat trapped under the gaze of a bonegnawer.

"Leia!" shouts Kenobi.

She runs.

/-|-\

\-|-/

When Leia's blurry eyes crack open, she is acutely aware of two things: there is a lot of noise her brain can't make sense of, and her head hurts really bad. Crying out, she reaches her hand to where the back of her skull is throbbing the most painful. The clink of metal much like the sound of the chains that they use on their Banthas makes her brows furrow — but then her fingertips graze the sticky area on the back of her head and she whimpers. Leia brings her shaking hand under her eyes, where blood glistens on her fingertips.

"Urrak, uli-ah!" She jerks violently, banging her elbow against something hard. As Leia's head throbs and her vision swims, she watches with wide eyes as the impending figure approaches her. Beige robes; gaderffii; a faceless being. She never would have thought that she would have to see a Tusken out of her textbooks. Slowly, the sounds around her begin to filter into her consciousness.

Hundreds of footsteps scuffing over sand. Conversations in a language she can't understand drifting in and out of her radar. The growl of some creature that makes the hair on the back of her neck raise. Metal grating against metal. The clinking of chains. A man, screaming in another dialect that definitely isn't Tusken. The crackle of a fire.

Leia adds to the noise when she starts screaming, too. She doesn't stop, even when the impending Tusken grabs her and shakes her roughly. The chains on her wrists clink violently… more Tuskens approach her… tears stream down her face… her world spins out of balance. She is so very cold. When the Tusken throws her to the ground the back of Leia's skull thumps against the sand. But she hardly notices. She howls up to the twin suns glaring down at her. Even when the screaming man goes silent she screams.

Eventually she loses her voice. Her tears dry up on her cheeks as she struggles to swallow. From the angle she's lying in, she can make out the wavering outlines of Tusken children on the horizon drinking from black melons. She shivers uncontrollably.

That's when she notices another sound.

A rhythmic pattern in the midst of chaos. Distinctly out of place in a Tusken's campsite. Mechanical breathing.

It takes too much effort to raise herself from the ground, so she forces herself to roll to the other side. Tuskens shuffle into and out of tents. Some sharpen their weapons on the fringes of the campsite, while others cook a large slab of meat over a giant fire pit. She takes a shuddering breath and drags her eyes towards the figure that towers above her. The Tuskens are acting like Vader isn't even here — which she supposes means that they can't see him. So really, he isn't even here.

"It's been a while," she tries to say sarcastically, but it comes out as more of a strangled gasp. Vader seems to understand her, though.

"I've seen an opportunity," he replies in his cold, robotic voice. She blinks defiantly up at him. One Vader keeps swimming into two Vaders, and back into one. Next she'll be seeing only one sun overlooking Tatooine. "Join me, or be a prisoner to these Slavers for the rest of your days. Your master will not free you." Leia attempts to scoff, her eyelids fluttering shut.

Even so, she finds herself wondering if he's right. Anakin knew there was something wrong but said nothing… and she doesn't know how long Vader's been lingering, or even how long she's been in this camp, but the fact that she's still here speaks volumes in itself. The bellow of a nearby Tusken makes her eyelids snap open again; her neck cranes to watch them hobbling towards the campsite with a very large black melon in their arms. Her eyes fall onto a horrific four-legged creature padding beside the Tusken. It opens its mouth as it begins to pant, and the sharp teeth protruding from its jaws makes her skin crawl.

"How did you get here?" Vader's question is simple. A hungry fire. Smoke polluting a purple sky. A murderer leaning on a cane by the flames. The blur of the awakening desert. The haunting tribal cries of Tuskens — they'd heard her screaming. An entire group of them. They turned around from their trek and gave chase. She ran back towards the direction of her crumbling farm. As they got closer, she could make out the strong scent of oil and gunpowder.

Leia watches the Tusken with the giant black melon and his horrifying pet pass. The Tuskens at the fire start whooping celebratorily. Her eyes narrow even as her throat tightens and her eyes sting. "As if you don't know," she rasps.

"I don't."

She curls up and wraps her arms around her knees. Leia's chest shudders with silent sobs, though she can't really cry even if Vader wasn't here. Not until she gets even a sip from one of those black melons in the Tuskens' clutches will a single tear spill from her dry, stinging eyes. It's one of the body's survival mechanisms — she had a test on general anatomy just last Benduday. When she watched Uncle Owen mark it, she swore she could detect a smile in his beard. At the time she had dismissed it as wishful thinking. She's suddenly very aware of the tin necklace digging into her skin underneath her robes. A sob catches in her throat.

"Just go away," she breathes, hiding her face in her arms. He doesn't. She only knows this because of the mechanical inhales and exhales that she can swear is getting louder, cutting through the ruckus of the Tusken campsite, as one click, two clicks, three clicks go by…

"Hoping for your master?" Leia stiffens. He sounds much closer than he was before. Some Tuskens start cheering. Vader inhales. "He will not help you." She clenches her jaw. The wound at the back of her head throbs more prominently when her heart rate steadily decreases. Her mind tells her she would like nothing more than to sleep in this Tusken campsite with Darth Vader at her side. When something firmly wraps around her arm, Leia jerks. She regrets it immediately because her world is disorientated and as she whips her head towards Vader crouched over her, she can barely keep the outlines of two of him in one place. Her eyes dart down — she's quite sure his gloved thumb and index are wrapped around her entire arm — before she raises them again. "You can only help yourself."

Leia's vision clears, and she sees only one Vader. With a sneer, she hisses, "By joining you?"

Vader releases her arm. For a moment, she wonders if he's really there or if people can still touch through Force projections. But if he was really there, the Tuskens would have noticed him.

"Look around you," he says. Leia's sneer dissolves into a frown. "What do you see?" Somewhat reluctantly, she turns her head right (her ear pressing into the sand) where the Tusken kids are now playing some sort of sport, and turns left where the group around the fire have increased, the remnants of the giant black melon scattered on the ground at their feet as they tear into chunks of charred meat where they've exposed their jaw with raised masks. She finds her eyes fixed on the thousands of rows of dagger-like teeth ripping into the flesh they'd probably hunted.

Zir once told her there was a crazy tribe of Tuskens who actively hunted Jawas for their meals when she herself was a little girl, down in Wayfar.

"You are paying attention to the wrong things," Vader snaps, jolting her out of her thoughts.

"And how would you know that?" she rasps haughtily, dragging her eyes away from the group at the fire to glare at him.

"The Tuskens — as I am sure you know — are not going to be your escape method."

Leia huffs, her eyebrows drawing together. Even when he's this close, she can't see eyes behind the fathomless pits of his mask. In the state she's in, she has nothing but his tone to indicate what he's feeling. She juts her chin up. "Well I did what you told me to! Not sure what you're expecting in a Tusken campsite."

"Look again," he commands. Leia scowls, the reminder of the giant boulder as the stars watched over them stark as her wounded skull. She's almost tempted not to do as he says out of spite. But that would be stupid, if he really is helping her with no ropes attached.

So Leia looks right, and left. The Tuskens have a lot of weapons — even the ones sharpening theirs could just stop, and use them at the first sign of trouble. It has to be a quiet escape, but she supposes that's obvious enough since she couldn't outrun them when she didn't have head trauma and dehydration added to her list of burdens. There's a lot of Tuskens, too; there's probably a lot more just lurking in the shadows of the tents ready to jump out with the first tribal cry.

Leia returns her gaze to the sky. She raises her hands above her face, where her palms block the two twin suns. Her eyes land on the cuffs around her tiny wrists but move on quickly knowing that she can't use the Force, then her eyes clamber down the chains it's connected to, following it underneath a rock that's about her size… There's no way she could summon the strength to lift that rock, not even with anger, just the thought of using the Force makes her feel dizzy — Leia balks, her eyes snapping back to her raised wrists.

"Now you see," says Vader.

It must be her head. "I — they… Surely they didn't just…?"

"The Tuskens are wild animals. They do not pay attention to detail." His cold robotic voice makes a shiver crawl down her spine. Leia finds that she likes it better when he sounds angry.

Making her hand as skinny as possible by intertwining all her fingers, Leia grabs the connecting chain with the other and manages to pull it free from the cuff with little difficulty. She repeats it for her other hand. Vader is silent beside her as the cuffs fall to the sand with an empty thud, except for his methodical breathing. Great. She's free, inside a prison. Well… She has just broken her cell door in a Sith ship.

Yeah.

And she has found herself an unlikely ally in the form of Darth Vader. Leia looks up at him from where she lies on the metal ground, exhausted from the efforts of getting her cell door open. The ship's engine drones in their silence. At first she thinks he will expose her, until Vader declares he is an enemy to the Sith who owns this ship.

"I will not help you," he snaps, when she dares imply it, "but I will not stop you, either."

"Good to know," she replies sarcastically, flicking a piece of metal debris at his mask. She watches it bounce off his eyepiece. The fact that nothing — not even his rhythmic breathing — changes, makes Leia giggle. Her eyes flutter shut.

"Get up." Leia blinks her eyes open. The droning fizzles into Tusken ruckus as the twin suns remind her of their presence by glaring down at her. Squinting, she turns her eyes to Vader who is now towering tall above her. She briefly wonders if she had actually flicked something at his mask. "I said, get up."

She frowns. "They'll notice."

"They'll notice you unchained if you keep lying here. Now get up."

Pressing her palms into the sand, Leia hoists herself to sit up. The entire planet spins out of proportion. Maybe a minute passes before she can finally convince herself to get to her feet. Leia immediately stumbles forward, grabbing the rock she was tethered to for support. Taking deep gulps of air, she feels bile rising in her throat. She is vaguely aware of some nearby Tuskens making out-of-place noises. Alerting noises.

"I can't," she gasps. "I can't stand."

"You must," insists Vader. Leia shakes her head, which spins even more. As she stares down at her swaying hands on the spinning rock, she can hear a few sets of heavy footsteps approaching her quickly. "Use your anger."

Leia grits her teeth. "Not this again," she hisses. The approaching Tuskens begin crying out to the others. The patter of their horrifying pets' footsteps is what makes skin crawl, though.

"Think of these Tuskens, who have held you captive and hurt you. Let it fuel you. It is the only way you will find the strength to escape." More footsteps are joining. There are some that are approaching mere clicks away — her heart pounds against her ribs. They will probably hurt her again. They might even kill her, this time. In cold blood like the way Kenobi killed her family. Leia lets her blood simmer as her brows draw together.

But then she remembers the promise she makes to herself every training night.

If she dies here, she wins. Vader won't have a potential addition to his Red Blade collection and he will never draw her to the dark side of the Force. The way she sees it, even if she makes it out of the Tusken camp alive she's still got a really bad head injury and she doubts there's much civilization around. Tuskens make a point of living in the most isolated places possible. Chances are, she'd drop dead before she makes it a hundred meters away from this campsite.

Leia thinks that at least this will be a better way to die, even as her heart hammers wildly in her chest and her breathing grows shallow.

The first Tusken has reached her. "Orukak!" Then comes the snarl of one of their creatures. As she jerks at the snap of jaws on thin air, Leia's world tilts sideways. The last thing she's aware of is alarmed exclaims before her eyes flutter shut.

It comes in glimpses. Floating Tuskens; flying weapons; attacking Tuskens; horrifying creatures writhing on the sand; running Tuskens; tents on fire. The entire time she feels like she's hovering in mid-air, bobbing roughly like she's riding on the back of an energetic bantha. Or more like when she's getting a ride home with Anakin. The Tuskens' guttural tribal cries puncture her unconsciousness and she idly wonders what's got them in such a frenzy. Maybe they've never seen a floating girl.

Then the Tuskens' hollers start to fade. She becomes aware of a pair of footsteps rhythmically pounding the sand. Anakin, who she was upset with for some reason but now she's perfectly content in his arms. Leia wants to ask him to tell her a story, but she begins to drift away again — until a descending roar forces her eyes open. Perhaps her injury has really taken a toll. The sand billows, unsettled, as the beautiful ship lowers itself to the ground. Vader's cape whips by her ear.

Leia looks up from where she is in Darth Vader's arms, and frowns. An overwhelming drowsiness pulls her eyelids down again.

The last time she awakens before she surrenders to her injury, Vader's boots march against metal as he passes a row of windows that overlook the Tusken campsite. They are tiny from this distance, tiny as her, scattered around their camp as they try to put out fires or bend over motionless figures. Then a red beam blasts at the campsite. Leia's eyes widen, but they fall abruptly shut before the impact.