He was in the Force. He was outside space and time. He was with Obi-Wan Kenobi and Qui-Gon Jinn. He was talking with them, but he couldn't remember afterwards what the conversation had been. Only that they had agreed on – something…

On an island far, far away, a centaur and two humans were in conference.

'So, I take it you have decided that sharing my home with just one homicidal maniac is not enough?' sighed the wizard with the long black hair.

'I don't want you to do this unless you're sure you're comfortable with it, Severus,' said Cheiron, kneeling so that he didn't tower too much over his human companions. 'And unless Konstantine is okay with living with not one but two mutant wizards, for that matter.'

The Barrayaran soldier's expression was as blank as it usually was, but Cheiron knew that he was thinking it over. 'Doesn't worry me,' he said at last. 'As long as he doesn't read my mind.'

He was floating in a bacta tank. He could feel two presences, human. One was Force-sensitive, not exactly Jedi or Sith, but it felt mostly like a Jedi who was tainted by the Dark Side. The feel of its personality said scholar, craftsman, and spy. And this – Dark Jedi or whatever it was – disliked and distrusted him, but was willing to take on the duty of looking after him. Ugh – did he really want that again? But where else could he go? And who was there who could actually love him? Other than Luke, but maybe there were limits even to Luke's patience, maybe even Luke had given up on him…

The other presence didn't seem to be Force-sensitive, but there was a simmering undercurrent of pain, anger and cruelty that felt like the makings of a Sith. (Stop that! He wasn't a Sith himself, now. Or he was trying not to be. But he couldn't go back to being a Jedi. What was he?) But he could also sense love, loyalty and honour in this mind. And this not-exactly-Sith felt – recognition and fellow-feeling for him.

He was lying on a bed. Wait, he was lying on a bed? He could feel soft fabric? He wasn't in his armour? He was going to die – no he wasn't. He had an oxygen mask over his mouth and nose, but it didn't feel like the mask in his suit. This was more like some sort of soft plastic lightly resting on his face. Frames of a harder plastic were resting around his eyes, too.

He could feel air on his head and neck – even a slight breeze – were they on some planet somewhere, with a breathable atmosphere? His prosthetic limbs didn't seem to be attached, though he could still feel phantom pains in them. As for what remained of his body, it felt – sore in places, but he wasn't hurting nearly as much as he had for the past two decades. He could feel bacta dressings over numerous fresh wounds crossing his torso – what was that about? He'd been electrocuted, not stabbed. He'd had a number of sores from where his armour chafed, but nothing like this.

The mask was just supplying oxygen, not forcibly pumping it into him, he was sure of that. He was breathing, actually breathing, although his chest felt tight and too small for him. His mouth was dry. I'm thirsty, he thought, and wondered why he bothered to think anything so ridiculous. He was used to his nutrients and fluids being supplied by tubes. Why should he notice thirst now?

He could sense the two presences from before. He opened his eyes to find dim light – no – he was wearing shades. Peering through them, he could make out the figures of two human men who were both so tall, lean and ugly that they might have been father and son. Both were narrow-faced, with big, beak-like noses and wary eyes. The older one looked about sixty, but fit and muscular, with close-cropped greying hair and swarthy skin, and wore a brown uniform with silver trim, with an emblem that looked like a stylised leaf – though not from any tree that the patient on the bed recognised – on the sleeves and collar. A pocket in the front of his jacket bore lettering which was probably his name, in some script that looked nothing like Aurebesh. He was the not-exactly-Sith, and although his face was set and grim, the wounded man could feel his interest and sympathy, and recognition. Not so much the recognition of someone reunited with an old friend, but of someone meeting a legendary figure he had only seen on a holodrama.

The other man – the Dark-Jedi – was in his thirties, with pale skin – not exactly the pallor of someone who was perpetually encased in a life-support suit, but he certainly looked as if he didn't get out much – long black hair, and deep, dark eyes. He wore a black robe which was bare of decoration apart from a green badge shaped like a shield, with a silver helmet on top of it as a crest, a silver snake against a green background, and another strip of writing below. This looked to be in a different script again from that on the brown and silver uniform, but they looked more similar to each other than either did to Aurebesh.

'Ah, yes,' said the younger man, his face distorted in a sneer that revealed long, discoloured teeth. 'Our so-called "Dark Lord". Rather precipitate, were you not, in claiming that title? In reality, you must admit that you were only ever a minion to the real evil overlord.'

The man on the bed almost caught the thought As was I. Now that the Dark-Jedi knew their injured visitor was conscious, he was shielding most of his Force presence, but, carefully, not all of it. He allowed superficial emotions like revulsion and contempt to be felt, while hiding anything that ran deeper. But for a moment, the man on the bed had sensed an undercurrent of fear-guilt-regret-hatred-resentment. He had no doubt about it: This is someone who was duped into selling himself to a Sith. Someone like me.

He had to admit, though, that the dark-haired man was right. He hadn't been a real Dark Lord. Not exactly.

'Professor, we should fetch Dr Durona,' said the man in the brown uniform. 'She told us to call her as soon as General Skywalker woke.' His voice was almost a monotone, but he seemed to emphasise the words 'General Skywalker'. No. I'm not him any more, either. The Hero With No Fear. I was never truly that, either.

The Professor nodded. 'I'll go. You guard him.' He left the room, while the older man continued to watch – Skywalker, or whatever he was going to call himself. No. I forfeited that name. It belongs only to my son now. And his sister – whoever she is… He had a horrible suspicion that he might know the answer to the identity of Luke's sister, but it slid out from under his consciousness.

'How are you?' the brown-uniformed man asked.

He lifted the oxygen mask up from his patient's mouth, so that he could see the lips whisper the word, 'Thirsty.'

'Need to see what the doctor says.'

'I have been capable of eating and drinking for the past quarter-century.' Though admittedly he could only eat normal food when in a hyperbaric chamber where he could remove his helmet, and the tubed Vitapaste that he was supposed to live on while in armour tasted so foul that he preferred to be fed intravenously. 'I fail to see why it should be a problem now, when my health is better tha…' He broke off into a fit of coughing.

The attendant lifted him with one hand and placed pillows underneath his head and upper back, so that he wasn't lying flat. Next, the man pressed a button which raised the lower end of the bed, so that Skywalker's leg-stumps were supported and couldn't slide down to the foot of the bed. 'Better?' he asked.

Skywalker shook his head. 'Dry,' he croaked.

The attendant picked up a cup from the bedside table containing some sort of watery paste, and dipped a small sponge in it to moisten the patient's lips and tongue. It was better than nothing, but not enough to quench his thirst. But the attendant's hands – and the feel of his presence – were surprisingly gentle. Was he a trained nurse? A warrior medic, like Kix?

What had happened to Kix, anyway? Anakin tried to remember. He had been kidnapped by the Separatists and then just never heard of again. Had he found out about what the chips in his and his brothers' heads were programmed to make them do? Was he dead? Had he joined the Rebellion? Was he still a prisoner somewhere, maybe frozen? If he hadn't been captured, if he'd had the chance to tell Anakin, maybe everything would have gone differently? And if Kix had been still serving under you when you became Darth Vader, would you have murdered him to prevent him from telling anyone that Darth Vader was Anakin Skywalker?

He didn't want to think about this now. He forced himself to concentrate on the here and now – wherever here was, and whenever now was – and the man in front of him. 'You are – good at this,' he said.

'Used to be bodyguard to a crippled boy,' said the older man. Anakin – Vader – whoever could sense a mental picture of a child with dark hair and mischievous grey eyes and a head that seemed too large for his frail, twisted body, lying on a bed with several limbs immobilised in casts. The feelings surrounding this boy were unashamedly parental – love-protectiveness-pride-worry-exasperation – mixed with obedience and reverence, as if he looked up to this child as something between commanding officer and Jedi Master.

But behind that, there was another image, of a startlingly beautiful young woman of about eighteen or nineteen, with long black hair. She seemed to be badly injured, and was bandaged and barely conscious. She reminded Vader of the Princess of Alderaan. But where Princess Leia had remained defiant and unbroken no matter what he had done to her, this woman looked as if she had passed through terror into despair. The man's emotions around this memory were darker – lust-love-guilt-shame-despair-grief-longing – pretty much exactly the same emotions Anakin felt, remembering Padme – and Bail Organa's daughter had looked almost unbearably like Padme, which could mean…

He was trying to order his thoughts enough to frame a question when the door to his room opened to announce the return of the long-haired Professor.

Author's note: I am not an expert on Star Wars. In fact, most of my information comes from reading Star Wars fanfiction. So if I get anything wrong – errors of detail, or just things that feel out-of-character for Anakin – please write and let me know. However, I probably will be taking elements from both the now canonical timeline and the Legends timeline, whichever I find useful.

I didn't want to go with the film image of fussily overdressed Snape. The Harry Potter films took a lot of liberties with the visuals – in the books, Hogwarts pupils do not wear muggle-style school uniforms, and we know that Snape as a teenager, at least in summer, wore only underwear under his robe. (And even this is a sign of his part-muggle heritage – some older pure-blood wizards refuse to wear trousers or even underpants even when supposedly disguised as muggles!) He might have taken to wearing multiple layers of clothing as a response to being sexually assaulted as a teenager, but the books do not suggest this – after he has been bitten by a three-headed dog, the pupils notice a bandage on his bare leg. So I pictured him just wearing a simple robe – but with the Slytherin house badge on it.

Barrayaran culture uses the Cyrillic alphabet for writing most things, regardless of whether they are written in Russian, Greek, French or English. We learn this in Shards of Honor, where Cordelia (being used to the Roman alphabet) has to struggle to make out the name-tag on Koudelka's jacket. I don't actually know how the name 'Konstantine Bothari' would be written in Cyrillic, but I think it's something like Константин Ботари, though if Barrayaran Cyrillic borrows letters from the Greek and Roman alphabets where appropriate, his last name might be written Боθари. At any rate, it explains why his first name, when mentioned at all, is sometimes inconsistently spelt when transliterated into the Roman alphabet in the novels we have.