Chapter 4
Alright, here's chapter four. Read, enjoy, and review.
Darth Vader was, to all appearances, the perfect Sith apprentice. He was skilled, both in the Force and with a lightsaber, he was rigidly disciplined, he rarely questioned orders anymore, and he appeared to have no intentions of overthrowing his master.
Perhaps Lord Sidious should have remembered, in all his reckonings, that deceit is part of the job description for a Sith.
Sidious was not, however, stupid. He knew enough to be suspicious when Vader claimed that he was leaving to quell a "potential rebel uprising" on Kashyyyk.
Punishment would be in order.
Vader did not remember the last time he had been around children. As a Jedi, they had been everywhere. You couldn't walk ten feet in the temple without tripping over one of them. They had admired him, he knew that much. He had talked to them, once in a while, even assisting with training for one class of younglings when Yoda was on a mission, once.
He had not spoken to a child since the day the temple was destroyed. He hated to look at them. Their faces all looked the same to him. Small and round-faced, naïve enough to ask their killers for help.
He was that killer. Many times, over and over, he had done so. It had stopped hurting him long ago. And when he killed, he was quick about it. He was never one for torture.
It didn't hurt them any more than it hurt him.
But he was in a speeder with two children, and the mind trick was wearing off. He could see it in the girl's restless movements, in the way the boy shot anxious looks at him through the fog that still hindered his movements.
Black and white. The world was much simpler that way. Easy and smooth. Vader hated shades of grey. And so he did not allow them to exist. The children would be trained in the dark side, or they would die. He had long accepted that before he set out.
If necessary, he would be the one to do it.
The boy looked like he had, so long ago.
Vader spared a moment to think of Kenobi. His body sprawled across the sand, limp and unmoving. Corpse-like. If Kenobi wasn't dead, he was certainly close to it. And all because he'd gotten drunk.
It didn't seem a fitting way for the last great Jedi warrior to die. Pathetic, the kind of death you could read about everyday in the news. Some homeless man who got into trouble would wander into some place he shouldn't, get tangled in something dangerous, and get killed.
Murder, plain and simple.
It was what Vader had been trained to do. It was what he had done everyday for the past ten years.
Yet somehow Kenobi's death had not given him the satisfaction he had counted on. He was left only with a sense of lack of closure.
The broken shell of Kenobi was lying dead, and with it, any chance to end things between them.
This was only thing that had truly rang true to Vader since Padme's death. Everything else passed him by, and though he heard it, and understood it, he never felt it.
This he felt.
"Damn you, Obi-Wan," he cursed under his breath, pressing harder on the gas so the speeder accelerated at what even he knew was a dangerous rate.
Kenobi had to take even his own death away from Vader.
Luke felt as if he was coming out of a fog. His eyes were heavy, and his mouth was dry. He rolled to his side slightly, and felt something cold.
His eyes snapped open, and he sat up painfully fast.
The Black Man was sitting no more than three inches away from him.
Luke's first reaction was decidedly unlike his sister's. He had never had a nightmare, never felt the cold terror of waking up in the night with nothing but darkness and the fear of the dreamworld surrounding you.
"Who are you?" he asked. Had he been fully awake, it is doubtful he would have ever found the courage to say anything. As it was, he was nearly half asleep and he hardly knew what he was saying. His tongue and tips were heavy and numb, almost moving without his consent. His hands trembled without his permission, shaking with a primal fear that he did not know to feel.
His eyes had closed again by this point, and he felt rather than saw the man turn to look at him.
The man's breath was like a sandstorm on Tatooine, terrifying and exhilarating all at once. Luke relished the hybrid of flesh and metal, feeling his own lungs sucked in at every inhale.
"My name is Darth Vader," the man said. A deep voice, as metallic as his breath, answered Luke. So different than Obi-Wan's gentle, lilting voice, one that rarely spoke to him at all. Stronger. More powerful.
"Why did you take us? Why aren't we home?" Luke wasn't sure anymore that what he was leaving was home, after all. He had Leia with him. That should be enough.
Vader had always been honest. Lying was for Jedi, with their shades of grey, their "sometimes right."
"Because you are mine," he said simply. "Kenobi stole you from me. You were never his. Now I am reclaiming you."
Luke nodded. So. This was it. "Will we ever see Obi-Wan again?"
Vader thought for a moment. "If he's alive." They were silent for a minute of so, and Luke was nearly asleep again when Vader asked, "Why aren't you afraid?"
"I don't know." He was honest as well, but not for the same reasons that Vader was.
This time, Luke did go to sleep. Vader glanced from the road every so often to look at him, but all he saw was the bloody stains on his daughter's white clothes and face. Her cheeks so pale as to be unnatural and the only color on her body aside from her pink lip and dark hair were red and brown streaks of blood.
She moaned in her sleep, fidgeting and crying out. Vader couldn't distinguish any of the words, but her fear filled the speeder and fogged his mind.
Soon it became full blown screaming. Luke, who was used to it, was able to continue his light sleep. Vader became more and more agitated. The girl rubbed at the bloodstains on her arm as she slept, tearing at her clothes where crimson liquid had spilled out from Kenobi's wounds. Her shrieks of panic were painful for Vader to listen to.
Usually he would kill someone in such a state.
He reached a hand behind the boy and grabbed her shoulder and shook her roughly. Her body jarred forward as the car slowed, and her mouth crashed into the dashboard and bled.
Her eyes opened and stared at him, but they were the glassy eyes of the unseeing. "Wake up!" he shouted, shaking her.
She blinked and she was awake. When she saw him, she stiffened and when quiet immediately. Her whole body shook, giant spasms of fear.
"Where's…Obi-Wan?" she managed to asked through chattering teeth, finally, "What did you do to him?"
"It is not your concern," Vader said sharply, relieved only that she'd stopped screaming.
She looked down as if seeing herself for the first time. "Whose blood is this?" she asked in a high pitched voice. "That's not my blood! That's not my blood! Why is there blood on me? Get it OFF! I want it off!"
She rubbed at her arms and cheeks until they turned raw. "It won't come out! I can't get it out!" She was hysterical by this point, tearing at her skin and tearing out her hair.
Vader reached over Luke and slapped her hard across the face. She was thrown back into the window. She was still for a moment before tears began to roll down her face. "I want to go home," she sobbed quietly. "I want to go home."
She closed her eyes and cried herself to sleep.
About an hour after both of his children finally slept, Vader pulled the speeder up to his ship, the Executor. He lifted the children and transferred them to the new ship. It lifted off quietly, waking neither of them, and leaving only fake marks in the sand.
The most difficult part of his journey was only beginning.