Kaiden ran into a room where the dominant piece of furniture was a large, black dome.
DADDY! He screamed at his father's force presence.
The large, black dome started to open. Kaiden slipped through. Suddenly, he was in the air, and floating towards his father, who had his arms folded across his chest disapprovingly. He had his helmet on. Kaiden frowned.
Daddy, you said in here was hat-off time, thought Kaiden.
'It's called a helmet, Kaiden,' said Vader, exasperated.
Kaiden frowned and pouted for a few seconds.
Vader smiled sadly under his mask. Kaiden reminded him so much of Luke, despite his hair, which was mysteriously brown.
One of the Kaminoan's favourite research topics over the last few years was how a clone of a blond haired person had been born with brown hair. Vader only wished that Kaiden would talk instead of just using the Force all the time.
Kaiden quickly forgot about the helmet, and frowned as he remembered why he had ran, screaming into his father's meditation chambers at four AM in the morning.
He realized that he was still floating. Kaiden tried to swim across the air to get to his father. Vader was trying not to laugh, as doing so would probably break his respirator.
He put his son down. Kaiden instantly ran over to him and grabbed his leg as if he would never let go.
'What's wrong, Kaiden?' asked Vader.
Kaiden started trembling a bit, and then he burst into tears.
I can't say, daddy, can you read my mind so I don't have to say? Kaiden thought, sobbing.
Vader quickly found the source of his son's distress. Kaiden had had a nightmare. Vader frowned. There was something about the dream that seemed strange; though he couldn't think of any reason why this should be so. As Vader watched the dream replay in his son's head, he realized, horrified, what it was.
The boy woke up, he didn't know why. Some instinct warned him of the danger. His father had left to settle a border dispute on Malastare, and he wasn't due back until tomorrow. The boy saw the man standing at the end of his bed as soon as he was awake. He opened his mouth to scream, "So the guards would know that he was in trouble".
'Don't bother, brat, your guards are dead,' the man said.
The boy stared in shock, he could sense the man invading his mind, but only his father could do that. The man took out a gun and pointed it at him. The boy crawled under the covers of the bed. The man pulled them up and shot. A blue stun bolt hit the boy in the back of the head. The man grabbed him and crawled back through the air vents to the exit, and jumped into a waiting speeder. His partner hit the acceleration.
They only spoke once they were entering the docks, where their ship was.
The pilot looked up at the man.
'Did you get the Prince, Jade'" he asked.
'Of course I did Fett, now hurry, we shouldn't keep these clients waiting,' Jade snapped.
Lucifer was awakened from his dream by a sudden burst of pain from his face.
He winced as he felt that brat of a Prince shout into the Force again instead of talking out loud like an ordinary person. It was almost as if he didn't know how to speak, yet any clone of Luke Vader should be able to do that, unless there had been genetic tampering, of course, which wasn't really all that unlikely, considering Palpatine's bright personality.
The brat could at least have the courtesy to be quiet, though.
Being heard by all force-sensitive from halfway across the galaxy was never a good thing, despite what the Prince seemed to think.
Slowly, Lucifer became aware of a banging on the door, and realized that he must have slept for quite some time.
He opened it to find Emerald with red, bloodied knuckles from hitting the door and Pyro with a battering ram that had been set on fire.
'What is going on out here?" Lucifer said in a dangerous voice.
'Well, since you've been in there for a few hours longer than you usually spend anywhere without a reason, we thought something must have happened to you. So I banged on the door for a while until Pyro came along with his battering ram and started bashing the door with it,' Emerald said.
'Hey Luke, are you all right?' Pyro asked nervously.
Lucifer froze.
'What did you call me?' he asked, startled and accidentally forgetting to sound cold and merciless.
'I called you Luke,' Pyro said, now starting to grow afraid of what the younger man might do if he objected.
Lucifer stared at him for a long time, obviously thinking about something. The scar on his face hat had never healed, even after five years, seemed darker and more obvious than usual. Pyro and Emerald, knowing that it was probably a life or death matter (at least, to Lucifer), stayed silent.
'Why?' Lucifer finally asked.
'Well, you don't really seem to like the name "Lucy", and "Lucifer" is too long, so I thought maybe "Luke" because it is a nice name and it's short,' Pyro whimpered fearfully.
Lucifer stared at him again.
'Don't call me that,' he said as he walked away.
When they were sure that he was gone, Pyro and Emerald looked at each other.
Emerald frowned.
'What was that about?' she wondered out loud.
"You're expecting me to know? The first time I called him "Lucy", all he did was Death Glare at me. Now I call him "Luke" which is a nice name, and it isn't a girl's name. What does he do? He talks to me! That is the Lucifer equivalent of chucking a spaz and going after me with a butcher's knife. Now that is messed up,' Pyro said.
'Yeah…,' agreed Emerald, lost in thought.
A few seconds later, Pyro got sick of waiting for a proper response and started to walk away.
'Pyro, when did you get a battering ram anyway?' Emerald asked.
'Ah, you know, some store somewhere. It was a fifty percent off sale,' Pyro told her.
Pyro walked into the cabin when suddenly, a vibroblade nicked the front of his shirt and cut his stomach.
'Ow!' he yelled.
Quartz walked in the opposite door and also got cut.
Pyro and Quartz looked at each other and ran, screaming, in opposite directions.
Lucifer looked up from his weapons practice to see if they were gone. Once he was satisfied that he was alone, he snuck back into the cockpit, once again locking the door behind him.
"You'd think that it would be noisier in here than the cabin," he muttered as he fell back to sleep in the pilot's seat.
Behind him, the wall shimmered for a second, before a small, pale figure came through it slowly.
Quartz quietly walked over to the captain and went through his pockets, finding what he was after in less than a minute.
As the fifteen year old walked back through the wall, he turned and whispered something.
"Sorry, captain, but there is no such thing as loyalty in this business,"
After he was gone, Lucifer opened the eye that wasn't scarred.
"Traitor…"