'I didn't have a father, either,' said Hephaestus, in deliberately casual tones to lessen the tension between them. 'My mother got fed up with her husband's constant philandering and decided to have a child on her own. And then when I was born, I was so disappointing that she abandoned me. My mother and stepfather do have two children together, my brother Ares, the god of war – he's a vicious thug, but fortunately stupid – and my sister Hebe – she's a waitress.'

'The god of waitresses?' Anakin asked.

'No, just waitress to the gods. And that's a busy job, considering how much my cousin Heracles eats and how much my cousin Dionysus drinks. They're my stepbrothers, as well as my cousins. My mother can't stand them. She doesn't like most of my stepfather's illegitimate children, apart from my cousin Athene, but she really has it in for Dionysus and Heracles. Ares and Hebe are pretty much the only legitimate children in my generation – being born out of wedlock is more the rule than not, where I come from. If it comes to that, Athene was born without a mother. It wasn't that she didn't have a mother, just Athene's mother died years before Athene was born. When her mother was pregnant, my stepfather got paranoid that her child would grow up to overthrow him, so he bet her that she couldn't shapeshift into a fly, and swallowed her as soon as she did. She died, but Athene survived and grew up inside my stepfather's skull. I suppose the shapeshifting spell stopped her from growing too big while she was a godling, but by the time she was a grown goddess she was big enough to give her father splitting headaches, until he collapsed one day and begged me – well, ordered me, Zeus doesn't beg – to crack his skull open and ease the pain. There wasn't time to call a healing god like Paieon, so I just did what I could with a hammer and chisel, and – there was a beautiful goddess standing in front of me. The way genetics work in my species, she was lucky she wasn't born with six legs, or compound eyes.'

Anakin caught a glimpse of unedited memory from Konstantine – a dark-haired woman lying on the floor in a dark, dirty room somewhere, biting onto a piece of twisted rag to stop herself from screaming in pain, as Konstantine crouched to deliver the baby, struggling to remain professional and concentrate on the welfare of the mother and baby and not perv over her too obviously. Even dishevelled, dressed in a nightgown, her hair loose, she was recognisable as the elegant, beautiful lady from the art-gallery memory. So why would a high-born baby give birth in some derelict hovel, without a proper medic to help? Where had Padme given birth, if it came to that, and who had attended her? Obi-Wan? No, he wasn't ready to think about that, not just now. Ask some more questions.

'How are your step-siblings also your cousins?'

'Because my mother got married to her brother,' said Hephaestus, as if this was the most normal thing in the world. 'My grandfather – he must have been a lot like Zeus – was paranoid that his children were going to overthrow him, the way he'd overthrown his father, so he ate nearly all his children – not Uncle Cheiron, because he was born later when my grandfather was no longer chief god, and besides, I suppose people thought that being illegitimate and a centaur, he wasn't too much of a political threat. But he ate nearly all his legitimate children, except Uncle Zeus, because my grandmother managed to smuggle him away in time. So when Zeus grew up, he claimed to be a healer and offered my grandfather a soothing drink for his indigestion, which caused him to vomit up all his children that he'd swallowed – so, of course, they overthrew him and put him in prison to stop him doing anything like that again. And apparently, when my mother and Uncle Zeus first set eyes on each other, it was love at first sight.'

'But – they were brother and sister!' protested Anakin. Wouldn't siblings instinctively know not to feel attracted to each other? Maybe not, if they had been brought up separately. He didn't know who his daughter was – until he had read Luke's mind in their final confrontation, he hadn't known that he had more than one child, and it seemed as though Luke hadn't known for very long either – but she was apparently a friend whom Luke cared deeply about, not just some stranger somewhere in the galaxy. Anakin had a sneaking feeling that he could guess the likely identity of Luke's sister. And if so – they might already have developed decidedly un-sibling-like feelings for each other before they found out the truth. No, he didn't want to think about that, not now.

'I know!' sighed Hephaestus. 'My family tree is more of a tangled thicket, really. My mother got married to her brother, who had a child with their sister, Aunt Demeter, who was kidnapped and forcibly married to their brother, Uncle Hades. And Aphrodite, my first wife, is legally another stepsibling-cousin, the daughter of Uncle Zeus and yet another of his girlfriends, but biologically, she's my great-aunt who was born as a result of my grandfather chopping off my great-grandfather's genitals and throwing them into the sea.'

'Is there anyone in your family who isn't weird?' asked Sparky.

'Yes: Auntie Hestia. She's lovely. She's a fire-god, like me, but she's the god of the hearth-fire, and I'm the god of the forge-fire. When my mother decided she wanted me as a son after all and summoned me back to Mount Olympus when I was nine years old, Auntie Hestia was the only one who made me feel like a member of the family, and comforted me and gave me scones when I cried because I missed my foster-mum. Hestia never married, never had any children of her own, but she's more like a mum than my own mother is.'

'Talking of making you welcome, how long do you reckon it's going to be before these humans offer you a drink?' Sparky asked.

Konstantine had been starting to relax – it was hard not to relax around anyone as likeable as Hephaestus – but his presence snapped back into wariness. 'Cheiron told me to guard General Skywalker,' he said tightly.

'And you can't leave us unattended with him, right?' said Hephaestus. 'In particular, you can't trust a god who has a reputation for pranks. But if I climb out of Anakin's float-chair – thank you for lending it to me, by the way, Anakin – and Sparky helps Anakin into it, we could all go down to the kitchen.'

Konstantine grunted an irritable assent to this plan. Downstairs, as Hephaestus settled comfortably onto the sofa with Anakin's chair hovering alongside it, Konstantine fetched caf for himself and Anakin, a bowl of watered wine for Hephaestus, and a saucer of milk for Severus, who emerged from investigating a possible mouse-hole to inspect the visitors. Sparky declined Anakin's offer of oiling or a recharging point, and stood against the wall on the far side of the room where she could see everything, her stiff, guard-like pose parodying Konstantine's.

Severus lapped a little at his milk, jumped onto the sofa to sniff Hephaestus, and seemed to decide that he wasn't a threat, for he curled up to fall asleep next to the god. Hephaestus was careful not to disturb him as he took out a device like a holopad from an inner pocket.

The images of designs of prosthetic limbs that he called up looked much clearer than most of the crackly blue holograms Anakin had encountered in his own world. There were an assortment of legs and feet on display, but most of the holos Hephaestus called up were of arms and hands. 'Cheiron told me you're an engineer,' he explained. 'I don't know whether you need hands to work, or whether you can move everything you need by the power of your mind. But I thought you might want to build your own limbs. So if I give you a set of hands to be going on with – if you need them – you could come over to my workshop and build your legs yourself. And in the meantime, if you want to visit the workshop anyway, you could watch what I'm working on in person, and make any suggestions on how you want things. Looking at images doesn't give you a full sense of them, after all. But from the pictures I've shown you, do you have any preferences?'

'The realistic-looking hand with skin for the left arm,' said Anakin, 'and the skeletal golden hand for the right.' Belatedly, he remembered to add, 'Please.'

'You don't want a matched pair?'

'No. These will suffice.' Prosthetic technology had improved dramatically in his world in his own lifetime. Luke's hand – the replacement for the one he, Vader, had chopped off, and that was yet another thing he didn't want to think about – had looked like a normal human hand. With limbs like that, Anakin thought, he could almost forget that he had ever been Darth Vader, and get back into the habit of living like a normal human again – or as near as possible.

But the right hand – that belonged to a different era of his life. Even if it couldn't be the original, Clone Wars era hand that had held Padme's at their wedding, the minimalist design in the holo Hephaestus had shown him looked as near to it as anything, and Hephaestus surely wouldn't mind modifying it to make the joints more knobbly and the fingers more skeletal. That was one memory he wasn't going to let go of.

'Wonder and I could take turns coming here,' offered Sparky. 'If I stay overnight, I can keep an eye on you meatbags while you go offline, give Full Body Replacement Guy his bath in the morning, and take him over to the workshop later in the day, and give Grumpy Soldier and Wizard Kitty a chance to catch up on whatever else it is you want to do when you're not looking after a broken human. You can spend the day with me and Wonder and Hephaestus and Erik, and Wonder can come back with you tomorrow afternoon and sort you out getting ready for bed. Deal?'

Twin thoughts flashed through Anakin's mind side by side, trying to overtake each other and intertwining with each other: Hephaestus wants to use me and Konstantine and Severus want to get rid of me. But was this him sensing truth in the Force, or simply the reflection of his own fears? From Hephaestus's mind, he could sense only friendliness – but then, he had used to trust Palpatine when he was young, and he hadn't been able to sense Palpatine's true intentions. Maybe gods were even better at shielding than Sith – and from what Hephaestus had said about his family, gods were scarcely different from Sith anyway.

From Konstantine he sensed a cocktail of emotions including wary distrust and protectiveness, along with a reluctant admission of relief. Without mind-probing, it wasn't easy to be sure which emotions were directed towards which people, but probably, he felt protective of Anakin, worried about letting anyone he didn't know well share the responsibility of caring for Anakin, and guilty about being relieved to have a patch of the day clear.

Severus's feelings were more animal than human at the moment, probably mainly because he was asleep. In his sleep, he wasn't bothering to shield his thoughts, and Anakin caught a glimpse of a dream about pouncing on a creature with a long pointed nose and a long bare tail. The dream turned into a nightmare – perhaps prompted by an awareness of Anakin's presence – as three much larger creatures, two of them canine-looking creatures that vaguely resembled a charhound and a raquor'daan, the third a horned beast like a kybuck – came chasing after the fluffy kit. Severus burst awake, yowling in terror, leapt off the sofa and scrambled up Konstantine's trousers and jacket, claws snagging on the threads. Konstantine cradled the kit in his arms, stroking him until he calmed.

So, yes, Konstantine was protective of Anakin – but protective of Severus, too, especially at the moment. And he was right to be, considering what Anakin had just done.

There is no good in me after all. Yoda and Obi-Wan were right. I am too corrupted to break the habits of a lifetime.

No. He wasn't. He was who he chose to be. He just – should have thought more carefully about his choices. But if he and Konstantine and Severus were going to go on living together, his housemates needed some respite from him. Besides, he was curious to learn how Hephaestus worked, and looking forward to having hands again and being able to tinker with machinery once more; he liked Hephaestus and enjoyed Sparky's cheekiness, and he wouldn't mind meeting Wonder; and he was curious about the other person Sparky had mentioned, too casually, in passing.

'The arrangement is satisfactory,' he announced. 'Who is Erik?' he asked.

'Hephaestus's apprentice,' said Sparky. 'He's an anti-social, disfigured, insane genius control freak who likes throttling people and whose idea of a good chat-up line is, "Agree to marry me or I'll blow up this building and kill everyone in it including you, me, your boyfriend, and the guy who is the nearest thing I have to a friend." You two should get on like a theatre on fire.'