Anakin managed to avoid going downstairs and talking to Cheiron until night fell. As far as possible, he avoided talking to Severus or Konstantine for much of the evening, either, but he could feel their emotions as a background hum downstairs. They were clearly happier when they didn't have to deal with him. Just as it must have been more straightforward to Luke to be able to mourn him and be glad that they had been reconciled at last, rather than to have to negotiate with the Rebel Alliance for his barely-still-alive Sith lord father to get medical attention while they decided whether he should face execution or life imprisonment. As for Luke's sister – well, Anakin didn't actually have proof that Leia Organa was the mysterious sister they had discussed, but she almost certainly was, and even if she wasn't actually Luke's sister by blood, she was one of his closest friends, and she and the rest of his friends weren't going to take kindly to Luke being the son of the Sith who had tortured them. Well, the organic friends wouldn't like it – he could only guess at the droids' reaction if he turned up and announced, 'Threepio, I am your father.' The thought made him laugh, which made him cough, which made Spark flash her eyes and mutter about how badly designed humans were.
At least Spark was one droid – sorry, noid! – who had no history with him. She was neither his creation nor his comrade-in-arms, nor someone who had served under Palpatine and was programmed to tend his injuries with as little gentleness as possible. Despite her insolence, she was brisk and cheerful and well used to assisting people with mobility restrictions. When he called her 'Sparky' a second time, she retorted, 'My name is Spark! My friends call me Sparky!' in tones that made it clear that Anakin was not yet admitted to that circle. But she seemed willing enough to treat him as – someone she might come to consider a friend, at any rate. When he didn't want to talk much about his life, she didn't pry, but spent the afternoon entertaining him with stories about Hephaestus's tribe the Olympians, their ancestors the Titans, and the complex soap opera of relationships between them and humans, nymphs, and assorted monsters, that made up the world she had been activated in.
She didn't say much about her work with Hephaestus on the Rock now, and dropped only hints about the mysterious Erik, but Anakin knew that this was deliberate: that she was enjoying keeping him in suspense. If she had been organic, he would have been able to feel her mischievous amusement. Then again, if she had been human, he would have been able to demand entry to her secret thoughts, so it was just as well that she wasn't.
By nightfall, however, they needed to discuss sleeping arrangements – for everyone including Spark, whose battery was beginning to run low. Konstantine still didn't entirely trust Spark, but also didn't trust himself to behave responsibly if Severus wasn't there to keep an eye on him, and didn't trust Anakin not to torment Severus. Severus didn't trust Anakin either not to hurt him, or not to be a bad influence on Konstantine if Severus wasn't around. Anakin didn't trust himself, but he knew that he was just as likely to invade his housemates' minds when they were in the next room as when they were right next to him. Spark seemed to have no objection to any of them as people, but distrusted the ability of 'meatbags' to be on duty day and night with no sleep.
In the end they agreed to sleep in the same room just so that they could all keep an eye on each other, with Konstantine lying on a mattress on the floor and Severus curled up by his feet, and Spark plugged into the wall socket and powered down to semi-sleep mode, so that part of her brain could scan the room for disturbance while the rest of it reviewed and sorted the day's events into her long-term memory files. She had allowed herself a short rest in full-sleep mode earlier in the evening while Konstantine had helped Anakin eat his supper, given him a final wash and a clean pad, and got him settled ready for sleep, with the articulated bed tilted close to horizontal, but with the head section raised enough to help Anakin's breathing, and the lowest section tilted enough to stop him sliding down to the foot of the bed.
Anakin tried to relax enough to sleep, though having the oxygen mask once more fastened over his face didn't help. He would have preferred to see if he could get through the night without it. After all, he had managed without it, at least for short periods, during daytime naps, and wearing it felt frighteningly like being back in his life-support suit. But monitoring him closely enough to spot signs of difficulty breathing would require at least one of his attendants to be fully awake and giving him their full attention, and after an emotionally exhausting day, everyone needed to sleep. Anakin told himself firmly, 'It doesn't feel a bit like the suit. It's more like being in the bacta tank. It isn't a problem.' And if it did stop him getting to sleep, or gave him nightmares, he could always ask Spark to take it off when she'd already had the chance to get some sleep herself.
The door was wedged open with one of Konstantine's boots, so that Severus could get out if he needed to get to the 'fresher. After all, even if he was currently in the form of a small furry animal, he was enough a person to want privacy, and feel more comfortable if his earth tray was on the floor of the 'fresher rather than in the bedroom. Also, of course – although nobody said this out loud – it gave him the freedom to run away if he felt stressed by being in the same room as Anakin for too long.
Anakin fell asleep before long, and found himself in a room he had never seen before. It looked like a room of some palace, opulently decorated. He could hear water splashing and gurgling outside, and the squawks of some kind of bird. In the dream, he somehow knew that the water was an ornamental fountain, and the birds were creatures called peacocks, which were kept as pets because they were decorative, despite their screeching.
None of that mattered, however, compared to the overwhelming presence of the Dark Side. None of the beings here were exactly Sith apart from the white, snake-like figure, but all of them except the prisoner were users of the Dark Side.
None of them? Anakin tried to work out what he himself was, in the dream. Someone who wasn't him, who was neither Anakin Skywalker nor Darth Vader, neither Jedi nor Sith, but someone whose eyes he was seeing through. He was one of a circle of creatures sitting in a circle, most of them dogs, including an expensive-looking hound puppy with cream-gold fur, who was looking up anxiously at the prisoner hanging in the air overhead. He could feel, throbbing painfully in his left foreleg, the brand which held his Force bond with the snake, and he could see that everyone else had one too. The cream puppy's was new and still raw, and he was evidently struggling to resist the temptation to lick it.
The prisoner was a cat with long dark-gold fur, and she was gazing imploringly at him, Anakin, or rather the person Anakin was in the dream, as if he was her only friend here. The snake ignored her as he hissed at his followers, taunting them about dogs who bred with wolves, and dogs who weren't pedigree, and the need to rid the world of all such, and above all, of cats. Anakin could feel the longing of the person he was in the dream to tell the cream puppy that it wasn't true, it was lies, he shouldn't listen. But he mustn't argue. As the snake reared up, about to strike, the golden-furred cat miaowed desperately, 'Severus … please …'
Of course! He should have realised. He was spying on Severus's dreams again, the way he mustn't. Anakin tried to wake, but he remained trapped in the dream, feeling Severus's misery as he watched his friend about to be swallowed by the snake and knew he must not intervene, or everyone would know that he was a cat too, and that would wreck the plan that he had already sacrificed his soul for when he had committed murder, just a few weeks earlier…
He was in the Jedi Temple – no, he wasn't, it was a castle he had never seen before. But it was probably where Severus had been trained, and so Anakin's mind translated it as the Jedi Temple. At any rate, there was a group of four dogs and a wolf – one of the dogs being the cream puppy again – cornering an elderly, sickly-looking fox whose fur was almost completely white with age. One of the fox's paws had been almost torn off by a trap and dangled uselessly, gangrenous and obviously slowly killing him, but Severus could smell that he had been poisoned, too, and that this was killing him much faster. He couldn't be long for this world.
The other dogs were urging the young hound to prove himself by ripping the fox to pieces, but the puppy just cringed away and whimpered.
Severus stalked forward, and, even from a dream-perspective inside his body, Anakin could feel his fur bristling with fury and hatred. The fox turned to him and barked the same message as the golden cat: 'Severus … please …'
He knew that this time it did not mean, 'Please rescue me,' but 'Please put me out of my misery.' But as he leapt forward, cuffing the puppy out of the way with one sharp-clawed paw (yet he wasn't slashing at him as an enemy, but thrusting the puppy out of danger as if it had been his own kitten) to bite through the back of the fox's neck and drop him as a limp heap of fur, he knew that nobody would ever see him as anything but a murderer. He loved the hound puppy who was his padawan, and respected the old fox who was his master, but the fox's friends would hate him forever and the puppy would resent him for stealing his kill.
Anakin woke, drenched in sweat and screaming 'NO-O-O-O!' It was like the visions he had had of his mother's death, and then of Padme's. He still couldn't know for sure how much those visions had been prophecies and how much the ones of Padme's death, at least, had been sent by Palpatine so that he would be anxious enough about danger to Padme that he would agree to turn to the Dark Side, and thus actually cause Padme's death. He still didn't know for sure whether he had murdered her – she had lived long enough to give birth to two healthy babies, and surely if her breathing had been badly affected enough to kill her, the babies would have suffered brain damage? – or whether Palpatine had done so. Perhaps his life had been saved by Palpatine draining Padme's life force to give to him.
The only thing he was sure of was that the sentimental rumour that Padme had died of a broken heart when her lover betrayed her wasn't true. Padme was far too brave to give up on life just because of him. She would have fought to survive as hard as she could, because if her children had only one decent parent, they needed her to make the galaxy a fit place for them to grow up in.
But these visions – were they prophecies of things Severus was going to do? Or memories of things he had done? Memories, surely – even if the people involved hadn't really been furry animals.
