As they settled down for the night, Anakin and Severus met in a shared dream-vision that lay somewhere between meditating and sleeping. It was becoming easier with practice to link minds, and to ensure that the vision took them somewhere they could enjoy being. Severus by day seemed to be making the most of the carefree life of a kitten, chasing any small toy he could bat around, being cuddled on people's laps, and sharpening his claws. Konstantine had brought in a section of tree-trunk for him to use as a scratching post, but Severus preferred scratching patterns into any usable part of wood in the house, such as doors and cupboards. His favourite was a circle with five vertical lines through it. Perhaps it was some kind of magic sigil, and Severus's emotions seemed more concentrated and human when he was actually working on it, but afterwards he would relax into animal mode again, and roll over onto his back to let Anakin Force-tickle him.

At night, when he linked minds with Anakin, he didn't mind being a person, as long as he was his younger self rather than the person he was now. Last night, they had been eight years old and building droids on Tattooine, and then twelve years old and breaking into the Potions dungeon at Hogwarts at midnight to experiment with brewing potions. Anakin as a waking adult knew that Severus in real life, even if he ever returned to human form, probably wouldn't really be capable of building a protocol droid, any more than he, Anakin, would really be competent to brew Polyjuice potion. But in the dreams, whatever knowledge and experience one of them had was easy for the other to pick up.

Tonight, they were in one of the training salles at the Jedi Temple on Coruscant. Ani proudly carried his new lightsaber with its beautiful blue glow from the crystal that had called to him and him alone when he found it in the cave. He loved it, had loved the hours he had spent building the technical components that housed it – and yet sometimes it gave him strange visions in which he was the opponent, chopping off the hand that held that lightsaber.

'Do you need to borrow a lightsaber?' he asked his friend. Sev came from a different school where they did things differently, he knew, but he couldn't really be planning to fight a duel with just a piece of wood, could he? Barely a quarter of a metre long, smaller than Yoda's walking stick, about the most that Sev's hawthorn twig looked able to do was poke someone in the eye, even if did have a piece of dragon heartstring threaded through the middle.

'No,' said Sev firmly, with a glint in his dark eyes. They bowed to each other and raised their weapons to begin the duel. With a flick of his hawthorn wand, Sev sent a tremor through the Force that exploded towards Ani in a blast of red light, hurling him against the far wall and levitating his lightsaber towards Sev, who caught it in his other hand. Now that the enemy had both weapons, it was going to be easy for him to finish Anakin off. Would he have the mercy to behead him cleanly, or chop his limbs off and leave him to burn to death, the way the last one had done? Why was he even thinking that? What 'last one'? Why did he seem to see a slightly older version of Master Obi-Wan's face in his memory – and why was Padme there?

Enough! He must defend himself. Using a move he didn't remember anyone having taught him, he reached out in the Force to grab the black-cloaked, black-haired boy by the throat and lift him into the air. If he clenched his real fingers in a throttling motion, it helped him to focus his mind on spectral fingers crushing his enemy's throat…

Sev must have seen what his hands were doing, because he shaped the Force into a knife that slashed painful cuts across the palms of each of Ani's hands. Ani collapsed in pain, letting go of Sev, who also crashed to the floor…

The pain was sharp enough that it woke Anakin up. Lying there in bed, he could still feel the throbbing pain in hands that he didn't even have and therefore couldn't soothe.

This was nothing, he reminded himself. He had lived with this for the whole of his adult life. When he was a Jedi knight, he had learned to ignore the phantom pains from the nerve endings in the stump of his arm by instead focusing on what the actual messages from his prosthetic hand were telling him. As Darth Vader, he had been so used to everything hurting that sensations from his missing limbs had been the least of his problems. This wasn't even a real phantom pain coming from real nerve-endings, but just the aftershock of a dream.

None of this helped. He was still enough in the dream that he wasn't a Jedi knight or a Sith, he was twelve-year-old Ani who dreaded being whacked with Yoda's walking-stick because it reminded him that, even if they called him a Jedi padawan, in practice he was still a slave.

Severus, standing up on the mattress where he slept curled up next to Konstantine, gave a sound between a faint mew and a cough. Apparently he, too, was still in pain from the injuries he had suffered in the dream.

'I am sorry,' Anakin said quietly. 'I forgot that I was facing a friend, not an enemy. Be calm. The dream is over. We are not, in fact, injured.' Not that he could convince the pain-signals pulsing through his arm-stumps to his brain of this. Severus, however, seemed more able to control his image of his own body. Instead of gasping like a cat who had been almost fatally strangled, he jumped up onto the bed, next to Anakin, and then miaowed and yowled softly in what was almost a song, calming and hypnotising Anakin, sending him back into the dream…

Back in the training salle, Sev went on singing the healing chant until Ani's wounds had closed and stopped bleeding, before bandaging bacta patches to his hands to complete the healing. Only then did he speak. 'I'm sorry, too. I wanted to practise defending ourselves without harming each other – blocking each other's spells, disarming without injuring, stuff like that. Only – we both panicked. When you picked me up like that, it reminded me of the bullies at my school doing that to me.'

'When you cut me, I thought you were going to chop my hands off,' said Ani. 'It was like…' he wondered whether Sev was going to laugh at him for saying this 'a vision of the future, of someone chopping my limbs off and leaving me to die. I have dreams of the future, and they nearly always come true.'

'Sometimes,' retorted Sev. 'And sometimes, enemies just use them to trick you – or they come true because of what you do because you believe them. We had one where one of my pupils thought he had a vision that his godfather was in danger, so he ran off to try to rescue him, and of course put himself in danger, so that his godfather had to come to his rescue and was killed…' He rolled his eyes, realising what he had just said. 'Merlin's pants, now I'm doing it as well! "Remembering" myself as a grown-up – and a teacher! There's no way I want to be a teacher when I grow up!'

'What do you want to be?'

'A potions researcher. Or a healer. We get careers guidance counselling when we're fifteen, to talk about what we're good at and what jobs we might be able to do and what NEWTs we need to take to get them.'

'Do they let you choose what you want to be, in your world?'

'Sure. I mean, unless I commit some terrible crime and get sent to Azkaban, or something. But if I get good NEWT grades, there are loads of jobs around. Don't you get a choice, in your world?'

Ani wondered. 'I don't know,' he said slowly. 'There are three sorts of Jedi, the Guardians, the Consulars, and the Sentinels. The Guardians are the warriors, and most of the teachers here are Guardians, so – I guess I just thought that was what I had to do when I grew up. I mean, as soon as I met any Jedi, I started fighting in a war, when I was nine. But there are the Consulars – they're mostly scientists and scholars and librarians and stuff like that, and I think the Healers are Consulars, as well, and so are the Seers, like Master Yoda. And there are the Sentinels – they're engineers and technicians and detectives. So – I guess that means, if I'm good at fighting and engineering and I can see the future, that means I could be a Guardian or a Consular or a Sentinel. But I don't know if I'm allowed to choose, or if someone decides for us. I ought to ask Master Obi-Wan how it works.' He had always just assumed that because Master Qui-Gon had won him, it meant the Jedi Order were his new owners and he was their property to do what they wanted with. But maybe he had a choice of what he did. Maybe he was even allowed to leave, if he wanted to. 'Are you allowed to leave being a wizard?' he asked.

'Well, I wouldn't stop being magical. But if I wanted to leave Hogwarts after I'd done my OWLs, I could do A-levels at a Muggle school, and apply to a Muggle university. My dad says university's only for posh people, but that's stupid, because university is free these days, because they want anyone who's intelligent to go there, whether they're posh or not. They even pay you a grant to go to university – not as much as if you're working, obviously, but it's enough to live on if you're careful. He's just jealous because he's not a wizard and Muggles didn't have proper schools in his day for people who weren't rich enough to go to private schools, and he's too thick to get into grammar school or university even if they'd had them. It's like when I was a baby, and he refused to have me vaccinated until I was five, because he said he couldn't afford it, and it took the social worker that long to make him realise that there even was free healthcare for women and children, because when he was a boy it was only for men.'

Ani had the fleeting feeling that they had been children before, and then adults, and then returned to childhood understanding life rather better than they really had done as children. But it didn't matter. It was just good to have a friend. This time around, maybe life could be better.