'So, after you'd tried to throttle Erik, how did the rest of the day go?' Cheiron asked.

Anakin yawned. By mid-afternoon, he had been more than ready for Wonder to guide his mended hover-chair back to the house, even if he hadn't done anything more strenuous during the day than watch Hephaestus mending it and eat lunch. Back in his room, he had let Wonder lift him onto the bed, slept for a while, woken up, and meditated. Still, the Force kept reminding him, he was just putting off the inevitable. He could sense Cheiron's presence in the living-room below him, with Konstantine and Severus, and he couldn't put off talking to the centaur indefinitely. So now, while Konstantine worked out on the gym equipment in his room and Severus sharpened his claws on a block of wood, it was Anakin's turn to have the how-do-you-feel-about-how-things-are-going conversation.

'It was – peaceful,' he admitted. 'It was interesting to see Hephaestus's techniques.' For as long as he had had the energy to concentrate, anyway. He had managed without sleep for nearly a quarter of a century, so why did he have to feel tired all the time now?

'How did you and Erik get on?'

'Erik is a fool. When we paused for lunch, he threw off his mask because he thought to terrify me with his ugliness.'

Of course, the action hadn't come as a surprise, no matter how swiftly Erik's conjuring-trained hands had moved. Anakin had been aware for half an hour before of the conflict in his mind between fear of removing his mask and malicious glee in wanting to disconcert Anakin by whipping it off with a flamboyant gesture, so he was quite proud of having not given Erik the satisfaction of reacting at all.

After all, it was, as Obi-Wan would have said, a matter of point of view. If you expected Erik to look like a normal human, then he was even uglier than Anakin knew himself to be, uglier than Palpatine, uglier than Palpatine's strandcast experiments. But if you just thought of him as a person called Erik – well, even with his almost bald scalp, noseless skull-like face and yellow eyes, he was a lot more human-looking than most of the people who had been Anakin's friends and neighbours on Tattooine, or most of his colleagues as a Jedi.

'Really?' Cheiron was evidently intrigued. 'What did you do?'

'Asked him to help me eat my lunch.'

Cheiron's approval was tangible, but all he said was, 'Why did you do that?'

'Because he is sad and lonely, beneath his fear and malice and his immature sense of humour. He longs to be accepted as a normal person, and he knows that few people will ever see him as anything but a monster, with or without a mask.'

'So you chose to be kind to him by accepting him as a normal person without comment, and asking him to help you,' said Cheiron. 'That was very mature and compassionate of you. How was lunch, anyway?'

'Good.' There had been bread, roast bird, salad, seafood, and fruit.For dessert, Hephaestus had brought out a chocolate bar. Erik had stared in astonishment at the blue-and-gold foil wrapper. 'Fry's Chocolate Cream!' he had exclaimed. 'I used to buy these for Madame Giry – the box-keeper at the Opera House. She'd spent time in England, and I'd overheard her and her daughter reminiscing about them, so I sent off for some. How did you get one here?'

'Things have a way of turning up,' Hephaestus had replied. In fact, when they had shared out the fondant-filled chocolate, both Anakin and Erik had found it too sweet, so Hephaestus had eaten most of it, but Erik had evidently been touched by the link to his past.

'Did Erik get enough to eat?' Cheiron asked now.

'Yes. He fed pieces of food to himself and to me alternately.'

'So having you to take care of probably motivated him to eat. He often doesn't, you know. Not just because he doesn't want to take his mask off, but because he gets so preoccupied with a project that he neglects himself. It sounds as though you're very good for him.'

'I am selfish,' said Anakin. 'If I can feel compassion only towards people who remind me of myself, it means I love only myself.'

'Even being able to love yourself would be a huge improvement on where you were not long ago,' Cheiron reminded him. 'But perhaps it isn't helpful to think in terms of self-love contrasted with love for other people, as though they were opposites. Some people would say that it makes sense to love your neighbour as yourself because your neighbour literally is yourself. After all, for all we know, all of us could be reincarnations of the same person. Other people – or possibly the same people in a different incarnation, of course! – would say that we are distinct individuals, but that loving your neighbour as yourself means acknowledging that each person matters no more and no less than you do.

'But nonetheless, love needs to grow naturally from the instinct of every creature to love itself, through loving the people you have a particularly close bond with, and then caring for anyone you can see that you have something in common with, to realising that you have something in common with everyone, if only the fact of being a person. You knew when you were a child that the problem with the world is that people don't help each other. But being given the impression that caring about specific people and worrying about their safety makes you evil and dangerous must have been very confusing for you.'

'It was true,' Anakin said. 'I turned to the Dark Side because I loved Padme and was desperate to do whatever I could to save her life.'

'In a sense, yes. But that doesn't mean that loving Padme was the problem. If you had loved her more, you might have asked her what she wanted, or at least thought about what she was likely to want. Would she have thought – even supposing that you could stop her from dying – that her survival was worth your joining a tyrannical regime, overthrowing democracy, and murdering children?'

'No.' The word was barely more than a whisper, as Anakin hung his head, utterly wretched.

Cheiron placed a reassuring hand on his shoulder. 'You didn't mean things to turn out the way they did. You were young and naïve and didn't have anyone trustworthy whom you could talk to about your problems. But all I'm saying is, just because caring about other people can sometimes lead to bad consequences doesn't mean it's generally a bad thing.

'Because you're Force-sensitive, you can directly sense Erik's feelings where most people would just have to guess how another person might be feeling about something. But deciding to be friendly to him, not because you wanted to manipulate him as a useful minion, but because you felt for him and wanted to help him, was your choice. Don't try to trick yourself into thinking it was a bad choice to make.

'I've sometimes wondered whether both Jedi and Sith philosophies started as coping strategies for being too aware of the suffering and aggression of beings all over the universe – whether Jedi decided to cope by learning to be detached and not caring too deeply about any one person's problems, and Sith decided to cope by revelling in pain and aggression, whether their own or other people's. But obviously I don't know; I'm not a Sith or a Jedi, whereas you have been both. But do you think that could be the root cause?'

'Perhaps,' said Anakin. 'Are there other options?' he added.

'Yes, I think so. For example, have you come across a race called the Cinrusskins?'

'No.'

'I'm not surprised. The planet Cinruss is a long way from your galaxy, probably fortunately for its inhabitants. But at any rate, they're a race of fragile, spindly insectoids who evolved a very high ability to sense the emotions of any creature around them. Probably for their ancestors, it first helped them detect and avoid predators and find breeding partners, before it helped them to build close enough social bonds to work together to protect each other.

'Now, as you can imagine, for a Cinrusskin, the easiest place to be is in a group of people radiating pleasant, harmonious feelings, preferably among others of their own species who know how to control their own emotions so as not to let those emotions hurt those around them. But the only Cinrusskins I have met – the only ones who sometimes need to escape to the Rock for refuge – are those who go out into the galaxy and choose to work in stressful situations where they are exposed to a lot of painful emotion. The one I know best started out working as a doctor in a multi-species hospital in space, where there was a lot of background emotional noise not just from patients but from doctors struggling to cope with working with colleagues from a vast number of species who can't even breathe the same atmospheres, where there were racial tensions between oxygen-breathers and chlorine-breathers, for example. He treated wounded combatants from both sides of what almost became the first interstellar war in centuries, and went on to work as a crew member of – and eventually captain of – a search-and-rescue ship scouting for survivors from wrecked ships. Now, can you imagine how stressful a job like that must be, for someone who is not only aware of everyone's emotions, but also cares deeply about them?'

'Yes.' Even coming to the Rock, Anakin knew from his own experience, was no real refuge for someone who was conscious of the emotions of everyone around him – even if being near to the presence of Cheiron, and the peaceful dreaminess emanating from the forested mainland, was comforting.

'Why do you think he might have chosen a career as an interstellar medic?' Cheiron asked.

'I suppose – because he cared. Someone like that must be a person of great compassion and great courage.'

'Exactly,' said Cheiron. He smiled. 'You're making an astonishing amount of progress. And – Severus seems more relaxed as well, today. How are things going between you?'

Well, he had started being honest, so he might as well go on – especially since Cheiron had already noticed a change, and Konstantine had already probably told him something of what had happened. 'Last night, we – had a shared dream. I did not seek to probe Severus's mind, but when I fell asleep, I fell into his dreams – dreams of his memories, I think. At first, they were nearly all painful memories, but when I asked Severus to show me a dream of something he enjoyed, he took me to a vision of swimming together in the lake at his old school, when we were boys. We both enjoyed it, but he said he intended to forget it on waking, because remembering enjoying my company would be too embarrassing.'

'It sounds as though it helped him, anyway,' said Cheiron. 'Now, talking of viewing other people's memories, there is something Konstantine thought you should see…'