It was a very quiet night, dark and heavy with a kind of primeval peace that could not be disturbed by the drama of the transient beings flitting across it, no matter what cruelties they inflicted upon one another. Luke was happy to bury himself in it, desperate for some escape from the ravaged landscape of his life. Tomorrow he would be able to handle it, but for tonight there was nothing, nothing but the fresh night air wafting in from the balcony, the scratching of the insects, the gentle lapping of the water, the close warmth of Mara.

And quite possibly someone else.

His skin prickling with the subtle certainty that he was being watched, Luke thrust himself up on his elbow. The shimmering blue-white figure on the balcony didn't entirely surprise him. He quickly slid out of bed and stalked outside to meet the elusive spirit, determined that it wasn't going to get away without at least some conversation this time.

They stood regarding each other quietly at first, just as eager and awkward as the last time they had met, but for very different reasons. Luke wasn't a prisoner in restraints this time, and his father's features weren't obscured behind a mask, but the intervening years had been heavy ones.

"Hi," Luke finally began, breaking the ethereal silence, his tone dry, abrupt, and more than a bit impatient. "Isn't this against the rules somehow?"

The ghost of Anakin Skywalker just smiled at him, forgiving the brusque greeting. He shrugged. "You've accepted the office of Grand Master now," he said, "with all the attendant duties, privileges, and prerogatives. You make the rules."

Luke narrowed his eyes. He had seen counterfeits before, notably Exar Kun's attempt to masquerade as his father in his dreams a few decades earlier, but this felt different. This felt real.

Anakin's smile faded. "Luke, by now you may well be the most powerful Jedi ever known. Your very existence challenges 'the rules.'" The smile came creeping back. "Besides, since when have you been a rigid adherent of the old ways? Your formation broke all the conventions, you granted yourself the rank of Master when it suited you, built your own training regimen, formed your own Jedi Council, and openly keep a wife and son in the Temple. You seem quite capable of making your own rules."

Luke felt his lip curl. "I didn't have much of a choice most of the time," he observed. "I had your mess to contend with."

Anakin bowed his head in a mute act of contrition, granting the point.

"Look," Luke said, cutting to the chase before they went any farther, "how can I be sure you're really you and not just a dream?"

Another shrug. "Maybe you can't," Anakin said. "Does it really matter?"

"Yes, it matters!" Luke insisted, a lifetime of frustration finally finding an object. "I want to know whether I'm talking to my father or to myself, and don't give me that slag about 'certain points of view.'"

Anakin seemed more wryly amused by that than the comment seemed to warrant. "I have heard that Obi-Wan exercised considerable creative license with the details." He sat down on the stone bench between the planters and invited Luke to join him. Luke found himself accepting the proffered seat before he could remember to be stiff and disapproving. "For what it's worth, I can promise you this is not a dream. Whether or not you believe me is up to you."

"Then where have you been?" Luke demanded, hearing some of the hurt and disappointment of his younger years leak into his voice. "I didn't mind not talking the first time because I was sure you'd be back. It's been thirty-two years! I could have used some advice on a few occasions. Why did you leave me like that?"

His father seemed equally exasperated. "Yoda wouldn't let me come," he finally admitted. "Grand Masters are not people to be trifled with, alive or dead. He assumed any advice of mine would do you more harm than good, and maybe he was right."

Luke sniffed indignantly. "Strange, considering you were the only one willing to tell me the truth."

"Now, that's a bit uncalled for," Anakin cautioned him, "although not entirely unjustified. My motives were hardly pure at the time, you'll recall, and Yoda and Obi-wan only wanted the best for you."

"They wanted me to kill you."

"Well, they weren't the only ones."

"No," Luke allowed, "but they knew who you were. And they knew that I didn't know. Were they never going to tell me, just hoping I wouldn't find out?" That had always bothered him when he thought about it, the inescapable fact that his mentors had conspired to steer him into an unwitting act of patricide. It just seemed like the kind of thing that should require informed consent.

"I know." Anakin sounded resigned, acknowledging that there was no way to pretty up that conclusion. "But don't hold it against them. That was just the old Jedi way. None of them had fathers, or mothers, or family of any kind. It shouldn't have mattered who your father was. All Jedi were fatherless."

"I suppose," Luke said, grudgingly granting the point, "but I still don't like it."

"Obviously. I'll admit to having a strong personal bias on the subject," Anakin continued, "but I have to say I prefer what you've done with the Order, not separating the younglings from their parents, even making the extra effort to keep families together during the training. It just seems healthier. I can't tell you how often I wanted to contact my mother, to just let her know I was alive, and to see that she was all right." He turned to meet Luke's gaze, his eyes shadowed by regret. "I've wondered how things could have been different if I hadn't been obliged to hide my wife and my children. I'm not trying to blame the Council for my bad choices, but having a secret like that can be very isolating."

There it was again, toxic secrecy, burning holes through everything it touched. Luke scowled at the ground. "I hate secrets. But how do I know I'm in the right? I'm not exactly unbiased myself," he said, nodding back toward his wife sleeping in the bedroom. "I barely knew the Jedi code before I was punted into the big leagues. Who am I to go around changing whole chunks of it with a few keystrokes?"

Anakin's sympathetic look turned a bit sly. "Now, I know you've been wanting to ask that question for years," he said, "but I'm pretty sure you already know the answer, or you wouldn't have been bold enough to go ahead and do it. First, you're the senior Master, and nobody alive knows more about it than you do. Second, you spent years studying whatever you could find, and whatever changes you made were made out of conviction rather than convenience. Third," he concluded, "and probably most important, you lived through a crucible that already informed every instinct you need to understand the core of the problem. You experienced the secrecy, the half-truths, the dysfunction caused by the well-intentioned but probably counterproductive disregard for family ties. When you saw that for what it was, you believed it could be different, that the Jedi could be better without having to sacrifice the essence of who they were, and you proved it. That by itself was an impressive act of initiative, especially for one so young." His expression softened with hard-earned humility and profound gratitude. "And one for which I'm personally very grateful."

The conversation was reminding Luke why he had been willing to gamble his own life and the entire rebellion on the belief that kindness and compassion could conquer empires, that while there was life there was hope, and that—whatever Darth Vader may have done—Anakin Skywalker still had dignity, still had value, and was still a man worth saving. It was true that his entire approach to the Jedi code had crystalized that day at Endor, and he still had no reason to regret it. "I'd do it again," he said. "Even now."

The profession clearly meant a great deal to Anakin, and he wasn't ashamed to show it. "Thank you," he said, sounding as if he had almost been afraid he might get a different answer now that certain details had come to light. "I'm sure it's more than I deserve."

"Maybe," Luke admitted, arching his brow and putting on his best stern look, although he didn't quite have the heart to frown. "I'm just sentimental that way."

"Well, I can't say it's done you any disservice," Anakin said, "considering what you've managed to accomplish with it. Sentimentality apparently isn't quite the fatal flaw they told us it was. Comparing what you've built, Luke, with the structures I knew . . ." He shook his head. "Any system that lends itself to less subterfuge and deceit is an improvement, in my opinion."

Now Luke did frown. "What are you talking about?"

Anakin gave him a sidelong look. "No disrespect to the Council of my day," he began, "but let's just say that, considering the alternative, I prefer to see the Grand Master living in a healthy marriage with the freedom to raise his own son and give him his name. Whatever the rules, people will be people, and people have passions, and passions often have consequences. Where do you think many of the Temple younglings came from back in the good old days?" he asked.

Luke supposed it was a fair question, and he didn't like the implications.

"Mysterious, unattached Jedi adepts," Anakin continued, "never to know their parents, never to return home. A few falsified records, a false name or two, and so the unacknowledged and inconvenient offspring of the Jedi found their way into the fold. Everyone knew it happened now and then, but no one talked about it. The most important thing was that everyone remain 'unattached.'" He sighed. "I didn't want to play that game. Your mother deserved better, and I wasn't going to renounce the right to acknowledge you or any child of ours, so we took the risk of a secret marriage. We still had no idea what we were doing. We had no plan and no recourse, just a love we thought could conquer anything."

She did deserve better, Luke caught himself thinking, but then he stopped. This was no time to take the coward's route. This was a transient opportunity, and if he had something to say—everything he had wanted to say at the mausoleum—he had better damn well say it. The things Artoo had witnessed were branded into his memory. "Father," he began. "Dad," he amended, trying the word the way Ben and the other kids used it, "what happened? What happened? I know you loved her, but I saw what happened on Mustafar. How could you? How could you do that to us?"

Anakin closed his eyes and wrapped his arms closer around his chest. "I lost myself," he said simply. "I tried so hard to hold our world together that I crushed it, and for years I still wasn't entirely sure how it happened. I'd give anything to change it. I had no guidance for forming healthy attachments, and I let love become an all-consuming jealous obsession, until I was willing to sacrifice anything or anyone to preserve what we had. The pursuit of more power and more control eclipsed everything else, until I became the poison that destroyed us."

It was as satisfactory an answer as he was ever going to get, and Luke could see the perverse logic of it, even if he couldn't condone it. It could happen so suddenly, a subtle shift into interdependence, a fundamental loss of perspective, and anyone could easily find himself very far afield. "I'm sorry you had to go through all that alone," he said. "I can't imagine losing Mara."

Anakin seemed taken aback by the sympathy. "But I think you can," he countered. "You've already faced the possibility on a few occasions, and with considerably more poise than I did."

"Maybe," Luke said, "but I never quite accepted it, and I'm still not sure how I would cope if the worst ever did happen."

"Well, you'd better figure that out, Grand Master. You opened this can of skettos, and you'll have to set the example. Or should we hope that you die first?"

Luke skewered him with a look. His father wasn't wrong. The only certainty in life was death, but it still wasn't something he liked to think about, particularly when other people felt obliged to remind him to think about it.

"If nothing else," Anakin added, leaning in with some self-deprecating humor, "I could still be a fine example of what not to do."

"Oh, don't worry," Luke assured him. "You're one of my favorite object lessons."

The ensuing silence wasn't uncomfortable, but Luke realized there was something else he had to get off his chest now that he had the chance, once and for all. It probably went without saying, but he would air it anyway for his own sake.

"I never asked for this, you know," he said. "The power, the rank, the prestige, the legacy, none of it. All I ever wanted was you, and Mom, and Leia, together. Naboo, Tatooine, Alderaan, kriffing Coruscant, didn't matter. But I never had that or anything like it, just a gaping black hole you left me to crawl out of."

"I know," Anakin agreed. "I know, and I can never apologize enough for putting all that on you. The future I'd imagined was so different, the dreams your mother and I shared while we were here at Varykino. At some point, I decided I would see the entire galaxy burn before I would let those dreams die, and ironically that was what killed them. I ruined everything, I have no excuse, and I am so very sorry."

There wasn't much more he could reasonably be expected to say. It was enough for Luke to hear him say it, to look him in the eye and recognize his remorse. He nodded, falling back into the patterns of the firm but benevolent Master his office required him to be. "Apology accepted, Jedi Skywalker."

A strange look flashed across Anakin's features, no doubt rooted in some extraneous context Luke didn't understand, but then it was gone. "I don't know if it makes it any better," Anakin continued, "but none of that happened because you were ever unloved or unwanted. I didn't look for you because I thought you were dead, and honestly I wouldn't have been good for you then. As soon as I realized my son was alive, I knew I had to find you. That was my new all-consuming obsession. I went about it like an absolute brute, but that was the motivation."

"I guess Yoda and Obi-Wan were really counting on your aversion to Tatooine," Luke observed. "In retrospect, the Lars farm seems like one of the most obvious places to put me."

"Oh, yes," Anakin said, now looking extremely uncomfortable, "the Larses. Listen, Luke, you might not know about this, and part of me is reluctant to even mention it, but while we're here I have to apologize for what I did to them. I'm sorry, I wasn't in my right mind at the time, frustrations were running high, and what happened was inexcusable. I just need you to know that."

"What are you saying?" Luke asked, his stomach balling itself into a knot, the memory of Owen and Beru's charred corpses as fresh as the day he'd found them. "That was you?" He found himself on his feet without any memory of how he'd gotten there.

"I didn't realize you were their foster son."

"I don't care if you thought Jabba the Hutt was their foster son! You don't do that to people!" Luke was shouting, venting anger he hadn't realized he still had, obliged now to accept that this man, this tragic maniac, had been the death of both his mothers. "Kriffing hell, Anakin! I loved them! And at the same time you were incinerating my childhood, you were torturing Leia and blasting her entire planet!"

"As a point of order," Anakin insisted, "it was Tarkin who pulled the trigger on Alderaan, and we all knew he was insane. But," he amended as Luke squared on him, "I will admit to being complicit in that too. I'm sorry."

"Yeah, I'll bet you're sorry," Luke spat before his more disciplined brain caught up with his mouth. He sighed heavily and pinched the bridge of his nose, trying to come down again, filling his thoughts with those chirping insect calls. He deliberately stopped pacing and resumed his seat. "Is there any part of our lives that you touched and didn't turn to ash?"

"Well . . ." Anakin hesitated. "Would it be a low blow to recall that I saved you from Palpatine?"

"At the last possible minute," Luke qualified, the exchange descending into banter. "And that's probably canceled by the fact that you brought me up there in the first place instead of defecting nicely when I asked you to."

"In my defense," Anakin persisted, "I'm going to point out that I died doing that, and I took the Emperor with me, so I think that trumps all."

Luke rewarded him with a dry bark of a laugh, and then another sigh. "I wish you hadn't," he said, still preferring in spite of everything that his father had survived his injuries at Endor.

Anakin looked keenly sympathetic, both pleased and humbled to know Luke still cared so much. "I don't see how it could have possibly been otherwise," he said. "My death was the price of my freedom. Justice demanded it. I made the most amends I could, and my time was up." He smiled, a fond and bittersweet expression. "I'm satisfied that our legacy will live on in all the incredible things you and your sister have been able to accomplish together. Your mother isn't able to tell you so herself, but we're very proud of you both."

That stirred a much more pleasant spectrum of emotions, cutting through the fog of old grief and regret. "What was she like?" Luke asked. He thought he had a reasonably good idea by that time, but he wanted to hear what his father would say.

"She was . . ." Anakin had to pause as an enormous smile spread across his face. "She was wonderful. She was a lot like you, actually. Don't believe Sola for a minute, Luke; you may look like a Skywalker, but your heart is all Naberrie. Your mother was strong, brave, loyal, kind, and generous to a fault. She didn't look very intimidating, but you didn't want to underestimate her. And she never gave up on me," he said, turning wistful, "even when everyone else had, even when I'd become dangerous to her. That's what struck me most about you when we met again that last day. There was so much of her alive in you, and you had taken up her cause without even realizing it. It was just a matter of time at that point. I couldn't resist you both forever."

It was a subtle but very satisfying feeling, Luke realized, the sense of being grounded in his own reality, finally knowing exactly who he was, where he had come from, and how he fit into the larger picture. "I knew the Hero With No Fear couldn't be completely dead," he insisted.

Anakin scoffed. "That was the dumbest name they ever came up with," he said. "I was made of fear. The war didn't bother me, but I was terrified of loss, of change, of the future, of anything I couldn't control. It left me paranoid, jealous, angry, all the things that made me such a rotten friend, husband and father there at the end. What I couldn't control, I learned to hate. Eventually I hated everything. I hated Obi-Wan. I hated the Jedi. I hated Palpatine, what was left of my body, that blasted suit, that awful paste I had to eat. Most of all I hated myself and the mess I'd made of my life. I found some reason to hate everything and everyone I saw." He smiled again. "Except you. I couldn't hate you, Luke. You gave me hope, a misguided villain's hope, but even that was an improvement."

"I'm sorry I couldn't have done more," Luke said with genuine regret. "It just seems like too little too late."

"Don't start apologizing for things you couldn't change," Anakin protested. "You did everything you could for me, and more than anyone expected. My mess was entirely my fault. I had everything I should have wanted, but I ruined it by wanting more. You, thankfully, made better choices with your life. I threw it all away at twenty-three when Palpatine made his offer, but when you had the same chance, you said no. By forty-six I was burned out and dead, but you had a wife, an infant son, and the other half of your life still ahead of you."

"I'd be lying if I said I hadn't thought about that at the time," Luke admitted, painfully aware that he had already outlived his father by nearly ten years. It had been a grim point of reference that had always lingered in the back of his mind, wondering what his forty-sixth year would look like if he lived to see it. He hadn't expected it to bring him the crowning joy of his life, and he distinctly remembered staring out at the stars aboard the Errant Venture with a newborn in his arms, appreciating the quiet and yet monumental significance of first meeting his own son at the same age Anakin Skywalker had truly met his, just before breathing his last aboard a doomed battlestation. There was an undeniable and melancholy harmony to their lives, all the while playing in stark counterpoint to one another.

"Obi-Wan was very touched that you named young Ben after him, by the way," Anakin confided. "He loved you like a son, though he would never be allowed to admit it, and certainly invested more time and care in your upbringing than I did. It means a lot, especially for someone who was never allowed to have sons of his own."

"He meant a lot to me," Luke said, although he knew it wasn't something he had to explain. Whatever difficulties he'd had with Obi-Wan, the old Jedi Master had been his constant though often unseen guardian throughout his childhood, a presence Luke had not always understood, but always appreciated.

"There was a time when even he was tempted to leave the Order, you know," Anakin told him. "He met a woman, the kind that leaves an impression you just can't shake, and he wondered if a life and a family with her would be worth it."

Maybe it would have been worth it, but then the galaxy would have been deprived of the legendary Master Kenobi. "That's just the kind of unnecessary dichotomy I've been trying to avoid," Luke said. "Is it really too much to hope for both? I could sooner stop breathing than leave the Order, but I wouldn't be myself without Mara. How are we supposed to be effective if we're only allowed to be half alive?"

Anakin shrugged. "Just another of the many well-intentioned disciplines that ossified on the Order until the Jedi were suffocating themselves," he supposed. "It was a problem no one really wanted to tackle."

Luke shot him a rueful smile. "Sorry you all missed the reforms by a generation."

Anakin turned the same expression back on him. "If I had known that Padmé's son would be the next Grand Master, and that he would rebuild the entire Order exactly the way she would have, I wouldn't have worried."

That was very gratifying to hear. Despite the fact that his mother had not been trained in the Force, perhaps had no aptitude at all, and was not able to manifest herself in the same way his father could, Luke was gradually feeling closer to her, finally able to recognize her in his own habits and personality quirks. His whole life had been spent trying to define what it meant to be a Skywalker, but now he was learning to understand himself in a very different context. It seemed the Naberrie legacy lived loudly in him. His thoughts were impulsively drawn back to Grandfather Ruwee and his secret scrapbook. Luke hoped the old man's suspicions, though unproven at the time, had been some consolation in his last years.

Anakin was looking at him again. It was the deep, melancholy, appreciative look of someone who understood how fleeting the best moments in life could be. "I'm glad to see you happy," he said. "It's a rare thing, what you and Mara have together, bonded the way you are. That's not something that happens even once in a hundred generations. Definitely a love story for the ages."

Luke glanced away, a smile tugging at his mouth. "She calls me her light," he said, "but she's my anchor. She makes the madness make sense."

"I never did like her," Anakin admitted, harkening back to the distant past. "Probably just more bad judgment on my part. It seems so pointless now to remember we were fighting over Palpatine's favor."

"Do you know where she came from?" Luke asked, still curious in spite of himself.

Anakin shook his head. "The Emperor kept his Hands to himself, you might say. None of us knew where any of them came from, and they weren't even allowed to know about each other. There were rumors, certainly, that he found her in the underlevels of Coruscant, trafficked her from Kuat, or even that he'd stolen her from Mandalore. Honestly, your guess is as good as mine."

"She says she doesn't want to know," Luke said. "I kind of want to know, but that's not my patch to dig."

"Doesn't matter," Anakin insisted. "You both know who she is. She's the woman who loves you, a Jedi Master, your wife, and the mother of your son. That's all she wants to be, and that's enough."

It was enough. More than that, Luke was realizing that this unlooked-for conversation with his father was enough. He didn't have to ask the myriad petty questions that had cluttered his thoughts since childhood. He didn't even have to hope for another such meeting in the future, as much as he would like it. It was enough. He could accept it and be satisfied rather than be continuously grasping for more. It was already more than he had expected.

They sat together in silence beneath the stars, deep in the heart of that remarkable place. That illusion of timelessness had briefly become real, and they were able to reach one another across the abyss of death itself. It was incredible. It was wonderful. It was enough.

Luke finally sighed, aware that dawn was not far off. "Is it time for you to go?" he asked, climbing to his feet.

Anakin smiled, doing the same. "I'm exactly where I should be," he said. "It's you who needs to go back." He nodded back toward the bedroom, back at Luke's sleeping form still in bed with Mara.

With a queasy flash of clarity, Luke glanced down and realized he was just as spectral as his father, that he was visiting Anakin's world rather than the other way around. He was dressed in black, the front corner of his tunic hanging loose in a way that immediately transported him back to a fateful day on a forest moon three decades past. The time and distance didn't matter. For that moment they were just two young men in their twenties, so similar and yet so different, each burdened with the sorrows of a lifetime.

There was a powerful resonance between them, Luke's sympathy for the appalling disaster that had been his father's short life, his regret that he couldn't have been present for him sooner or shared his own life with him, Anakin's profound remorse intermixed with gratitude, and his enduring pride in what his son had been able to accomplish. The past was gone. They couldn't justify it, they couldn't change it, they couldn't fix it, but they could build on it. The field was there, but they would have to grow their own flowers. Luke didn't have enough hubris left to assume he had built a better Jedi Order than the one the Empire had destroyed, but he could still hope that he had.

He reached without thinking to clasp his father's hand, and they were both a bit surprised that it was possible. Not satisfied with that under the circumstances, Anakin pulled him into an enormous hug that was long overdue, so strong and tight that Luke felt many cosmic injustices righting themselves. There were no tears in the spiritual realm, but just experiencing his father as a man rather than an armored cyborg was enough to reduce him to that deepest part of himself that had been frozen in time, a lonely boy who just wanted to know his parents. It was a cruel irony how much that knowledge usually hurt when he found it, but this was different. This was something he had wanted all his life.

"I'd have visited you wherever the war tribunal put you," Luke professed into Anakin's broad shoulder, holding on with some of that frustrated desperation he'd felt at his mother's grave. "I wish the kids could have known you. We could have salvaged something."

He felt rather than saw Anakin's sad smile. "I'm sure you would have," he said, "but I don't think there was a war tribunal in the galaxy that would have let me live, not even if Luke Skywalker had asked them to." He pulled back a bit to look him earnestly in the eye, holding him by the shoulders. "You're everything I should have been, Luke, and maybe more. I'm afraid I did a lousy job of being the Chosen One. I'm sorry I couldn't carry that for us, that I left you so much of that burden, but you're the best legacy I could have asked for, you and Leia and all the kids. Don't regret it, and don't look back. You still have too much to live for."

His earnest look hardened into a warrior's resolve, the kind that usually concealed deep wells of emotion. "Now," he said, "go back to Mara. Live that life you've earned for yourself, because time may be shorter than you think. You said you wanted my advice, and this was the hardest lesson I ever had to learn, something I didn't accept until the end, something I think you already know. All things die, and eventually even stars burn out. Love as hard as you can, Grand Master, and if you can somehow bear to meet the end with a smile and teach your Knights to do the same, you will have conquered one of the greatest challenges of all."