Parental Duties
By Rey
Chapter summary: Luke plays catch-up all too often. And even when he finds the seeming end of the journey, he finds that he still has to play it yet longer.
19. Luke: The Source
The ripple in the Force was huge.
Luke was combing through planets round Serenno for Sith artefacts that he must get rid of when he felt it. even Leia felt it, and she has a weaker sense for this kind of thing.
He met with her briefly on Hosnian Prime while he topped up his fuel for this new search, and she was just as concerned about what might have caused it. Hopefully it's not the Emperor coming back to life or something like that! Just in case, though, he's packed up all the little ordinance she insisted he bring with him. A well-timed, well-thrown flashbang can distract storm troopers like few else, after all. Not even his lightsabre can do that, though he shan't admit that to her!
He lets her track his person and his starfighter, too, though he made her swear she'll be the only one monitoring it. He likes knowing that she knows where he is. It feels like she's keeping him company physically, not just at the back of his mind via their natural twin bond that he had to unearth and strenghten when she began her training in the Force. But he hates some of her acquaintances, and doesn't want Han to go snooping after him – it's just too dangerous! – and there could still be a price on his head even after this long, too.
But, anyway, the ripple seems to have originated from Tython, of all places: the home of the ancient Jedi Order, long before the more modern one was established on Coruscant… and he has just remembered, too, that Ahsoka recently told him that there was a potential student for him, who looked like Master Yoda but had a Mandalorian as a parent, whom she had sent to this very planet.
There's neither a being armed and armoured from head to toe nor one that is small and green with long, large ears round the ruins of the ancient Jedi temple, though, when he lands there and investigates.
But the ripple came from here, yes. And, up close in the physical plane, even the days-old remnant still feels powerful.
`What did the little one do?`
The alarmed question is even more relevant and even more pressing when he scrutinises the site round the Seeing Stone deeper physically and in the Force and finds evidence that lots of Force-sensitive youths were here recently. Maybe even at the time of the ripple bursting.
`Did the child summon people here instead of just communicating with one?`
The picture he is assembling becomes more bizarre when he traces the path of the… panicked?… children down the hill and, where they seemed to be pooled for some time at the bottom, he finds the leftover imprint of some kind of landing gear.
Three sets of them, if he is not mistaken. From a model he isn't familiar with, too, though the distance between struts in each set seems to indicate the size of a starfighter.
And, when he traces the path further, he finds imprints of yet another ship, this one bigger and heavier. Perhaps a gunship?
And there's yet another one farther away, of a similar size but definitely a different model.
`But this planet is supposed to have been abandoned long ago! Did the Mandalorian bring a lot of people here to guard the child? But Ahsoka said nothing about companions….`
He frowns, and the frown only deepens when he finds imprints of so many heavy boots churning the surrounding land.
`Storm troopers? But, no, these are heavier, and… not alive? And where are they now? There seems to be no fight here. where did the children go? Where did the rest go? Were these things hunting the children?`
He jogs back to his fighter, now, urgency nipping at his heels.
It's so hard to meditate while so many horrible imaginings run in his mind at the same time. But he stubbornly, defiantly does it, anyway, once he has seated himself in the X-Wing and closed the canopy overhead.
"Don't take off yet, Artoo. I need to find where they're going," he instructs his friend, a little belatedly, before plunging deeper into the Force.
He brings to mind the sensation of the ripple's imprint, and the children's likewise, then coaxes them to reveal where they led to. It's like trying to coax a pair of skittish wild eopies from different herds to run together towards a set destination, really. But it's for the children! So he keeps going, and lets his fingers input the coordinates once the unseen path leads him away from this Force-rich world, and lets his physical body follow his mind once it's done.
Artoo squawks, maybe, or what he dubs his "farmboy brain" does, or both, but he can't afford the distraction right now, in any case.
He lifts off, soars away from Tython, skips and dodges and slides on the edges of celestial bodies and gravitational wells and one or two solar storms, and keeps flying until the path is about to lead him onto the surface of a planet that is being battered by the tail-end – or beginning? – of a solar storm.
It's not really the solar storm he's worried about, though, but the Imperial cruiser skulking on the fringes of the storm, which seems to have been there for ages.
`Are the children down there? Are the Imps waiting to ambush the children? How did the Imps know of the children, though?`
He grits his teeth. His heart burns with the fury of the two suns in the heights of their arcs across the sky.
`Force-sensitive children. What do the Empire remnants want with Force-sensitive children? Isn't it quite enough already that they hunted and killed those kids or brainwashed them?`
He forces his mechanical right hand to let go of the yoke, which is crieking alarmingly already under the strength of his tightening grip, and has it finger the ordinance belted to his person instead, as his usual self-soothing gesture for when he had to do some groundwork during his "rebel days."
`Did Leia foresee this? Is this why she packed me so much of it?`
Well, regardless, he can't have the Imp cruiser ambush his potential students, can he?
Better yet, when he has Artoo scan the cruiser, he finds that most of its inhabitants are droids, not living organisms – at least not according to the Force. It makes it easier on his psyche regarding what he can do to disable this ship.
Leia will want the data from this cruiser, though, so he can't just blast the thing using strategic shots.
`Well, my stealth mode won't survive the first shot, anyway. Bother.`
With that resigned thought in mind, he has the fighter drifting close to one of the hangars of the cruiser which is somehow open, instructs Artoo to keep the stealth mode on until he returns and keeps inside the fighter in case he needs a quick escape, then leaves to clean up a cruiser for his sister and the possibly hunted children.
It sounds ludicrous even in his own mind. But, still, it's what keeps him going. Even when he has to repeatedly, continuously hack and explode some kind of new battledroid model into pieces, even when he finds a pair of tiny manacles in one of the brigs, even when he finds the commander of this cruiser and it's Moff Gideon, even when the moff tries to fight him using a black lightsabre… and even when, just after he has secured his victory at the end of a long, long, long battle that makes his heart sick with various horrible possibilities, just as he is looking out into the now-stormless black of space, he witnesses a small fleet of mostly mish-mash ships rise from the planet to which the viewscreen is facing and jump into hyperspace.
`Five ships. Three of them are identical in model. – damn it! I'm too late. Now, where are they going?`
He really doesn't look forward to tracing the flight path in the same way again, so soon after the first one. He has a miserable headache from that one! Not to mention all the various injuries he has accumulated ever since.
Well, he is aware of those bothers only now, when adrenaline is starting to abandon him and a securely tied up Moff Gideon is cackling like a mad thing on the background, but it still counts.
`Now, do I tell Leia first or tail the brats?`
He purses his lips. It's so hard to think while his whole body is protesting so much and Moff Gideon is mocking him relishingly.
`If the children are this skittish, though, they won't appreciate me bringing Leia down on them, will they?`
He grimaces. He loves his sister, but… well….
Giving himself a mental shrug, he makes sure that the communication line and tracking devises in the cruiser are disabled at least for the time being, instructs Artoo to stand down using their prearranged code, and once more dips into meditation.
`Now, if only those little eopies will stay still once I arrive….`