Anakin knew he should be doing more to help Severus, but he was still trying to make sense of why the mirror should have shown him Obi-Wan Kenobi, of all people. The man who had chopped his limbs off and abandoned him to burn to death without even having the decency (or the sense of self-preservation) to finish him off properly. The man who had tried to trick Anakin's own son into murdering him. The man he used to love and revere. The man he had called 'Master' since he was nine years old. He supposed now, looking back, that it was supposed to mean 'Master' as in 'teacher' rather than 'owner'. Most Tattooine languages had separate words to distinguish between the two concepts. Basic didn't. And he had never really believed that he had been set free. Did Obi-Wan, or anyone who had been brought up as a Jedi, have the concept of freedom?

Severus interrupted his thoughts. 'Was Padme the girl you told me about?' he asked. 'The one you hoped would be your girlfriend?'

'Yes,' said Anakin. 'I met her when I was nine years old. She was so beautiful that I thought she must be an angel. Then I began my Jedi training and did not see her for another ten years, but I thought of her every day. When I was nineteen, I was assigned to be her bodyguard – she was a Senator, an important politician. We got married secretly…'

Severus looked at him curiously. 'Are Jedi not supposed to marry Muggles?'

'We are not supposed to marry anyone,' explained Anakin. 'A Jedi is not allowed to have close emotional ties to any particular person – and yet we are expected to be compassionate towards the universe as a whole, without caring if specific people we loved were murdered or died in ch-childbirth…' His voice broke into a rasping cough, and he sank down onto the bed. Severus, after checking that he wasn't dying, fetched him a glass of water, and waited, giving him time to regain control of himself.

'So – Luke was supposed not to care about you, not just because you were a Sith, but because as a Jedi he wasn't supposed to care about family anyway?' the wizard asked at last.

'Correct. If he is rebuilding Jedi culture after my death, I hope he rebuilds it into something better. I think he will.'

'From what I saw, he looked a rash, foolish young man who managed to be right about you by dumb luck,' retorted Severus.

'Yes. But his folly was wiser than everyone else's wisdom. Only...' – Anakin wondered how to to put it into words. 'I was a fool like him, but I did the opposite to him. He was foolish enough to trust me, and he saved me. I was foolish enough to trust Chancellor Palpatine, and that destroyed me. Luke loved me enough that he saved the galaxy. I loved Padme so much that I – became obsessed with the fear that she would die in childbirth, sold my soul to the Dark Side to gain the power to save her life, which led me to commit atrocities from mass murder of children to strangling Padme, causing her to die in childbirth.'

'"Yet each man kills the thing he loves,"' said Severus, sounding as if he was quoting some poem.

'Konstantine did not,' Anakin retorted.

'No. He raped and tortured the woman he loved, when he was ordered to do so, but he was Slytherin enough to trick Admiral Vorrutyer into letting him save her life. But I don't get the impression that she thought that was a mercy. Eventually, she killed him, and he stood and let her do so, because it was the only way he could think of to atone for his guilt.'

'You never murdered a woman,' said Anakin, realising as he spoke that he was making this sound like an accusation. 'When you showed me your memory of killing a mortally wounded man at his own request, that was the first time you had killed. I could sense it in you.'

Severus looked away, and shielded his mind so that it was harder to read his emotions. Anakin wondered how to reach him. Something prompted him to change the subject. He didn't know how he knew what to say, except that somehow the Force was prompting him. Perhaps Cheiron was right and, having been a Jedi and a Sith, he was called now to be something different from either – and befriending Severus, caring about Severus, was part of it. There was something he needed to ask, but it was awkward to approach, and he had never been good at being tactful.

'Did you know that I was born a slave?' he asked. 'A visiting Jedi won me in a bet when I was nine years old. I hoped he had come to Tattooine to free us all, but he said he wasn't there for that. I vowed that when I grew up, I would come back and free all the slaves. Instead – I gave myself, body and mind and soul, to a man who enslaved the entire galaxy.'

Severus nodded in complete understanding. 'I thought wizards could be free of having to hide from Muggles who hate and fear us, once.'

'Do you know if Konstantine was a slave to that family he worked for?'

'Not legally,' said Severus carefully. 'I don't know whether chattel slavery is legal on Barrayar, but I do know that only a free man can be oath-sworn as an armsman. It's not like being a house-elf, so much as – two people exchanging vows of loyalty and protection until one of them dies, almost like a non-sexual form of marriage. Psychologically, though, I'm not sure Konstantine knows how to be free. He's a human with the mentality of a house-elf. He doesn't trust himself to make the right decisions, so he fixates on anyone he can look to as an authority figure. As far as I know, after the war he became armsman to Aral's father, so he'd have been freed from his vows when the old man died, and he could have retired then, but instead he must have chosen to swear loyalty to either Aral or his son. But that isn't about not having the legal right to go free. That's just him.'

'Were you a slave?' Anakin asked next.

'Not legally,' Severus said again. 'We – that is, wizards of the British Isles – passed laws in the 12th century – eight hundred years before my time – that no wizard could own a human, goblin, centaur, dwarf or merperson as property. Originally, the law was supposed to include elves, but the elves objected. They insisted that, because of a terrible genocide committed by an elf wizard, centuries earlier, they weren't fit to be free or to be allowed to carry wands and train as wizards, and they demanded the right to be the slaves of humans until elves as a race had done sufficient penance.'

'Were you a slave?' Anakin repeated. 'Even if it was not legal?'

'I – in a sense, yes. As a teenager, I got involved with a group that I thought could make life better – make wizards safer from Muggles, and Slytherins safer from Gryffindors. By the time I realised they were terrorists who were more likely to make life worse for everyone – especially Muggleborn wizards and witches, like Lily – I was in too far to leave, and I decided that the best I could do was to make myself useful enough to the leader that he might spare Lily for my sake.'

'Your Sith master?'

Severus frowned at the description, but considered it seriously. 'You could say that,' he admitted at last.

'The one you had a Force bond with, in the scar on your arm?'

'Yes. I offered my services as a spy. I brought him a prophecy which he decided referred to Lily's unborn son – and so he resolved to kill the child, which was bound to mean killing Lily and her husband if they fought to protect him. I tried to bargain for Lily at least to be spared, pretending that I wanted her as my slave, but the Dark Lord – Voldemort – wouldn't agree to that. So instead, I went to the only wizard I knew who was more powerful than the Dark Lord and might be able to protect Lily from him – and who I thought might want to do so, since Lily and her husband were part of his vigilante army fighting against the Dark Lord.'

'Who was he?'

'The Headmaster of our old school.' Severus sat on the bed beside Anakin and took slow, deep breaths, trying to force his face to look calm, but his shielding had slipped enough that Anakin could feel his mind heaving with waves of grief, guilt and anger. 'I asked him to hide Lily – hide her family, her husband and the baby – he asked me what I would give in return, and I said, "Anything." I changed sides and worked for him from then on – betrayed those who had been my friends – he did not keep his side of the bargain. They – Lily and her husband – had a magic item that might have protected them – except that he borrowed it to study it, and never got round to giving it back – Lily and her husband were murdered – I wanted to die – the baby survived – somehow the Dark Lord's spell had rebounded off him – everyone thought the Dark Lord was dead, but the Headmaster was sure he was coming back – he told me to help protect the child as he grew up – only – he didn't tell me – it was never about saving the boy. It was about grooming him to die at the right time. He had a piece of the Dark Lord's soul lodged in him, and the Dark Lord needed to be tricked into killing him before there could be any chance of killing the Dark Lord. I was dying when I passed this information on to the boy – the Headmaster was dead…'

'The man you killed?'

'Yes. Anyway, I did not live to see the outcome, but – I don't know if there was much hope, whatever happened.'

'Was this Headmaster a Sith, too?' Anakin suggested. 'Was he your "Dark Lord"'s Master?'

'I don't think Lord Voldemort was secretly posing as an enemy on the Headmaster's orders,' said Severus. 'It would make a neat plot twist if they were, but life isn't always that tidy. They both wanted to win, and were both willing to crush as many people as necessary to get there.'

'Why did you bother to fight?' Anakin asked.

'Because – because it was worth it. Albus Dumbledore wasn't a good Headteacher – and I can say that from my experience both as a pupil at his school and as a teacher. Bullying was rampant; I was nearly killed as a teenager, and some of my students – not just Slytherins, either – had some very bad experiences from the ones who could get away with anything because they were the Head's favourites. But the year after Dumbledore died, when I was required to take over as Headmaster, convince everyone that I was loyal to Voldemort, and allow genuine followers of Voldemort to teach at the school, took it to new levels of horror. Now it wasn't a matter of students getting away with bullying, but whole classes of students being required to practise torturing other children with highly illegal curses, and being tortured themselves if they refused. Voldemort had become more and more mentally unstable over the years and was murdering not just potential rivals, but anyone unlucky enough to be in his way – Muggles who tried to confront him, children, anyone.

'But even before Dumbledore's death, the night after he told me what the plan was – that it involved deliberately sending a teenage boy to his death – and I wondered whether anything was worth fighting for, I had a dream. I dreamed that it was twenty years on, the boy – Harry Potter – was dead, Voldemort was reigning unchallenged, and I was one of only three people left who were opposed to him. And in my dream, a boy called Scorpio – the son of one of my students, the grandson of a boy I was at school with – came to me for help. He came from a timeline where it had gone the other way – Voldemort was defeated, and Potter had somehow survived, and Scorpio was best friends with Potter's son, who was in Slytherin and was named after me, but they had been playing with time-travel and somehow created the timeline where Voldemort won. I could guess that in his timeline, I was dead – he looked so astonished to see me alive – and I knew that I would willingly give my life again to restore his timeline.

'Of course, the dream couldn't show a true future. It wasn't just that Voldemort couldn't be defeated without Potter's death, but that it wasn't remotely believable that Potter would name his son after me, or that he wouldn't disown him for being sorted into Slytherin and being friends with a Malfoy. But I knew that the dream had shown me one truth: that with Voldemort in power, life would keep on getting worse, and that even if defeating Voldemort didn't bring about utopia, it was still worth fighting for and dying for, not for Lily Evans or Harry Potter, but for everyone. And I knew that if I could choose to give up my life for something more important than me, then Harry Potter was capable of making that choice, too, and – it was dishonest not to let him know what the situation was and allow him to choose.

'So – I suppose I didn't turn against Voldemort because the Headmaster forced me to defect to his side in exchange for protecting Lily. I would have rebelled against Voldemort anyway, because I couldn't respect a man who would behave like that. But Death Eaters who defected on their own got killed, so I needed allies if I was to stay alive long enough to achieve anything.' Severus had started to cheer up at this thought, but now sank his head into his hands. 'Only,' he mumbled through his fingers, 'I can understand why Dumbledore didn't care about me, but why didn't he protect Lily for her own sake? Why did he even let me get away when he knew I'd overheard the prophecy in the first place? Did he want her dead?'

'What do you think?' Anakin retorted.

'I don't know. I don't think I can know. There are two possibilities: either Albus Dumbledore was a fiendishly clever evil genius and everything that went wrong was part of his plan, or he was a fallible human who sometimes made bad decisions. And considering that I know for a fact that he did some idiotic things, from abandoning a sleeping toddler whom he was counting on to be the Chosen One on a stranger's doorstep and just hoping that someone would wake up and take the child in before he either froze to death or woke up and wandered off, to dying of putting on a magic ring that he knew was cursed…' (and here Severus's presence flickered again, showing grief, exasperation, and, surprisingly, even love for the man he had been accusing of being an evil despot a moment earlier), 'I suppose the latter is at least as likely. I think – if he had wanted to be an evil Dark Lord, he'd have been better at it. He'd have been ruling the world by the age of thirty.'

'At any rate, even if he was not a Sith, he was still not the mentor you needed,' said Anakin. 'Obi-Wan – he wasn't a Sith, but he was not the mentor I needed. But – we were friends, once. Before everything went wrong.'

'People don't want to stay friends with people like us for long,' said Severus grimly.

'No. Perhaps that is why the Force pushed me to you and Konstantine. Because the three of us are "people like us".' Anakin remembered something he had heard long ago – not in the Jedi temple, but earlier than that, probably in some Tattooine legend that his mother had told him when he was a very little boy. 'Sometimes, a bond arises between three heroes which makes them greater than any of them could be alone,' he said. 'There are usually two men and one woman, and the woman is generally the lover of one man, and best friend or sister of the other. All three are brave, deeply loyal to each other, and continually save each other's lives. My – my twins and my daughter's boyfriend have that bond.'

'There was a gang like that in one of my classes,' said Severus. 'Two boys who were dangerous louts who liked to make potions explode, and a girl who took advantage of the diversion to steal ingredients from my cupboard for her private experiments in brewing. They were a menace, but they were undeniably brave and loyal.'

'And from what we have seen of Cordelia Naismith's memories, she and Aral Vorkosigan and Konstantine Bothari were forming a bond like that,' said Anakin.

'Except that he lost them, by dying and coming here,' Severus pointed out.

'Yes. But he found you. And me.'

'I don't think any of us is likely to turn out to be a woman,' sneered Severus. 'Or to fall in love with any of the others.'

'No. I said that is how it usually works. What we have is – a different band of three. More like three brothers.'