Aaaaah what a crappy fortnight but we're here at last.

LordAries: hope this is what you were after :)

Chapter 62: Anakin

The disappointment had ceased to surprise Darth Sidious and his rage, too, was muted now. His apprentice did not seem to learn anything from being tortured. Perhaps he had tortured her too readily, in the years in which he had first had her in his capture. There had been a fire in her then that he had never quite glimpsed again. Or perhaps she had simply never been strong enough. She had not been the apprentice he had chosen but the one the galaxy had given him, as the other Inquisitors had died at the hands of lost Jedi and rebels. These years of inadequacy would make his victory ever sweeter, Sidious reasoned, when he finally seized Skywalker.

The escape of the children on Bespin was an inconvenience but not a defeat. Sidious had foreseen his victory. Skywalker would come to him in time.

"You seem to do better, Darth Gelid, overseeing construction projects than hunting half-trained adolescents," Sidious mused. "If the rebels are to run and scatter, we require a weapon of mass destruction."

His apprentice watched him, her Force signature fiercely guarded, anticipating the pain.

"The construction of the new Death Star is well underway," he went on. "See that it is finished ahead of schedule."

"Yes, Master."

He might have dismissed her, had a question not been gnawing on his mind. Sidious kept his own presence in the Force shrouded from the kneeling apprentice before him; he was the Emperor of this galaxy and he feared nothing.

"Have you heard anything, my apprentice, of your former Master in recent times?"

Her expression slackened, briefly, in surprise, then hardened again. Shields firm.

"Do not lie to me, Gelid."

A submissive dip of her head.

"I…"

She faltered.

"I do not hear her as I once did, Master. They are just memories, perhaps."

"Indeed."

Surely, they were simply memories. Symptoms of a broken mind. The Light Side could not grant that power of life beyond death. The art of essence transfer to which Sidious devoted his days was possible only through the Dark Side of the Force.

"I look forward to hearing of your progress on the Death Star, Darth Gelid."

She nodded, fortified, and rose to her feet.

"It will be finished sooner than the rebels could ever anticipate it, Master."

Luke jumped to his feet as the surgeon appeared from behind the curtain that made a makeshift cubicle within the newly erected hospital.

"Did everything go okay?"

"The procedure went well."

There was a crash of relief, followed by sinking, dragging guilt that could not be allayed. It was all Luke's fault that Ariarne had been in surgery to begin with. Sewlen Jerac, pulling her bandana from her greying hair, gave an apologetic grimace.

"It's a very painful procedure. I'd do a nerve block for her but it compromises the organic-prosthetic nerve coalescence."

On another day, Luke would have been fascinated. His father had let him pull apart and fix just about anything he wanted, in his childhood, but never those prosthetic limbs, of which he was protective, and perhaps embarrassed. It was to Luke some miracle of engineering that the organic nerves of the human body could fuse and learn to speak with the crude wires of a prosthesis. But today a droid and a young surgeon's apprentice were carrying a rickety stretcher on which lay Ariarne and Luke did not care about engineering today. She was still and silent and pale. The absence of her right arm was so much more glaring now, with a shining prosthetic in its place, instead of a strange depression beneath a blanket that could almost have been a trick of his eyes.

"The anaesthetic will wear off soon but this line here will keep infusing pain relief," the surgeon indicated. "Strong pain relief. She'll probably sleep for most of the next cycle. She mightn't really hear it when you talk to her but you're welcome to be here."

Luke managed a nod.

"Thank you, Dr Jerac."

A weary, creased smile.

"No trouble, ad'ik."

The past cycle had been a lot of trouble, of course, for Mandalore, and for Sewlen Jerac in particular. Luke had heard Korkie and Fenn talking about how the hospital had been the biggest and busiest building in Keldabe, after the Mand'alor's house. They had treated Mandalorians from all over the system. But they'd packed up all their patients and their already sparse equipment and scattered into the boulder-strewn desert along with the rest of Korkie's people. Korkie had reassured Luke that they had done it before, that it was the Mandalorian way, now. The enormous tent had been erected with well-practised precision and Korkie had promised that Ariarne would have received no better care in Coruscant in the age of the High Republic.

Sewlen gave Luke a comforting pat as he sat, with shaking legs, upon a plastic stool.

"Look after that dressing, alright?"

She pressed at the silver film upon his nose and cheek, smoothing it firmly into place.

"No tears allowed."

"I'm fine," Luke grumbled.

He should have been embarrassed that it was so obvious but Luke hadn't slept since before they'd gone to Bespin and he was beyond really caring now. The surgeon delivered some instruction to her apprentice in Mando'a and they left the cubicle, no doubt another patient to attend to.

Luke sat with Ariarne alone.

It didn't feel right; she didn't feel right, in the Force. It was the drugs. Sewlen had said the drugs were strong. She was blurred in the Force, a shadow of her usual self, with none of her gleaming brilliance.

How had they ended up here?

Luke had replayed it a thousand times in his mind. Everything he could have done differently. And stars, there was a lot he could have done differently. He was ashamed of how blind he had been. They had grown so close, so familiar, in their years spent together on Dagobah but there was so much that they had never said. Ariarne had never told him that she still ached for her family in that way, had never shared with him her desperation to know the truth of their story. She had echoed Yoda's teachings and seemed to believe them.

It was almost impossible for Luke to imagine that life, to imagine growing with a story entirely unknown. The shadow of two strangers somewhere above. It had been difficult enough for Luke in the years in which talk of his mother was sparing, when his father's wounds had still ached raw. But that story too had eventually been unveiled to him, while Ariarne had learned nothing on Bespin.

It could not have been true. The Second Sister had spoken to wound her. It was impossible that any parent could have given Ariarne away without protest. They must have adored her.

Luke held her organic hand and felt the prick of forbidden tears at his eyes. What would Ariarne have said, had she woken? She had always been better at meditating than him. He breathed as she would have told him to; it was easier to listen to her voice in his mind than his own. He breathed and he remembered his teachings. This was no one's fault. It had been as was the will of the Force. They had survived the day and would grow stronger and the next time Luke saw Darth Gelid he would kill her.

Blast it. Now he was sad and angry.

Luke took another breath and allowed the tears to roll. Kriff the blasted dressing. He didn't care for the burn on his face. It would scar and that was the way he wanted it. He had deserved much worse.

"I won't let this happen ever again," he told her.

But his voice was thin and Ariarne said nothing. There was the quiet hum of the line infusing medicine and fluid.

Was he angry at her? She'd been so stupid, throwing herself at Gelid like that. Pushing him back where he couldn't help her. Asking that question and opening herself to that hurt. And after never having told him…

But there was a lot, Luke supposed, that he had not told Ariarne.

"No more secrets," he muttered, with a squeeze of her hand.

Rashki had heard of the freer of the slaves. There were whispers of him everywhere, now, around the Outer Rim. Slavers were changing their routes for him; Tatooine was not the haven it once had been. But the Hutts continued to demand slaves in an economy that was built upon their labour and the route had to be braved if a slaver wanted to make good credits. Rashki had been waiting for this day. It was said that every slave that survived long enough to know wrinkles upon their face – and there were not so many of them, these lucky and unlucky survivors – would see the sands of Tatooine eventually. In this rolling life of buying and selling, buying and selling and eventual decommission, a slave would inevitably be thrown into the galaxy's vastest slave market.

Torreus had insisted he be paid immediately and refused the smuggler's safe delivery clause. He had known, too, about the freer of the slaves. He'd certainly not sent Rashki on this journey out of any sort of benevolence – her eyesight had faded too badly for the textile work now and Torreus never could bear to part with a credit to be earned, no matter how low Rashki's market value. But he had given her a wink as he had sent her; he had known she was in with a chance.

Rashki sat tucked against the wall of the hold of a ship that must have been at least as old as she was and waited for him. After all these decades, these fruitless turns around uncaring suns, she held an optimism that should have long been stamped out of her. After all these decades, Rashki knew she was due some good luck.

And when it came, many cycles into their journey, it was just as the stories had promised.

The boarding was innocuous, at an unavoidable fuel stop. The cry from the cockpit sudden and short. Rashki flinched an instinctive hand to her back but the slavers had never had the chance to activate the mechanism that would have ended them. There was the humming of an ancient weapon, already extinguished by the time the great warrior emerged from the cockpit and into the hold.

"You're free. Unless anyone wants to get off here, I think it's safest to start flying, then I'll deactivate the chips in hyperspace."

The news was delivered in Basic, and then in Huttese, the language not only of the slavers but of the galaxy's slaves. His accent was faultless, natural. The stories said that the freer of slaves had been a slave himself, once. It seemed impossible, looking at him, towering at such a height, that he ever could have been tied down. His hands glinted a dark carbon as they emerged from his billowing sleeves. The stories said he had been a Jedi once. Rashki could believe that.

No one opted to leave the ship at this satellite fuel stop. No one seemed able to speak. They sat in stunned silence as the ship roared and then lifted into their strange new future. It seemed to handle far better under their rescuer's guidance, almost like a new ship entirely.

A new ship, a new future. A new life.

You're free.

They were the words of a dream, for a slave child. The words a slave grew to accept they would never hear. And they had rolled so easily from his lips, as though he had said them a hundred times before. When the galaxy rushed past them in luminous streaks of white, their rescuer emerged from the cockpit. Behind him, Rashki could see where he had stacked the bodies of the smugglers in an orderly heap, packed in dark dura-plastic. Rashki's brother had been packed like that, jettisoned into space with the rest of the trash, when he had fallen ill on their journey between their first master and their second.

Justice.

But the warrior did not revel in his violence. He knelt and spoke gently to the children, showed them with patience the tools in his hands.

"It won't hurt you. We will take the chip away. And you will be free."

The slaves queued tentatively at first, and then in an impatient scramble, once it had been proved that their rescuer knew what he was doing and no one would be detonated. Rashki leant against the wall and waited. She had waited seven decades for this moment. She could wait a little longer.

When he reached her, he knelt, head low and respectful, and spoke to her in Huttese.

"It won't hurt, Aunty."

Rashki smiled.

"Nothing could hurt me, child."

Not on the day that she would be free.

She pointed him to the scar upon the small of her back, where he hovered the tool above the puckered skin. It emitted a low whine and a beep. He clicked a button and there was the cold hiss of anaesthetic spray upon her skin. A pressure, a tug, and a release. The man deposited her deactivated chip into her waiting palm and smoothed a dressing upon her skin.

"It shouldn't bleed much."

"I have no blood left to give."

Never in her life had Rashki been given medicine to numb her skin. Not when she had burned herself upon the hot oil in the confection factory, not when her third master had dragged his fingernails down the skin of her chest and back just because it gave him pleasure to do so. Not when she had birthed either of her babies – not with the tear of the first, who had died of the winter cough, nor with the caesarean section of the second, who had become stuck and threatened to kill her in the days in which she was still a valuable slave. She had survived that operation but her baby had not. And no one had thought to numb her skin where they had cut her.

She pressed her fingertips to the small, neat square of woven mesh upon her back. She could barely feel it. She looked at the warrior before her, a jagged scar across his left eye, and felt tears well in her own.

Ah, she was too old for tears. But she would cry because she was happy, because he had brought her freedom and joy, and that was a good enough reason for an old slave to cry.

"You are Anakin," she told him.

Anakin. The freer of the slaves. In the bedtime stories of the children who still knew hope.

He smiled at her.

"Yes. I am."

He squeezed her hands with the metal of his own and rose to stand, walking through the swathes of the weeping and exhausted and delirious from joy, who did not know where they would go next but trusted that it would be some place better. He walked above them all and he seemed to glow like the setting suns.

But as he re-entered the cockpit he faltered, flickered in his brightness. He fished a hand into the pocket of his robes, and gazed at his bleeping comms.

Anakin retreated to the solitude of the cockpit to take the call. His comm indicated Korkie's code and a call from Korkie usually meant trouble. Korkie's half-armoured appearance, against a backdrop of rocky desert that looked in even worse shape than Mandalore's temporary capital, was confirmation of the fact.

"What's happened?"

"Ah…"

Korkie grimaced, fiddled with a strand of hair.

"Look, Anakin, I really don't want to worry you. I know you're out doing a job and you can finish as planned; you needn't do anything for us at all. I just thought we'd best tell you that we've had a close miss."

He gave a lopsided grin.

"A closer miss than usual, that is."

Anakin gave a tight smile in return.

"And by 'we' you mean…"

Leia appeared in the frame beside Korkie and Anakin felt his shoulders slump. Of course, it was his kids. His kids had a way of finding trouble.

"We do need you, actually," Leia cut in. "Your Tatooine expertise is finally going to come in handy, Dad. Han's been captured by Boba Fett and he's taking him to Jabba. He froze him in carbonite! We need you to-"

"Start from the start," Anakin sighed.

He loathed to admit it but Korkie was right; he couldn't abandon this job and run to their aid. They were safe, it seemed, with Korkie already. The boarding of a ship and skirmish against the smugglers was the easy part of his work. Freedom came with new danger for the vulnerable of this galaxy and if he didn't take his time and do it properly, they'd all end up in slavery again before the year was out. This was the part of the mission that Obi Wan would have been in charge of, so many decades ago, when they had worked side by side. An adolescent Anakin would have teased him for being old and wise and not much of a soldier, quietly admiring him all the while.

"Fine," Leia grumbled. "The evacuation of Hoth didn't go all that well. The Falcon blew a hyperdrive. Han took us to Bespin to get it fixed and Gelid was waiting for us. We escaped but she got Han."

Anakin's chest tightened. A very, very near miss.

"Is that all, Leia?" Korkie asked, brow arched.

"It's near enough…"

"Leia has neglected to mention that she and Han were both in Gelid's capture until Luke and Ariarne mounted a rescue effort and got into plenty of trouble of their own," Korkie contributed. "I was a bit late, Anakin, I'm sorry. I've got them all with me now. We've had to evacuate the cities in case the Empire had any ideas of retribution but I think we're okay."

A very, very, very near miss. Leia was in one piece before him but where was Luke?

"Is everyone okay?" Anakin asked. "Was anyone hurt?"

Leia's face darkened.

"Ariarne got hurt. Luke just got a scratch."

"Luke got a burn," Korkie clarified, anticipating Anakin's question. "Small, superficial, no worries. It's on his face. He'll just look rugged like you, Vod."

And maybe it was vain or just over-sentimental but Anakin had never wanted his children to wear battle-scars like his own. He didn't want Luke to have a scar on his face, no matter how small. He had known that face when it was tiny and soft and unblemished. He had known that face when his jaw was round and his cheeks were full and he had known that his son would grow and his features sharpen but he had never wanted to see a scar upon that face. He didn't want Luke to be rugged like him. His children were supposed to have a better life.

"Meanwhile, if you didn't hear me before, Dad, Han's in kriffing carbonite!"

There was such grief, shining in Leia's face. Anakin for a brief moment forgot entirely about Luke's wound and whatever idiocy had brought him into that battle as it dawned on him that Leia cared. Leia cared. Leia was no less stricken than Anakin had been on Geonosis when Padme had fallen from their low-flying ship.

"Han?" Anakin asked, appalled. "Han Solo?"

Korkie shot him a look of warning that Anakin ignored.

"When was anyone going to tell me about this?"

Leia shot him a sullen glare.

"It's not like you were around to ask. Besides, if you think I need your permission-"

"No one is under any illusions that you require anyone's permission to do anything, ad'ik," Korkie advised.

"How old is Han?" Anakin demanded.

Korkie blanched.

"We're getting off topic, here."

"I'm an adult and he's an adult and it doesn't kriffing matter!" Leia erupted. "Why is no one listening to me? Han is on his way to Jabba-"

"In carbonite," Anakin repeated, in faint disbelief.

"Yes! Thank you! In karking carbonite!"

"Then we have time, Leia."

"Time? You'd just leave him there?"

Leia stalked across the desert and Korkie followed, camera jolting, behind her.

"It's fine," she called back, over her shoulder. "I'll get him myself. Forget I ever asked for your help."

Korkie and Anakin groaned their protests in synchrony.

"Leia, think about this for a second-"

"Leia, you know Jabba," Anakin pleaded. "Everything he does is for show. He'll display Han as a warning to keep his smugglers honest. He won't hurt him. And we'll have more luck rescuing him when this has blown over a little. We won't wait long. Just long enough to get ourselves organised and get our strength up again."

His daughter slowed, marginally, in her furious march back towards their small cluster of ships.

"There's nothing wrong with me," she pointed out. "Or you. We're ready, Dad."

"It's you and Luke who need me now."

"Luke just has a burn!" Leia wailed. "The surgeon says it doesn't even need grafting!"

Anakin sighed.

"You're hurting, Leia. And no one makes their best decisions going into a fight hurt. We'll go soon. Promise. I'll finish this job, come join you on Mandalore, and we'll go."

Leia took a long and steadying breath. Stars, she looked like her mother, pulling herself up to stand tall and brave like that.

"You'll be here soon?"

"Really soon. A couple of days."

"And then we'll go?"

"Yes."

"And you're not going to lecture me about all that too-old-for-you and good-for-nothing-smuggler bantha-shit?"

Just like Padme, Leia knew how to strike a deal. To strike when he didn't have much choice and satisfy her full agenda. Anakin sighed.

"Sure. Whatever. Deal."

He didn't suppose it would have ever done him any good, when he had been nine-years-standard and in love with the Queen of Naboo.

"Drop me your coordinates, Korkie. I'll see you all soon."

"How is it that every time we visit this planet, Artoo, the infrastructure is in worse state than we left it?"

The voice of the protocol droid travelled easily through the thin walls of the hospital tent, followed by a flurry of binary bleeps and Korkie's indignant reply.

"I thought you were programmed to be polite! Some mechanic you are, Anakin."

"I was nine-standard, you know."

"I had better manners than that before I started school."

"That's funny. I recall you being the snarkiest child I'd ever met."

"I only meant to say, Master Korkaran," the droid protested, "that it's quite unfortunate a leader of your stature should have to reside in a tent."

Ariarne could almost see the wave of Korkie's hand, the easy smile upon his face. She'd become adept at imagining the world around her as she lay in her bed.

"I've lived in far worse, Threepio. Fenn's not a bad tent-mate. Much better than snoring Anakin on Kalevala in our childhood."

"I don't snore."

"Well, it's been a while, Anakin, but I can assure you, you did back then. Perhaps Padme was too nice to ever tell you…"

The voices became louder and then softer again as they passed by Ariarne's cubicle. She didn't have to be here, anymore, in this bed. Sewlen and her apprentices were always encouraging her to sit out of the bed and walk again, to begin to take part in the gentle activities that made up a normal day. Ariarne didn't mind. Her body was going alright, really. The pain was less now. But getting out of bed meant that the new visitor would see her; everyone would stare at her arm and offer apologies and their pity would seep through the Force and leave her feeling cold and pathetic. Luke would go quiet and stew over his guilt and they wouldn't talk to each other in the way they had once, so easily. It was easier to stay in bed and say that her arm hurt.

There were the muted voices of Luke and Leia joining the conversation now. Luke had told her he would come back and bring her some lunch, if she didn't feel like getting up. Ariarne could only hope that he would forget to do so. It was no good both of them being miserable. It was better if he, at least, enjoyed his father's company. They'd already spent so many years apart.

Ariarne closed her eyes. Maybe she would sleep. Maybe she would pretend to sleep. She hadn't really done enough today to even begin to feel tired. She should be meditating. She wanted to go back to Dagobah, to be with Master Yoda again. She couldn't seem to find her peace on this broken land. Master Yoda would be disappointed in her but he would not be angry for long. He would practice acceptance and they would go back to how they always had been. He would have helped her to forget about the family that had never fought for her, that had never even cared for her…

"I've not properly met you before."

The figure appeared at the foot of her bed, gave a well-practised bow.

"Princess Organa."

Once upon a time, people had bowed before her and called her by that title every day.

"Ariarne," she corrected him.

The man smiled.

"Anakin."

He had Luke's eyes, a soft blue amongst his weathered skin.

"Everyone's having lunch. But I ate on the way over. I thought I'd escape my kids arguing for a few minutes…"

He gestured towards the stool at Ariarne's bedside and she gave a nod of permission. She should have told him to go be with his family and his friends and not here amongst her misery. But there was something warm and gentle about his Force presence. And emerging from his sleeves were two hands of carbon, just like hers.

Anakin sat beside her and regarded her prosthetic without emotion.

"It hurt much?"

Ariarne shook her head. It didn't. It barely hurt at all anymore. And yet…

"I liked it better when I had nothing," she professed.

Anakin nodded.

"I know the feeling."

He pulled a case from the pocket of his robe, reached a hand towards her.

"May I?"

Ariarne proffered the arm. She did not much care who touched it. It was not hers. Anakin flipped open the control compartment and examined the design.

"It's quite well-made. For where we are."

"Sewlen said she's still new to prosthetics. Said she never had the resources to replace anything until a few years ago."

"She's done well. We could improve a few things, probably."

He took a tool from his case and opened the panel a layer further, beginning to make delicate adjustments. He was careful about it; there were no sparks of pain up her arm as there had been when the surgeon's apprentice had last altered her settings.

"Mine used to break all the time," Anakin recalled. "I can make a better arm than anyone in the galaxy, now. Decades of trial and error."

"Thanks."

She hadn't really needed anything fixed. She'd learned to take her clothes on and off so long as they were simple, sturdy garments, and she figured that was about as much fine motor skill as she needed. She would never be a princess, wearing a gown fastened with a hundred buttons down her back, ever again. She would never again draw or paint as her parents had encouraged her to do on snowy days on Alderaan. But it was nice to have company like this. Quiet. Respectful. Anakin was open to her in the Force and he did not pity her.

"So you really survived two years on Dagobah with no one but annoying Luke and crazy Master Yoda for company?" he asked, eventually.

Ariarne gave a reluctant beat of laughter.

"I don't think Master Yoda is crazy," she told him. "I think he's wise. We got along well."

Luke had always said that Master Yoda liked her, that she was his favourite. Ariarne had always protested that Master Yoda didn't like anyone but some part of her had believed it too.

"But he'll be disappointed in me now," she murmured.

Anakin shook his head, voice quiet but firm.

"No, he won't. No one learns without failures."

"Mhmm."

Ariarne had been told that by her parents and her tutors on Alderaan. But it had felt different then. It was alright to fail a test. This seemed like a far greater failure than she ever should have fallen into.

"And I don't think Luke's that annoying, either," she said, trying to find some lightness again.

Anakin's mouth quirked with amusement.

"No?"

Ariarne shrugged.

"I learned not to take it personally when he preferred to hang out with a broken engine than with me."

At this, Anakin laughed. Properly, genuinely. The first true laughter that had been shared with Ariarne since they had gone to Bespin.

"He has terrible manners," Anakin sighed. "My fault. His mum would have raised him better."

After so many years, that flood of love in the Force was still so tangible.

"I used to watch her speeches," Ariarne recalled. "I memorised some of them. When I was a princess, I wanted to be just like her."

Anakin gave a wistful smile.

"She was wonderful."

"My mum and dad used to cry every time they watched one of the old videos."

"I used to cry every time I even thought about her."

Anakin held her gaze briefly and then dropped his eyes, focused himself upon the delicate crossing of the wires deep inside her arm. Centred himself despite the pain of it.

"It feels wrong, sort of," Ariarne confessed. "For me. With my parents. The way the grief gets smaller."

Anakin shook his head.

"It's the only way we can continue to live."

He said it with such certainty. It was a matter he had no doubt long wrestled with himself.

"You don't want to be like Padme anymore?" he asked.

Ariarne hurried to amend the misunderstanding.

"I do. Brave and wise and strong. But I want… in this galaxy…"

How could she strive to be Padme Amidala in a galaxy without a Senate? To speak as she had spoken when there seemed no one left to listen? Ariarne felt her shoulders slump.

"I mean, I was never all that excited about sword-fighting," she admitted. "Not like Luke was. But I want to be able to end this. If being a warrior is what it takes…"

Anakin shook his head, countenance firm.

"I don't want you or Luke or Leia to ever be hurt like this again. It's not up to you kids to face the Emperor. That's my job."

Ariarne sat in shocked silence. It was obvious – through the Force, through the faint surprise even on Anakin's face, through everything Luke had ever told her about his father – that this was the first time that Anakin Skywalker had either said or believed this. That this was a pledge he had long avoided making.

"Luke didn't want that," Ariarne murmured. "He wanted to protect you."

Anakin's expression tightened. He had stopped in his work with her arm.

"I know," he conceded, voice heavy. "I never should have put him in that position."

But there was no anger in him, as Ariarne sensed there once had been so much anger in him. The man sitting beside her was the freer of slaves and he had, over long years, forgiven himself for all he had not been.

"I don't think you'd turn," Ariarne professed.

It was the sort of observation her parents had always discouraged her from making; asides from hinting at her Force-sensitivity, it was just plain rude to voice another's vulnerabilities that had not been shared aloud, no matter how good the intention. Anakin looked at her in faint awe, for what she had read and understood in him. But he did not look to be offended. After a few moments, he managed a small smile and tweaked the last of her electrodes, closing the compartment to the prosthetic arm with a gentle click. There was a quiet confidence about him the in the Force.

"Thank you, Ariarne," he said, eventually. "I don't think so either."

A few moments that I've long been waiting for here - Anakin as the freer of the slaves, and of course finally finding out about Han. (Not great timing, I know). I hope you enjoyed them, as well as my far less-planned encounter between Anakin and Ariarne, which sort of wrote itself.

Work has been keeping me very busy recently and I fear it'll probably be another fortnight for the next chapter - I've got a string of nights coming up and my usual commute writing is difficult when half-asleep. I've got a bit of planning to do also. Not sure how sacrilegious it is to change up the visit to Jabba's Palace... We'll see how we go.

Much love,

xx - S.