Chapter Text
The problem with participating in both sides of a conflict, apparently, is that everyone is karking stupid. Those on the losing side are made stupid by constrained resources, or by desperation. Those who have won power, even through intelligent means, become stupid over time out of complacency. (Exhibit B: his master, who not only kept doing everything in his power to martyr the Rebel Alliance, but who also kept his quadruple-amputee, borderline suicidal apprentice around for far longer than necessary—just to spite both of them, seemingly. Exhibit A was, of course, Master Yoda. No explanation needed.)
Participating in both sides sucked. It almost made him sympathize with Darth Sidious's Clone Wars machinations. Why did he even bother at this point? It's not as if he had a personal anti-murder policy, clearly. But starting down the path of blowing up entire planets was not only bad foreign policy, it would also make the Force feel icky for weeks, and that was annoying to him personally.
And he never believed his master wouldn't use it. He wasn't about to make a mistake like that again.
The idiocy of the general population wouldn't bother him so much if it didn't force him to stoop to the level of directly involving himself in petty shenanigans such as: personally reviewing thirty-three million pages of blueprints for a battle station that was more vanity project than anything for the sole purpose of overlooking an obvious flaw and making sure everyone else with the capacity to notice overlooked it too; then when no one saw fit to leak the schematics under his nose, covertly informing the saboteur himself of their location so he could find someone to come and steal them; chasing down the Rebel leader who got herself caught with said schematics; and taking so long to kill her incompetent guards (which was just doing her a favor, really) that she had plenty of time to jettison the plans via escape pod.
Hopefully, that was not the full extent of her brilliant plan. No point chasing after an empty escape pod, though, is there? Even if an empty escape pod is in fact highly suspicious and probably worth blowing up just for good measure. He certainly wasn't about to point that out.
So, while the Emperor failing to find his sudden interest in middle management or quality assurance in any way unusual turned out to be helpful to him personally, it did speak to a broader trend in stupidity that was about to culminate in blowing up some hapless Outer Rim planet (possibly even his own, which would be a net positive, really)—unless, of course, he could provide the Rebels with enough intelligence to counter their own stupidity. Lame pun definitely intended, because that's all he had to entertain himself these days. Which probably said something about how stupid he must be to have somehow put himself in this position at all. He could own up to that. As long as he didn't look at any of those memories directly.
(Better dead. Better dead than enslaved. Stolen from their families by coercion or by force, it made no difference. Jedi masters, Sith masters, it made no difference. Masters were masters, slaves were slaves. A slave can only be free by rejoining the Force. Better dead.)
When the elevator at last came to a stop, the hiss of the opening doors brought his attention back to the present. The fact that this gaudy station led to the ridiculous circumstance of Sith Lords riding elevators was perhaps the worst part of the whole endeavor.
He pulled himself together. Enough philosophizing for one day. Philosophizing made him antsy. Time to take out his frustrations on the nearest idiot.
He had intended for this idiot to be the Rebel princess. Unfortunately, when the guards opened the door to her cell, she had brown eyes.
Wait. No. She had brown eyes before they opened the door. She even had them earlier, when he had confronted her on her ship. It's just that he had been a little preoccupied at the time. But now, she was looking up at him with big brown eyes—up, because even though she had got to her feet when he entered, she was still tiny—and a defiant tilt to her chin that made his eyes itch. Why did his eyes itch? He blinked repeatedly, but it only made his vision blurrier. He vaguely recognized that she was snarking at him again, which seemed to be a favorite pastime of hers, but he couldn't process what she was saying. Was the Emperor messing with him somehow?
She even had the same hairstyle. Why did she have brown eyes and a Naboo hairstyle? That wasn't fair.
He was supposed to use a mind probe. He had it with him. But he was suddenly afraid of hearing her cry out in pain or fear. Afraid it would sound familiar.
"Where is the Rebel base?" he asked tiredly.
His hoarse, underused voice reverberated tinnily in his ears, but he knew she heard a deep and commanding vocoder. She didn't seem particularly intimidated by the voice, though: more annoyed at being interrupted mid-sentence. That made him want to like her. He stamped down the impulse.
She said some more things. He didn't really hear them, but he knew they didn't contain the location of the Rebel base. Maybe he could look into her mind himself. It would be faster, and painless, but more importantly faster. Usually, people didn't even realize he was doing it. If she really was Force-sensitive, as he suspected, she might try to resist. She was probably good. But he was better.
He was always better. Being better wasn't fun anymore.
He snuck in through a side door to her memories while she was busy shouting. It took her a second to notice, but it took him less than that to realize she had been trained to guard her mind against intruders. He was still on a surface-level mindscape, though one that was made to appear deeper than it was. She was playing comforting memories on a loop in the back of her mind, a practice that appeared self-soothing but was in fact self-protective. It would be harder to break past such vivid memories that included so many of the senses, that had been well-trodden in her mind for so long. That must be why she had chosen them.
The memories were mostly old. The perspective he saw them from was very close to the ground, probably around three feet high. Sometimes he recognized people or places, like the Alderaanian queen and consort. They had brown eyes too, and theirs didn't hurt to look at. He was overreacting.
Then a familiar image made him reconsider. He seized onto the memory with more force than intended, shocking the Princess into silence in the outside world. He felt her probing, trying to figure out what he was doing, but he just watched in silence as the short memory played out in front of his mind's eye over and over.
He hadn't seen it from this angle before. Last time, it had been as if he was sitting in front of her, this child of four or five, watching adult hands weave and pin her waves of brown hair atop her head. He remembered wishing he could do it himself. He remembered daydreaming about the day that he would. He even asked a handmaiden to show him one of his wife's simpler hairstyles so that he could practice, because the Force had for once shown him a pleasant vision, had told him he would have a daughter one day. He had been so sure. But he had been wrong. The Force had been wrong, that time. That child had never drawn breath. He knew that. He had looked for her. He'd looked for her.
But now, seeing it through her eyes, it was clear that the princess was sitting before a mirror, watching those same hands from his vision as they styled her hair for her. Except now, he knew he had been wrong about whose hands they were. He always knew they didn't belong to his wife, of course. He would recognize her hands anywhere. But neither did they belong to his sister-in-law, or any of the handmaidens, or even his padawan. They belonged to Breha Organa.
And for a moment, he hated her more than he hated himself.
They took his daughter.
They took his baby.
They took his whole family, one by one.
He briefly paused in his destruction of his quarters back on the Executor. Who was "they," this time? He could blame Bail and Breha if he wanted. He could blame Obi-Wan, because he surely had something to do with it. He could blame the Jedi if he really tried. But who truly benefited from taking away everything he loved? It wasn't any of them.
"Why did you stop?" asked Eebie calmly.
She didn't even react to his rampages anymore as long as she wasn't in range of any projectiles. She did, however, glue his fingers together when he dented her that one time, even though it was an accident. When he stole the little EB-17 maintenance droid on a whim so that he could tinker with it ("steal" being used loosely here, as she was due to be decommissioned anyway), he hadn't counted on her using her welding powers against him in such irritating ways.
"What?" he mumbled.
Eebie sighed: a useless skill for a droid, but one she had learned from him.
He finally heard her question. "Shouldn't you be asking why I started destroying the lab again rather than why I stopped?"
She sighed again.
"Fine. It's because I just realized something."
She didn't ask him what it was. Jerk.
"I killed my mom. I was too late. I killed my wife. Master told me so. And that means I killed my daughter too."
Eebie didn't respond. This wasn't new information.
"But did I… did I actually do that?" He was short of breath. Was his air filter plugged in right? "I took too long to come back for my mom. But did I kill her? She was bleeding when I found her. I didn't make her bleed. And my wife… I yelled at her. She yelled at me. I yelled at her and made her cry, but then—but then I was fighting with Obi-Wan. We were fighting and she was gone. Where did she go? She was alive when she gave birth, much later. I felt her die. I didn't want to believe it, but I felt her die while I was on that table. I must have been there for hours. There, and on the shore on Mustafar. She left that planet alive. Why did she die? My master said I killed her. But how did I kill her? And if I didn't… if I wasn't there, if it wasn't me, then who was it?"
Eebie blinked her light at him.
"And how did he know?" he murmured finally.
"And if you didn't kill your wife," Eebie surmised, "you didn't kill your daughter either."
"My daughter's alive," he whispered.
"What?"
"I think."
"Excuse me? Are you not sure?"
"No, I'm not sure!" he exploded. He ripped the oxygen mask off his marred face, the better to yell at her, wheezed, thought better of it, put it back on. "Her Force signature's all wrong! But I saw my vision in her memories. The vision I had of her before she was born, I saw it from her perspective. I'm sure that's what it was. I'm… I'm sure. I know that vision better than I know most of my own memories. I thought it was the only time I had a vision that didn't come true. But what if it did? What if I've never been wrong at all?"
"Better track record than Master Yoda, if you're right," Eebie scoffed. She shouldn't be able to do that either.
"That's not the point." He waved a hand. She wasn't getting it. "And anyway, Master Yoda can't see the future like I can, if he can at all. All he could do was give vague warnings. He was never sure. I'm always sure."
"Well, only one way to know."
"About Yoda?"
"No, about your daughter! If she really is your daughter."
He stared at her.
"Did you not take a blood sample?"
He narrowed his eyes.
"I'm going to go take a blood sample."
"Great idea."
He hovered awkwardly (menacingly) behind the medical droid as it compared the two samples he'd given it. It wasn't one of the ones on the Executor, not one assigned to him: he suspected those ones were directly connected to his master's records in some way, just in case he stepped a toe out of line. Metaphorically. Because he didn’t have toes anymore. Thanks, Obi-Wan. Not that toes were what he missed having. Obviously.
Anyway, this droid he was going to monitor constantly, then alter its memory as soon as it was done. Hopefully that would be safe enough. Even if it wasn't, he sincerely doubted his own blood sample could be recognized by anyone who happened to come across it. It wasn't kept on file because the midichlorian count would at best attract attention, at worst tie him to Anakin Skywalker.
I’m a person and my name is—
Moff Tarkin was probably waiting for his report regarding the Rebel base, he remembered suddenly. He should really get on that. Even if he cared even less about it than before.
I’m a person—
The princess probably did actually have some idea of where the base was, but he had glimpsed her training and doubted the information would be easy to obtain, if it was even possible. But his master wouldn't be happy if he failed. Maybe this was a situation in which he had to contrive to let her escape, find a bothersome officer to blame it on, and kill that officer. It was becoming a pattern. He really needed to find a better offboarding policy.
"50% match," said the droid. "Sample B is the parent of Sample A. Do you require any other—"
He was already in the memory banks, pretending that something considerably less world-altering had just happened.
I’m a—
Parent.
Parent. That was the word the droid used. He wasn't a parent. He couldn't be a parent. He was a limbless, homicidal slave to a Sith Lord. He had failed his wife, his mom, his little sister, his—his Obi-Wan—and he had already failed his daughter not only once, but every day, every moment of her life.
He had looked for her.
"I looked for you, I swear," he whispered inside the helmet. The vocoder didn't pick it up.
"I looked for her!" he screamed, voice catching as he descended into a coughing fit and struggled to continue destroying the junk he had accumulated in the lab.
Eebie hadn't bothered trying to clean up while he was gone. She knew he'd be back.
"Her Force signature—it's—it's wrong!" he gasped for air. He couldn't even scream properly anymore. "I looked everywhere! I didn't believe they were both dead. For no reason—it didn't make sense… I tried… I…" He wheezed. "I gave up. I gave up on her."
Eebie hadn't said anything for a while. His eyes were itching again. He rubbed at them with one glove and one metal hand whose glove had disappeared at some point. Neither was effective. Both were damp now. Waste of water.
"She's going to die," said Eebie.
He whipped his head toward her.
"They're going to kill her, one way or another, if she gives them the information or doesn't. They're going to kill her, if you don't do something about it."
With more effort than ever, he got to his feet. He had things to do.
"The prisoner has no knowledge of the location of the Rebel base," he told Tarkin in his usual dismissive tone, or what resembled it through the vocoder, anyway.
He was busy drawing up a mental list. He had a list once, a long time ago. It had Obi-Wan's name on it. The current list went as follows:
1. Master Sheev Palpatine
He watched the Moff grit his teeth and glare up at him. The Princess did the same, but he felt her confusion in the Force. She knew he had barely made a token attempt to find out.
"And how have you come to such a conclusion—and so quickly, at that?" Tarkin asked derisively.
"It was obvious from the start. The Princess has an inflated sense of self-importance, but she is little more than a child. Only a fool would entrust her with information of such value." He was almost proud of that one.
Her anger flared in the Force almost as brightly as his as she squared up to him.
"I am no child—" she began snippily, inadvertently proving his point, but Tarkin spoke over her.
"Well, I certainly hope you are mistaken, Lord Vader—if not for her sake, then for the sake of her people. You see, before your execution, Princess, I would like you to be my guest for a demonstration that is about to make history."
Vader and the Princess stopped glaring at each other long enough to watch Tarkin make his way to the console in front of the viewscreen, which was focused squarely on Alderaan. They glanced back at each other. Tarkin wasn't about to destroy a Core world, was he? Without provocation? Without authorization? Had the Emperor given him authorization? Surely it was an empty threat.
The Princess clearly wasn't willing to risk it. She protested the pointless destruction of a pacifist planet, but when Tarkin put a little more pressure on her, she snapped.
"If you would prefer we test the powers of this station on a military target," he said in a bored tone, "then by all means, name the system."
When she didn't respond, Tarkin inched closer to her, backing her into a corner as well as right up against Vader's armor.
"Dantooine," she said quietly.
"There. You see, Lord Vader? She can be reasonable."
Tarkin didn't know enough to ask Vader if she was telling the truth. So he said nothing.
"Fire when ready."
The Princess shouted at Tarkin, who said something about Dantooine not being interesting enough to destroy as a demonstration. She lunged at him despite her cuffed hands, despite the fact that it would change nothing. Vader grabbed her before Tarkin even saw her move.
"No!—"
Alderaan was replaced with a field of debris.
Vader absently thought that the instantaneous destruction of a giant mass and all the billions of souls that had just disappeared along with it should have made a noise, or a flash of light, or something. All he could hear was his own respirator. The Princess wasn't breathing at all.
Vader, in contrast, was discovering that he suddenly had something to live for. One might assume this was a good feeling: it wasn't. It felt like distraction in the back of his mind, like worry that never faded away. Like responsibility.
1. Sheev Palpatine
2. Wilhuff Tarkin