The Captive Heart

Rating: NC-17
Category: AU; Star Wars rewritten as Dark Fantasy/Gothic Romance/Celtic Saga.
Pairing:Han/Leia mostly; also reference to Qui-Gon/OFC and Obi-Wan/Eirtae.
Time frame: Set during the time of the original trilogy
Spoilers: To the films (obviously). Also some minor ones to various novels and to The Tales of the Jedi comic books/graphic novels. Some conjecture about events which may or may not take place in episode 2 (but I can't say for sure whether these will ever amount to spoilers - they are simply wild guesses).
Disclaimer: The Star Wars characters and universe are owned by George Lucas/Lucasfilm Ltd. With all due respect to Lucas, this reworking of the characters is for my own amusement only and I make no profit from it. Other characters (principally the Baobhan-sith) are copyright me, as is the selection and order of the words used herein.
Feedback: It would be nice to know from time to time that someone out there is reading this and by some fluke enjoying it. So send me feedback please.
Notes: Written and published on QJEB and JediPrudes: April 2001 onwards.
Series: This story is third in a series, the first being Dreams Made Flesh and the second being Severance. You can also find more information by visiting Nightsister's site at The Cloister.

- Prologue -
Beyond The Fields We Know.

A cauldron. Inky waters spilling over the rim. A shiver of silver ripples across its surface. A night sky. A reflection. A star. Brighter than the rest.

"Give me your hand."

Qui-Gon Jinn, the form of a man who had once walked a legion of worlds as a Jedi, the spirit who now counted Mananon's dark forests and storm-ridden seas as home, the lover who had embraced the wild goddess of the Taleach worlds without regret despite the losses she had brought him in return, offered his hand to Caer Ibhormheith.

She took it with love and tenderness, worn and callused with work though it was. She held it in the smooth white flesh of her own hand. Cold. As cold as his.

"Can you see him?"

Qui-Gon stared, sightless to one world, seeing only another. Stared deeper into the waters, his head bent forward, silvered hair falling across rugged features. Blue eyes shone with intensity, seeing across the great distances of space.

The dark perfume of incense and candlewax clouded the sith-bhrugh, the room carved from stone, pillars rising to a vaulted arch above, the fire burning in the grate, the canopied bed hidden in the gloom, the flight of stone steps leading up, out into the dark world beyond.

A sepulchre. A tomb.

A temple. A home.

Incense and desire clouded the room and clouded his mind. Sparked the vision of things to be. Of things that were. Elsewhere.

"Yes," he whispered.

Ibhormheith closed her eyes as he glanced up at her. As the lids fell, he saw they glittered with bright tears. He reached up and pushed a strand of red brown hair, tinged in the light of the candle flames with a fiery glow, away from her pale cheek. He touched the arcane markings tattooed on the flesh. A gentle touch.

"Oh, Iva..." He wanted to whisper sweet nothings to her. Kiss away her pain. Later. That would wait. They had forever.

"The children..." she whispered. "The children..."

Qui-Gon dropped his eyes and stared back into the depths of the blackened water.

His spirit broke free of its moorings. He felt himself sinking down into the waters. Open to the heavens, surrounded by the stars. Thrown across the universe. Into another life, another world, another soul.

A rendezvous. A meeting with fate. A lost child. An unforgiving master.

Further, further down, he sank.

A ship. Still. Waiting. Waiting to take off.

Here, yes, here.

A man. Betrayed. Lost to love.

"His eyes. I see through his eyes."

Iva gripped his hand more tightly.

The cries of a clutch of children in the emptiness of a cavern. Waiting.

Waiting for a sign.

Waiting for help.

"Take them. Take them with you."

Qui-Gon knew he should not speak. He felt as this man felt. Conflict. Fear. Anger. Arrogance. Loss. A broken shell patched with pride. Without hope. Or redemption.

"Do it. Help them. They have no one else."

The other, the man from whose eyes Qui-Gon now gazed, resisted the thought, the temptation. He was resigned to loss.

Qui-Gon could not hold back the words.

"There is always hope. Save them."

Thoughts. Words, words spoken by the other echoed back to him across vast tracts of empty void, across a gulf separated only by a twist of fate.

"Get out of my mind."

And then a change of tack. A change of heart. Qui-Gon felt it as if this were his own emotional turmoil. A change of mind which would lead this man to meet his destiny just as long ago Qui-Gon had met his.

"Are they safe? The children?"

Iva's voice called him back.

His consciousness snapped back to the present. The only present he knew.

He grasped for words. "Yes," he said.

"And is *he* safe? Qui-Zhang?"

"Yes," he said, and smiled. "For now." It wasn't a lie. It wasn't the truth. What had he really seen?

Iva let go of his hand and fed the charcoal with another pinch of incense. Pungent. Sweet. A smell to carry a soul to heaven. He was back in his own life, his own body, his home. His heaven.

He smiled again, smiled at her. She was his one desire. His heart and soul.

He took back her hand and covered it with his own. Small. So delicate. So fragile and yet so strong. What power it could wield if she wished it. Magic. And such bittersweet joys.

He crushed her fingers to his lips.

"It's coming," she whispered. "The storm that will wipe clean the galaxy. It's coming soon."

"I know."

Her reply was smothered by his kiss.

***

She was lying dead. Or dying. A battlefield around her. A battlefield of sounds.

No vision.

Her vision darkened. Darkened with the promise of death. The slain and the martyred lay around her.

Dead.

Dying.

Yet death could not claim her.

The Force would not come for her.

The blood of the Baobhan-sith was in her. Tainted. Her blood was tainted. She was tainted.

Dead.

Dying.

Yet undead.

"Yaddle."

A hand on her shoulder. Shaking her out of the reverie of death.

"Yaddle, come back to me. Dawn's coming. Wake up."

She reeled her essence in. Pulled herself out of the trance.

"Yes, Even. I'm here. I'm coming."

She glanced at his face. The large pointed ears she loved so much twitched almost imperceptibly. Twitched with concern. But he smiled and his face wrinkled along the line of the old scar that had taken one eye.

Yaddle smiled back, knowing her own face reflected his emotions. Love. Care. Expectation.

He helped her to her feet. She let him lead her back to their home, their nest in the bole of the great tree. The tree that stood at the centre of the forest, the world tree, their tree.

For they were the guardians of the forest now. She was no longer a Jedi, but a spirit of the universe, of nature. The brideach a coille of this strange, wonderful world. And Even was her consort.

"You were gone a long time, old girl," Even murmured as he soothed her pale, green, brow and stroked her tufts of red hair as they settled down for sleep. "What did you see?"

"It's coming, Even. A glimmer of light in the darkness. It's coming."

"We'll be ready, Yaddle. Don't you worry, we'll be ready."

She snuggled against his body, not for warmth but for pleasure. The soft burr of his breath was a comfort to her.

Yaddle didn't go to sleep for a long while. It was her own death she had seen. The death of her worldly form. She hadn't died, though, had she?

She remembered with sadness the final battle. The bloodied industrial fields of Geonosis. Her last stand as a Jedi. Her comrades maimed around her or already slain and gone to the Force.

She hadn't died though, not really. Not in that way. She had called on the goddess, had pulled on all the strength the Baobhan-sith blood rite had wrought in her. And the spirits of the forest gave her succour in her hour of need. She had dragged her weakening body to Even's side and forced him to drink the blood, her blood, the life's blood that was leaking from her veins. He hadn't known, hadn't known what she was doing, but had taken her gift in the bond of love they shared.

It was funny, she didn't remember how they had got here to Tamhasg, the old Sith world of Ziost, but get here they had. A ghost world, it was, unless you saw it with the eyes of the dead or the visionary. And then it was a wonder, a world of peace and the beauty of nature and of twilight.

Once they were here, she regained her strength and memory slowly. And Even had pulled through too. Bewildered at first, and angry at what she had done. But when he knew... Oh, when he knew to what it was she had brought him, he had rejoiced. And they had rejoiced in each other.

They found Iva and Qui-Gon eventually. And others of the Baobhan-sith. The people too, the remnant of the Taleach, those who had survived Palpatine's genocidal destruction, had found them in turn, to worship and share with them. It had been bliss.

It was still bliss.

And there was more yet to come.

***

Iva curled down into the soft eider of the bed, the soft heat of orgasm still on her. Qui-Gon wrapped his arms around her from behind. His familiar smell and beloved touch embraced her. She felt his hands heavy on her shoulders. She turned within the circle of his arms and laid her head upon his chest. As she looked up at him, she dissolved in the blue ocean of his gaze.

They remained still, very still, until he closed his eyes and broke the spell. His hand was on her breast. They kissed and kissing they fell into the forgetful embrace of sleep.

Yet as dawn left the night behind, Iva felt alarm grow in Qui-Gon's heart. Felt his muscles stiffen. His heart pound.

"Mo luaidh," she called, seeing the shock in his eyes as she reopened hers. "What is it? What is wrong?"

Fear clenched at her heart.

"The Force..." He gripped her arm hard. His breath was sharp. "It's the Force. The Force is calling me back..."

- 1 -
In Another Time, Through Another Door.

The heat was too much for him.

Even within the coolness of the adobe walls, he sweltered. Living, simply being, existing, was too, too tiring these days. Oh, that death would take him. Oh, to finally be one with the Force. To sleep. To dream. To die.

"Obi-Wan, you old fool..."

He chastised himself aloud, though there was no one there to hear him. Nothing but the rock and the sand and the desert wastes to swallow up his words. No one left anymore. There hadn't been anyone here for a long, long time.

"Ben," he said aloud, reminding himself. "You're called Ben now." But that only reminded him all the more how much had changed.

He thought of Qui-Gon Jinn, the man who had trained him, the Master he must never speak of.

He thought of Anakin Skywalker, the Apprentice he had trained, the boy who was dead to all, even himself.

He thought of Yoda, leaving, lost and alone at the end.

And what had become of Iva's child? Qui-Gon's son?

Qui-Zhang, the boy he had seen born. Qui-Zhang, who would now be a man. Qui-Zhang, who was destined to be their - their what - their deliverer? Their saviour? The one wwho would aid them in their moment of greatest need? During the purge, Obi-Wan had looked, had looked and looked but never found. Qui-Zhang was lost.

Lost. Just another lost child.

And Eirtae? Where was Eirtae now? Was she still alive? Was anyone else that he had loved during his life still living?

He wiped the wetness from his face. He was shedding tears. Bitter tears from an old man's eyes.

Oh, Eirtae. She had to be alive. She had to be.

He consoled himself with the thought that she... that they... That somewhere out there might still be people who loved him and remembered him with fondness.

He knew... He feared... Vader might have found them, tracked them down and tortured them, maimed them, killed them.

He remembered the pain, the injuries, the humiliation, that the Emperor's thugs could inflict, had inflicted.

He winced.

No, that couldn't have happened to them. He would have felt it through the Force. That couldn't have happened to her. Not to his beloved Eirtae. She had to be safe. She was safe. He had entrusted her to the Force. With love.

Yes, he loved her, but their love had been forbidden. After Qui-Gon's death, the Jedi Council had discouraged all relationships outside the Order even more strongly than they had before. For that, they had seen, had been Qui-Gon's downfall.

It had been Anakin's too. His love for Shmi. His love for Padme. Yes, most of all, his love for Padme. The Force had shown it to him, Anakin had said, he and Padme together.

Qui-Gon had said that, too, of Iva.

Perhaps it was the truth then. That love had brought them all to this.

Oh, Eirtae. Why couldn't he have loved her more? Why couldn't he have loved her at all? Why had he treated her so? Why had he sent her away?

Perhaps Iva had been right. He had never known love. And now he was an old man, bent by sorrow and the wild winds of fate, if not by age. He was a watcher, now, not a doer. And he had spent so much of his life alone.

He hoped and prayed the Force would guide the children of the dusk to a better path.

***

As Lord Vader knelt before the Emperor, waiting for his audience, he felt the pains grow anew in bones improperly healed. Felt scarred skin stretch and crack. Felt mechanical implants cycle bodily fluids. His flesh and bones were a ruin, yet his mind was clear. Suffused in the evil darkness of the Force, no pain could prevent the enaction of his will.

"Rise, Lord Vader."

He was commanded, and he did so.

"You have brought the witch's child back safely?" The Emperor's voice was tense.

"Yes, my Master. The surgeons have him as we speak."

"Good." The Emperor paused. "And is he... well?"

"Mad, my Lord. Jabba's care was not conducive to his sanity."

The Emperor stood, the shrivelled flesh of his hand turning yellow-white against the arm of the throne as he forced his bent body upright. "Walk with me, Vader."

Vader fell into step beside him as he turned towards the gardens of the Palace.

He waved a hand dismissively. "It matters not, Lord Vader. Qui-Zhang's sanity is no concern of ours. I trust only that his blood is healthy. What did this new surgeon report?"

"He has great hopes, Master. He believes he has finally put together the research abandoned by Grocelind. He hopes to have a serum within the month. You will be well again, my Lord."

The Emperor took a deep draught of air into his lungs. He seemed to stand straighter, appear younger, at the very thought. "I hope he has better luck than his predecessors. Grocelind left us a mess worse than nothing when he abandoned us. But that is no matter, this surgeon will succeed. Or die." The Emperor's voice took on a touch of glee. "Now tell me, Vader. Was the Hutt angry at his loss?"

"Superficially, Master, for my benefit I suspect. I sensed that he was tired of Qui-Zhang's ravings, and tired of supplying us with blood and bodily samples. The boy was not what he had hoped for - or been promised."

"Promised!" The Emperor spat the word out through his laughter. "Jabba was a fool if he thought the offspring of that rogue Jedi and the paltry excuse for a Sith that he married could bring him a fortune or fame. He deluded himself if he thought the boy would become a seer."

Vader felt stiff, unused muscles move painfully as his mouth attempted a smile beneath his mask. His Master's hope offered hope to him too. If this time the surgeons could perfect the serum, he too might benefit from its rejuvenating powers.

***

Obi-Wan stepped outside, shielding himself with his cloak as best he could from the blinding heat, and looked up at the blistering sky.

Qui-Gon.

Was Qui-Gon out there? Somewhere? Anywhere?

He hadn't spoken of Qui-Gon for years. But he had often thought of him.

After Jinn's betrayal of the Order, the Council had made changes. Even the name became anathema. See how even he used it now. Jinn. Jinn's betrayal.

It had been no betrayal. Tragedy, maybe. Sacrifice, yes. But if anyone had been betrayed it had been Qui-Gon. And Iva. And the Baobhan-sith.

Obi-Wan had had a long time to think about such things. And think he had.

Perhaps the Baobhan-sith had been right. Had been right to ask for an alliance, an extension of the personal alignment forged by Qui-Gon with Ibhormheith. But the Council had denied them, set their faces against them.

And after Qui-Gon's death, they had proscribed not only marriages with outsiders but the study of all peoples, all religions and beliefs, ancient and modern, which did not claim to be grounded in the Force. And for what? To what end? To seal their fate, bring about their downfall. A fault. A failing. A defect they had all been punished for.

'There is knowledge,' Obi-Wan whispered. The remnant of a code now forgotten.

The Council had turned their backs on knowledge where it did not suit them, where it hindered their agenda. They had declared Qui-Gon rogue and expunged his name from the records, never to be spoken of again. It was an irony, a bitter irony. Where Qui-Gon broke the code in devotion to the Living Force, they turned their backs and broke it with their wanton blindness.

But knowledge could not, could never be denied. Hidden, yes, misdirected. But not denied.

Some had kept Qui-Gon's name alive. Adi and Plo Koon had their secrets, secrets which flourished in silence. Yaddle had continued to dabble in the Baobhan-sith ways and had sought to sway Even to her cause.

And there had been others too. Others whose intentions Qui-Gon himself would not have welcomed.

Jorus C'Baoth had stood out in support of Jinn, in support of separatism, against the Council. He had even garnered followers. But slowly, the proponents of the cult had all retracted or quietly disappeared - to dangerous missions in remote corners of the galaxy, to bolt holes of their own. C'Baoth had never been seen since the ill-fated Outbound Flight Project.

Obi-Wan hadn't been disturbed by that. He had never trusted C'Baoth and doubted his sincerity. Perhaps he had been seeking other ends, hidden agendas, in his campaigning in Qui-Gon's name. No, Obi-Wan hadn't disagreed with the Council's actions, just their reasoning.

Qui-Gon had been no traitor.

Obi-Wan looked down at the sand. Scattered the grains with the toe of his boot. Suddenly, he remembered what it had been like to be young and thrilled by the world. But they were memories tinged only with sadness. His world had closed around him, slowly but surely. Since Qui-Gon's death it had tightened irredeemably.

Oh, Qui-Gon. Why hadn't he listened to his Master more closely? Heeded his words with more care?

Obi-Wan knew that in his grief he had not followed Qui-Gon's guidance in training Anakin well enough.

Ah, he had failed. How he had failed.

He thought of Anakin's personality and zest for life swallowed up by the Dark Side even as his physical form had been swallowed up by the dark prosthetic suit he now wore to keep the remnants of the body together. But not the soul. No, not the soul. The soul was gone.

Obi-Wan looked back to the sky. If Qui-Gon did yet live...

"I hope you made a better home for yourself with the Baobhan-sith than I did here, Master." He whispered the words with reverence, he knew them to be true.

Mistakes. They had all made mistakes.

Isolation. That was not what the Baobhan-sith wanted. They had asked for union. The Jedi had denied them. Become more isolated. More elite. More misguided.

It had exacerbated their downfall.

And now here he was, in his isolation.

Oh, Luke. Have I lost you too? The last time he had spied on Luke, the boy had been demanding that Owen let him leave Tatooine. Obi-Wan had willed Owen not to let him go. And Owen, whether of Obi-Wan's prompting through the eddies of the Force or of his own volition, had refused. Just another harvest. Stay for just another harvest.

And if nothing happened? And if Luke left? What would Obi-Wan do then, alone on Tatooine? How could he follow and guard and teach then? Something, anything, would have to happen soon.

Soon, it might be too late.

Too late. All too late.

He saw it coming to him then. A speck. A dark speck in the open sky. He blinked and it was gone. And yet, he felt, within himself, within the Force, that coming it was. A ship? A message? Hope? What, he didn't care. He only wanted for it to be for him.

- 2 -
This Is The Colour Of My Dreams.

"Take them home."

Voices.

A voice.

Echoing.

Thrumming at the edge of consciousness.

Calling him.

Leading him.

Commanding him.

"Get out of my head!"

His outcry startled even him.

Sitting beside him at the controls of the Millennium Falcon, Chewbacca turned at Han's complaint. Growling at him in concern. A friend's worry.

Han swallowed hard. "It's okay, Chewie. Nothing."

The growl came again, louder, more insistent.

"I don't need to rest. You heard Jabba. We've got a Kessel Run. I don't want those kids aboard any longer than they have to be, but it'll just have to wait. Let's turn around, get this job done and then deliver 'em to Corellia afterwards."

But the Wookiee wouldn't let it rest. Another growl issued from his throat.

Han turned towards him, spitting the words into the Wookiee's face.

"No, it's not madness. I don't 'hear' voices. Let's just get this delivery over with, shall we, and then get those kids home."

Han hated these moments. When he doubted his own sanity. When Chewie smothered him in concern. This time felt different, though. As though a volcano were about to erupt. A star to go supernova. Something was in the air, something ominous, deadly. He blamed it all on Bria. No, not on Bria, on himself. He should never have fallen in love with her. Never got tied up in that darn fool Ylesia mission with her. What did he have to show for it. Nothing. The only booty they'd managed to salvage was a herd of orphan children that even now were clogging up the Falcon's decks.

That and a broken heart, Han thought wryly. Don't forget the broken heart.

"Rrrhnggghhhrrr."

Chewie's whine pulled him back to the present.

"Jumping to lightspeed," he drawled as he punched the control. "Kessel here we come!"

***

Leia looked at herself as she brushed her hair and almost, almost, liked what she saw. She had thrived and blossomed from a girl to a woman here on Coruscant these last two years or more. But she hated this place, oh how she hated it.

Her apartment was comfortable but hardly luxurious. Not that she spent much time here. There wasn't much time left at the end of the day to do much but eat and sleep.

She gritted her teeth against the day, another day of talks and debates and committees. All designed to get them, the senate, or what was left of it, nowhere. She had only just returned from Ralltiir but she already wished Bail or someone, anyone, at the Alderaan Consulate would send her out on another peace mission. Another fact-finding tour. Not that that was much better...

Where *was* it all getting them? She was impatient, fatigued and depressed.

"No," she said to herself in the mirror. And then more firmly, "no." She put that thought, the negativity, the pessimism, out of her mind as she twisted her hair into plaits.

Her face looked back at her, resolute. A face she had always thought of as plain, but it was at least blessed with clear skin and a pleasing symmetry to its delicate features. And now that she was grown into adulthood, they didn't look all that bad, those features, framed as they were by her thick glossy hair. That was the feature she loved above all others. But no, the overall wasn't that bad at all.

She wasn't vain, though. She shouldn't be sitting here like this, looking at herself with pride. She had a job to do. She coiled her plaits and pinned them into place. The complex style traditional for Alderaan women wasn't the most flattering, but she wasn't trying to attract attention.

She was a senator, a young one too, the youngest they said, not that she cared about that. She was here for Bail, that was all. To help him hold back the swell of the tide that was crashing the Empire onto every shore, every land, every planet, washing away all opposition. It hurt her personally, too, when they - this so-called government - oppressed the people, the alien races. Outlawed them, herded them onto remote worlds. Perilous places where only famine, pestilence and death waited to greet them. It hurt her physically. Inside, in that secret place where she had caged her soul and her strength to keep them safe from prying eyes and prying minds.

This was the world she had grown up in and this was the person it had forged. And she was going to make a stand against it if it proved to be the end of her. She nearly cried. She felt the tears threaten her beauty.

Yet she mustn't, she knew she mustn't, ask why. Why had it happened? Why had it happened to her? No, they were not questions she could ask. Because, because she knew the answers already.

She had been chosen.

***

Voices.

Voices in his head.

"Help her."

Voices urging him to do things he would never do. For safety's sake. For pity's sake.

Save the Wookiee.

Take this one with you.

Let her go. You can't love her.

Help these orphans.

No. No.

No.

Han woke, sweat drenched, dry mouthed, uncertain where he was.

Home. The Falcon. He breathed his relief through a clenched jaw.

The only home he knew. As close to home as he had ever known.

What did he have to show for it? This life, this short life, three decades of wandering. Of restlessness and recklessness.

"She needs you."

That voice again.

He sat up quickly, span around, his eyes searching every corner of the cabin.

No one.

Empty.

"Chewie?" He whispered hesitantly.

Then sighed.

Still dreaming.

Or was Chewbacca right? Was this madness? Was it becoming a sickness? Had he been running too long? Living life too close to the edge?

He got up quickly, left the damp sheets crumpled on the bunk, and entered the refresher.

A brief glimpse in the mirror showed him a grey-faced apparition. Bad, he looked bad. Old, decayed. No, only tired. No longer the fresh face of youth, a few scars for his hard life, but not yet old. Only tired. Only worried.

It had been a bad night after a bad day. In fact, the last seven days had been pretty awful. Apprehended by Imperial customs ships, he had dumped the spice destined for Jabba into space. Finding only the slave children, the Imperials had insisted on escorting him to Corellia, the spice cargo left far behind. And then the darn fools on Corellia had proclaimed him a hero for saving the kids. He cursed. He didn't need that sort of attention. Not after Bria's betrayal on Ylesia and certainly not after person's unknown had tipped off the customs on Kessel. He felt bitter, sick.

He splashed cold water on his face, his chin was rough but a shave could wait. He ran his fingers through short brown hair. Not quite neatly combed, but not quite so tousled. The dark rings under his eyes... Well, there was not much he could do about those. Worry and restless sleep could do that to a man.

He set his shoulders and stood upright. A man, yes. And a smuggler, a good one.

So, he'd lost the cargo? So? With luck it'd still be sitting there, floating in space. He'd always had luck on his side, hadn't he? Uncannily so, some said. And if it wasn't, if it was gone... Well, it didn't bear thinking about but Jabba could be appeased later. And if he had to lie low for a while to avoid the wrath of the Hutt, so be it. Chewie was probably right. He needed a rest. The voice in his head *was* nothing more than fast living and hard work.

He faced the mirror again. Gave himself a wry grin. He was itching for take off, itching to be in space. "Let's get back and see if we can't salvage that spice, eh?" he drawled to his reflection.

***

Bail had taught her well.

Leia was dressed for the Senate and ready for the day. But first she had a meeting with Wilhuff Tarkin. The prospect did not please her. Nor did the fact he was keeping her waiting.

He'd already kept her waiting for this appointment, with petty excuses, with other meetings, with trivial committee business. Day after day and every day an excuse. How many now? She had lost count? Ten? Eleven? Twelve? And every day more people suffered, starved and died on Ralltiir. She had seen it with her own eyes and those eyes threatened to fill with tears of sorrow and anger and helplessness with every passing day. She had exhausted all other possibilities, her appeals for clemency had been denied. This, this face to face meeting with Tarkin, was her last resort.

She breathed slowly. To suppress the tears and the anger. Thought about something else.

Yes, she knew that Bail had taught her well. He had ensured she knew how to maintain a blaster and to shoot straight, to fight, to protect herself. But he had taught her more than that. He had always cautioned her against revealing too much - and not just as a rebel sympathiser. He had warned her, too, of revealing any association with the Force. She had a sensitivity which could mark her for death, or worse. For what had once been a gift was now a curse.

The Force strong, Jedi and untrained alike, had been hunted to near extinction, condemned, persecuted and destroyed. Babies born with it, children unaware of it, adults expressing it, they were all still being slaughtered. By Lord Vader, by the Emperor's Hand, by dutiful citizens, by fearful parents.

And so she had spent her life resisting its allure, its power pulsing just beneath the surface of her mind, never to be used, never to be wielded, never to be used in the cause peace or defence or persuasion. Pushing, pushing it away. Striving, striving for normality.

Yet Leia knew she wasn't normal. And never would be.

She shifted her position. She might still have many minutes before the Grand Moff's aide came to fetch her. She sat, straight backed, alert and wary, on the uncomfortable chair and waited.

And as she waited she worked at making stronger the barriers she had built around her mind. Just as Bail had trained her. From childhood he had trained her. Her earliest memories were of him kneeling before her, holding her arms tight against her side, almost frightening her. His dark hair and olive skin, his serious face etched already with lines of worry, his deep brown eyes, pinning her to the spot.

His voice came to her.

"You must shield yourself, Leia. The Force is strong, but you can contain it. There are people who will hurt you if they know. You must hide it from them. Never, never reveal it to them."

He had trained her well. Impressed on her the necessity of hiding it. They must never know, no one must ever know, that she was sensitive to the Force. That it grew in her and strengthened in her by the day.

"I will be still. I will be tranquil. I will be free."

She intoned the words Bail had taught her. It strengthened her and resolved her.

How many times had he repeated those words to her over the years? Countless. It took her years. Years of practice, of failure and of setbacks.

One day, after days and months and years of practice, of try and try and try again, she had turned to see Bail laughing at her. At her efforts. At her failed efforts, or so she thought.

She had been twelve.

In her mind she was twelve again.

"Concentrate, Leia."

Bail loomed over her, familiarly. He didn't menace her, his size, his height, his bulk, to her were reassuring.

"Yes, father."

She tried again. Imagining her thoughts as a cloak, soft, heavy, dark, surrounding her, enveloping the Force, shielding her. Shielding her mind and her emotions from Bail's probing.

It was then that he laughed.

She thought she was doing so well and then he laughed. She turned and glared at him. Sullen, angry, ashamed.

He shook his head and laughed the more.

"No," he said, "that was good. Good." His face grew serious. "Soon you won't need my guidance any more. I don't have the skills to train you further."

She looked at him, puzzled.

"Would that someone could, Leia. But those days are long gone. Once you might have been chosen by the Jedi." His face, his old familiar tired face, old and wise beyond its years, looked sad. His voice was stern. She knew he held back deep emotions. "Yes," he said. "It's true."

She looked at him, stared at him, alarmed and excited.

"Ah," he said lightly, "but I've said too much."

A thought leapt into her mind. Startling in its import and its impact on her life. She wasn't from Alderaan. He wasn't her father. She had another past.

"I'm not one of you," she said before thinking.

Bail's eyes dropped. He could no longer meet her gaze.

She knew then that she had let the thought and the emotion slip through the carefully erected barricades.

"You are, Leia." He touched her shoulder, lightly, lovingly. "You always will be."

But there was a deep sadness in his voice.

It was then, only then, that she truly acquired a skill previously known only amongst the Jedi Knights. The ability to mask her Force presence, to armour her thoughts and protect her mind from attack.

It took her years. Years of practice, of failure and setbacks and, finally, success.

"I will be still. I will be tranquil. I will be free."

Those words, now they were her mantra and her guide.

And now, no one, no one would break through her shell, no one. She would have no close companions save her family on Alderaan, save Bail and Winter. She would cultivate no friendships, take no lover. Not till all this was over. Not till the rebellion achieved victory. For the danger to her, would become a danger to them.

- 3 -
Her eyes so open to the dark.

A noise. Behind her. Scratching. Startled her.

Leia turned, slowly, warily. As she thought, there was only a wall there. The scratching continued for a moment and then faded.

Why were they keeping her waiting? The appointed time of the meeting had come and gone.

There. Again. A scratching from beyond, from within, the wall. A sharp, ripping sound. Almost a screech. Like nails on marble.

Leia stood and crossed to the wall. Only a wall there. A structural wall. Thick, solid. Or it should be. She laid a hand on the cool surface, bent close, trying to hear more, to sense something.

A sharp rap alarmed her. She jumped back instinctively, shivered.

Stupid, she thought to herself. She wasn't a nervous person.

Another rap. Two more.

What was this? Was this some attempt to unnerve her? Did the Emperor suspect? Did he know what Bail was attempting on Alderaan? Did he know about the conspiracy with Mothma and Bel-Iblis? Had she come here to meet with Tarkin, to plead on behalf the people of Ralltiir, only to walk into a trap? To became a hostage?

The scratching came again. More insistent. Sharper. Louder. It assaulted her ears.

Involuntarily, she shook in fear.

***

Vader sat, for the moment at peace, enclosed within the sphere of the meditation chamber. It amplified the dark strengths of the Force and relieved his pain as nothing else could.

He had been in space for weeks. It was a relief to rest at last. His recent trip to Nal Hutta to retrieve Qui-Zhang Jinn was not a pleasant memory. The Hutts revolted him and he despised them. It was Hutts that had enslaved him, stolen his freedom, taken his mother, cursed his life. One day he would see them obliterated, wiped from the face of the galaxy. If only they were not still of use to the Empire, he would have seen to it long ago. An untidy end to an unwholesome race.

He let the hate grow, let it sustain him and electrify him. He breathed slowly and deeply, drawing the super-enriched air of the hyperbaric breather into impaired lungs seared by fire, forcing oxygen into alveoli scarred by burning ash.

***

Leia stormed to the door.

Enough. This was enough. She had waited too long. She would end it now.

She felt for the hidden blaster at her hip. The security and promise of escape it offered her.

She opened the door, accosting the secretarial aide even as she stepped into the outer office.

"I demand to..."

But a scream of alarm was already emanating from the secretary's throat.

Leia froze, stunned. Bewildered.

She hadn't done anything yet.

The secretary cowered in fear, retreating behind his desk, his hand fumbling with his comm-link, sending off an alarm.

Leia had her blaster in her hand now, an instinctual reaction. She kept her back to the doorway and turned in the direction of the secretary's terrified gaze.

She held back a startled cry at the sight that met her eyes.

There, there in the corner of the room, a panel had drawn back, a dark maw behind it. And framed in that maw was a creature of nightmares. A phantom of a being. Little more than bone covered with taut skin, clothed in rags, unwashed, dirt-ridden. And the face, the face. A slash of a mouth in sallow skin, twisted in malice, flared nostrils, jaundiced eyes that peered from under a tangled curtain of ashen hair. Scratches and wounds wept pale ichor.

He, it, this vision of dread, moved slowly and unsteadily towards her. She could smell it, the stench of it. It reached out a hand.

She backed away.

It came on, on towards her. Its hand was grasping for her throat.

***

Vader sensed the alarm before he heard it.

His moment of peace was over. He motioned for the chamber to open and repositioned the protective helmet over what remained of his face.

He signalled his response on the comm-link. Qui-Zhang had escaped. The Emperor's antidote to dark side senescence was now at large in the offices of the Imperial headquarters.

Vader closed his eyes in frustration. Could no one be trusted? Did he have to see to everything himself? Someone would pay. Someone always paid, it was one of his few pleasures.

***

The terrible visage of the monstrous thing leered at her. Leia wanted to shrink from its presence as its hand fouled her shoulder. Its nails, she could feel its nails, torn and ragged, pressing into the skin through the fabric of her dress. It screeched. A jumble of words she couldn't make out. It screeched in her face, its breath hot and foul.

Leia stumbled and gasped. The blaster dropped from her hand. Pity as much as terror suffused her mind. She saw that it, that he, was afraid. Very much afraid.

"Oh," she cried, "oh. What happened to you?"

He, whoever this sad man was, must have sensed her lack of threat for he suddenly let her go and hung his head in shame as he retreated from her. His voice lost its stridency and dropped to a mumble.

"Help, help me, need help," he stammered.

It seemed to Leia that time had stopped for a moment. The room, the building was immensely quiet, still.

"Yes." Leia stepped forward and reached out. She touched his hand softly. "Yes, I'll help you."

He, this creature, had picked up her blaster. Was pressing it into her hand. Was pointing it at his chest. At his heart. "Kill me," he pleaded. "Kill me. Let me die."

Her finger rested lightly on the trigger. One movement. One movement would do as he asked.

The moment's silence hung suspended on Leia's in-drawn breath.

The spell broke. Doors were thrown open and Imperial guards, two of them, entered, Tarkin at their heels.

The wretched creature flung himself towards Leia again, screeching in terror and pain. He fell to his knees and grasped her about the waist, clutching at her hands, clutching at her dress. She couldn't make out his words. She could see the guards walking resolutely towards her, they carried restraint cuffs.

"Needles. No more needles. No needles." The creature was repeating the words. A plea for help, a cry for sanity.

Tarkin barked out a single word. 'Jinn.' The sound reverberated in the air.

Leia could see the madness in the man's eyes, but beyond the madness she could sense the injuries that had been done to him. She stroked his head. Bent down so only he could hear. "I will do what I can. I promise." She whispered reassurance as she helped him stand.

The guards seized him roughly and pulled him away from her.

***

The Emperor stood with his Hand at his side, observing events in the Grand Moff's offices, observing Leia's reactions to the events that were unfolding around her.

"Well, Mara. What do you think?"

The lithe, red-haired woman thought for a moment. Eyes half-closed.

"She's feisty," Mara began. "But she's very plain."

"I'm not interested in your feminine jealousies, in your opinions of her looks, Mara Jade. Is she a threat? Does she have potential? Should we recruit her?"

Mara raised her chin, undaunted by the Emperor's censure. "I sense nothing. She has no Force capability. But she may still be a threat."

The Emperor nodded. "You are right as usual, Mara, to be sure. I suspect the Alderaan delegates of duplicity. We should watch their actions closely. This one in particular."

He watched the screens a moment longer. "Mara. Deliver a message to Lord Vader. Inform him that once he has dealt with Qui-Zhang, he is to keep a close watch over Leia Organa. Inform him that he is to pursue her at a discreet distance should she go off-planet and apprehend her once he has proof of our suspicions."

***

The mad creature struggled to escape the guards but they had the better of him by far. Soon he was wrestled to the floor restrained at wrist and ankle, though he still thrashed and screamed and railed against his bonds.

Leia stood helpless. "Please don't..." she appealed in vain. She wished she could do more, but what? Better to wait and take action through the appropriate channels later.

Tarkin moved past her, oblivious to her, and bent over the man. "Pay attention, Jinn." He spat out the words and the wretch ceased struggling, looking up at his tormentor. Tarkin held up a syringe. "I hope I don't have to use this?"

The wretch shook his head. Leia watched as the guards dragged him away. Appalled by what she had witnessed, she found her voice.

"Tarkin, how dare you treat him like that? He did no harm..."

Tarkin turned on her. "You know nothing of this man's condition. It is not your concern."

She returned his steely gaze, staring back into his gaunt face, daring him to challenge her.

He looked her up and down as though she were nothing. With disdain. A petty hindrance. She could sense it. He had scorn for her youth and scorn for her role, representative of Alderaan. She didn't flinch under his stare. For she was young and he was old, so old, so grey and wrinkled. For she was the representative of Alderaan, a neutral world, a free world. A world which would soon lead the rebellion to victory. And he was a toady to the Empire. Just another of the Emperor's lackeys.

Tarkin said nothing.

Leia refused to swallow her anger. "Your thugs treated him like a criminal, a madman."

Tarkin paused, cocked his head to one side as if inventing a plausible reply. "A criminal, no. Mad, yes. And there's little can be done for him, save stop him harming himself and others."

It didn't satisfy her. "Who is he? Why is he here? He should be receiving medical care."

"He is, I assure you, the best. The Emperor's own surgeons are treating him. He is merely flotsam, Senator Organa, one of the unfortunate hoards. But you should know, my dear, that that man was a prisoner of the Hutts. Lord Vader only recently saved his life. An act of mercy. The Emperor himself is overseeing his care. But his mind is unhinged. I fear his madness is irreversible."

"So, now the Emperor is keeping him prisoner." Leia wondered then about the importance of this man. "Who is he?" she demanded again.

Tarkin ignored her question. "You're a child, my dear. You can't expect to understand these things."

With that, he ended the debate and turned towards his office. "You came here to discuss the situation on Ralltiir, I believe. Perhaps we had better restrict ourselves to official business."

She followed, annoyed by Tarkin's arrogance and intrigued by the mystery she had stumbled into. She wouldn't let this rest. She would investigate this later.

***

Chewie growled at Han, displeased. They'd been arguing, fighting, panicking for almost four days.

"Well, it wasn't my fault." Han slammed his fist against the bulkhead. "It was a set up."

Of course, it was a set up. It had to be. The customs waiting for them. The damned children. Now the spice gone and Imperial vessels in its place. They'd barely, he and Chewie, got through the Kessel black holes with their lives. They'd been debating it, back and forth, what to do next, ever since.

Jabba would not be pleased. The Hutt was a repugnant creature to behold, and when displeased, he wasn't pleasant to be around. Han didn't want to end up in a Rancor pit, even with a Wookiee protecting his back.

Chewie's growl took on a tenacious drone.

"Go to Kashyyyk? You might be right this time, old pal. We'd be safe there, true."

Yet something nagged at Han. A voice at the back of his mind. He fought to repress it, but it was insistent.

Go back. Face Jabba. Go back.

Was the voice, after all that, just his conscience?

"Well..." Han began.

Chewie growled in alarm.

Han continued. "Well, sure, we could lie low on Kashyyyk, but we'd both be old and grey by the time this all blew over. Life's too short for running."

Han stalked back to the cockpit, stabbed at the controls. Chewie wailed as he sat down beside him, but it wasn't the Wookiee's voice Han heard. It was that other.

"Look for the one who walks the old paths and the boy who rushes into the future..."

Han groaned. Not his conscience after all. Just another stage of his insanity.

And then a darkness fell. Not of the light, but of his mind. A presence left him, a presence he had not recognised until that moment, until it was gone. The whispering stopped. He suddenly felt empty and alone.

Heck, what had that meant anyway? Walking the old paths? What old paths? It was like something a fortune teller might say. An omen out of the mouth of one of the Hutt's card reading Ryn. Just some nonsense. Nonsense. But still...

No. He shut off the thought.

He reached out and thumped Chewie on the arm. He needed contact with another soul. "Don't worry, old pal, it'll come right. It always does." He reached up and activated the com unit. "Let's call Jabba and get it over with."

***

"I will not show emotion. I will not bare my soul. I will not fear. I will not perish."

As she stepped through the door of her apartment, relieved to be free of the offices of the Grand Moff, Leia intoned the words. For she had been in a den of thieves and murderers. For thieves and murderers they were. They had stolen the power of government and murdered the Jedi, its harbingers of peace. And now they were not just content with executing governments and incarcerating whole civilisations - for she had got nowhere in her demands with Tarkin, she had failed to persuade him that neutral observers should oversee the Ralltiir internment camps. No, now they were, it seemed, conducting experiments and who knew what else on mistreated slaves and other unfortunates.

She wanted to shower, to cleanse herself of Tarkin's presence, before taking on the rest of the day, but she resigned herself to yet more upheaval when she saw there was a coded message on her private link to Alderaan.

Within a few minutes she set off, heading for the docking bay of the Tantive IV, ready to set course for Toprawa. She still felt unclean, but she had renewed purpose in her stride. This time, she could use the injustice and atrocities of the Imperial action against Ralltiir as her cover.

***

The orderly responsible for Qui-Zhang's escape lay slumped on the floor, a hand at his throat, his body already cooling.

Vader turned to the staring, panicked faces which surrounded him. "We must resume the experiments at once. The Emperor's health is at stake."

The head surgeon scurried around the room, organising his equipment, commanding his underlings. They had Qui-Zhang sedated now, prone on the operating table, his arms secured firmly, veins exposed. Vader could see the tracks of old needle marks and implants along each arm. They had kept this man drugged, the Hutts, addicted perhaps, as well as using him as a donor for the experiments into the source of the Emperor's longevity.

Vader sneered at the sight of the tranquillised body on the table. A face, a form, a voice rose up in his mind. Jinn. The man here didn't really remind him of Qui-Gon Jinn. How could he? This one was maddened by years of imprisonment and torture. Jinn had been proud, upright, knowing. Oh, so knowing.

Vader could feel the venom rising in his throat. He wanted to spit it out, spit it into the face of the man lying before him. To show the hatred he felt towards the man who had turned his life upside down. Who had set him on a path which had brought him here. To this. To this ravaged flesh. This barren life and ruined hope.

The venom and the hate swept across the dark plains of his mind. Pushing down the regret, the guilt, the barely remembered love.

Spit? He could no more spit than he could smile. His face was immobilised by tight bands of scar tissue behind the mask. In compensation he picked up the syringe from the surgeon's table and crushed it in his gloved hand, letting the dust and fragments fall into the inert body before him.

"This is your legacy, Qui-Gon Jinn," he hissed. "Too bad you didn't stick around to see it."

- 4 -
The Gods Only Know How To Compete Or Echo.

"Well, Mara, you fail to surprise me yet again."

Mara didn't turn at the voice. She had known the Emperor would find her, disturb her here, in the medical bay, in the rifling of his files, of Grocelind's records. She glanced up from the data screen and peered through the viewing window at the patient, at this Qui-Zhang Jinn. Tossing and turning, fighting the drugs and the restraints, he looked like nothing. She sensed nothing. No power. No Force. Nothing. Only psychosis.

How could this mad creature provide the solution to the Emperor's decline? She was interested because she suspected that her own use of the Dark Side of the Force would lead to such decay in her own body. And the last thing in all the world that she wanted was to lose her beauty. That, that, she could not live without.

"Ah, Lord Sidious." Sidious. She said the word with emphasis and spite.

For he, the Emperor, was the one called Sidious. It had said so in the records she had read. An ancient being, older than they all thought. He had dabbled in clone experiments for years, decades, almost a century. Palpatine had been his greatest achievement, his figurehead in the halls of government, but when Palpatine had died, his life extinguished by a vengeful enemy at the moment of his ascendancy to power, why Sidious, Sidious - newly revitalised by this Grocelind's potion, had simply usurped his younger self's position as Supreme Chancellor of the Republic. It was Sidious that had built the Empire on the decaying corpses of the alien races and the Jedi.

She glanced down and read some more, her eyes flicking quickly as the lines of data scrolled across the screen. Ah, Anakin Skywalker. Lord Vader, too. Another clone.

She turned finally and smiled at her master. "Interesting," she purred. "And clever. Very clever."

"I'm glad you think so, my dear." The Emperor was very close to her, he reached past her and flicked the screen into darkness. "But this is not for your eyes."

Not for her eyes! She snorted. She didn't believe half the stuff she'd read. That some descendent of long dead Sith slaves could transform herself into a monstrous being. That Palpatine had grown obsessed with this woman. That a Jedi had mated with her. And that pathetic creature, all mad eyes and tangled hair, in there, this witch's child. Her blood, her offspring's blood the antidote to Sidious' weakness. It was implausible. And Vader. Vader, his genes, Sidious' genes, contorted by the Force working through some woman, some Hutt slave, he had been implanted into. The Jedi Order's Chosen One. Never.

Mara stepped sideways and strode across the room. "It's preposterous. It's all nonsense."

The Emperor shrugged. "Think what you like, my dear. When the time comes, when your face sags and your body betrays you, you'll be glad of the solution."

That did it. "How dare you threaten me," she screamed. "Your secrets are mine now." She hissed through clenched teeth.

"Cease this anger, Mara Jade. It does not become you." The Emperor's voice reached a crescendo.

"Oh, oh," she railed. "Anger. I thought you nurtured anger. I thought it was only Jedi who denied anger?"

"Anger wastes vital life energy, my dear. For you it should be an amusement, merely an amusement. Don't waste it on me."

Sidious smiled at her with palpable indifference. She could sense that she amused him, her fury and her espionage both. She wished, she wished she were free of him, but she was tied to him by bonds much stronger than simple loyalty. Her power, all her powers and Force-given skills, descended from him. Without him she was nothing.

Knowing this didn't stem the tide of her anger. It incensed her still further. Thoughts of Vader, his favoured position in the eyes of the Emperor, his high status in the chain of command, fuelled the flames of her ire.

***

The sombre ship landed. It was little more than a sphere, a black sphere embellished with silver filigree, ragged solar panels folded against its sides like monstrous wings, an open portal at its centre leading to a dark heart.

Obi-Wan walked slowly across the sand towards it. Alert, yet unafraid. He had faced this foe before. If foe it was. He had seen it coming.

A woman emerged from the orb. Dressed in a dark shroud. Older than he, wrinkled with time, stooped and wiry, yet with intent in her steps. She closed the gap between them.

Robes the colour of twilight lit by a myriad stars wrapped around her frail form as the evening winds of Tatooine blew about her. Trails of white hair escaped from her veils.

He stopped. There was something in her he recognised. Yet was it just the garments of her art and calling that he knew? Or something else?

"Obi-Wan Kenobi," she said in hushed, harsh tones as she neared him. "The hour of your death is at hand."

***

"Your clone," Mara sneered. "Your malleable clone. No wonder you prefer him over me."

The Emperor, this man Sidious, stared at her, the contempt obvious.

"He was a failed experiment, you've read the files. But he had his uses. The Jedi took him as their saviour and he betrayed them."

"He will fail again. He will betray *you*."

"Cease this jealous outrage, now." Sidious raised his hand, threatening a blow that despite his infirmities she knew could knock her to the floor. "He is no concern of yours. Forget him. He is a trifle to me. You're the one I hold most dear. Anakin fell so easily, but Vader is expendable. You are not."

Mara didn't fear him. Or his punishments. She sensed there was more, information that wasn't hidden in some file. "He doesn't know?" She looked her Emperor in the eye, equal to equal. "Does he?"

"No, and he shan't know. Shall he, Mara?" He reached out a hand towards her, a gesture, part lover, part parent, part slave master.

Mara knew when she had reached the limit. "No," she replied firmly. "Not from me."

The Emperor dropped his hand. "Good. He is an experiment I am no longer interested in. You, on the other hand..."

***

"I won't let you take my life easily. I have work to complete here. The Force wills it." Obi-Wan pulled out his lightsabre, ready to defend himself.

The old woman, the crone, continued on her path towards him. "Put that away," she said, but it wasn't a command, it was an appeal.

He dropped his arm but kept his fingers curled around the weapon.

"What do you want?"

She answered with another question. "Don't you recognise me, Obi-Wan?"

"You're Baobhan-sith."

She had stopped now, a few paces from him, but he kept his guard up.

"Yes," she said. "A Matriarch. But you don't recognise me." She stared at him curiously. "What is your heart's desire?"

"I don't have to answer your questions. You have no right to be here."

She stretched one arm up to the sky, pointing. "I flew on the solar winds to reach the far suns, Obi-Wan Kenobi, to bring you a gift."

"A gift?"

"Your heart's desire."

"My desire is to see that Luke Skywalker achieves his destiny."

"That is your duty, Obi-Wan. Not your desire. And when your duty is done, what then?"

"Death." He sighed. "Then, I hope, I will become one with the Force."

"Hope? Oh, sad, sweet, Obi-Wan, what about love?"

"Ah, desire. You mean..."

"I could be young again, for you."

The air shimmered around her and he saw her beauty, the beauty of youth. He knew her then. No, he hadn't forgotten.

"Eilidh!"

"Yes, Obi-Wan. Do you want to share sex?"

He opened his mouth, a soundless gesture. He shook his head. Once he had been too young. Now he was too old.

Eilidh laughed. The sound hummed in the air around them. An aged woman, wizened and bent, stood before him again.

"I didn't think so," she said. "Ever the faithful Jedi. Still, it could have been fun." She winked at him.

She had him wrong. Oh, but she had him wrong. He wasn't a blindly faithful Jedi Master. He was was faithful to Eirtae. Only to Eirtae. He shrugged and started to turn.

"No, that wasn't the gift, Obi-Wan. You can still have that if you choose."

He stopped, his back to her now. "And what do I have to do, exactly?"

"Give me the moment in which you were supremely happy."

He spun around, confused. "How?"

She reached out to him. "Just give me your hand."

He didn't want to comply, but something in him obeyed anyway. She grabbed his arm and pulled him sharply towards her. He caught a flash of light on the edge of his vision. He turned his head but her hand moved too fast. Something metallic and sharp. He felt a blow to his temple and fell backwards, backwards into the abyss of night.

***

"You promised me you would have a solution within the month. You only have a few more days. And what have you to show me? Less than nothing."

The surgeon had returned just a few moments ago and now the Emperor had turned his wrath on this man. He cowered back. "I'm sorry, Lord Palpatine. Whatever it was Grocelind found, it is not in this man's blood."

"What do you mean? Not in his blood. It has to be." The Emperor swept his hand towards the surface of a table, equipment clattering to the floor, containers exploding.

The surgeon moved back in alarm. "I've repeated the procedures again and again, sir. There's nothing."

Mara felt the shift in the energies of the Force, knew that Sidious was about to act. She felt impelled to calm the situation down.

"Perhaps, my Lord, this Qui-Zhang doesn't have it."

The Emperor turned on her. "Doesn't have it?" His voice was a screech so loud she frowned in discomfort.

She spoke softly to appease him. "Perhaps, Lord, it is not genetic. He was not raised a..." Her mind wrestled with the word. "What are they?"

"Baobhan-sith. You think it could be some form of initiation? Some process they put their adherents through? To put this agent in their blood?"

"It's possible, master."

"Then we are lost."

She sensed despair creeping up on Sidious. She steeled herself to protect him from it.

"Or perhaps..."

"Perhaps?" He sounded intrigued. Good.

"Perhaps..." She walked across to look again through the screen at Qui-Zhang. She reached out with her mind. She could still sense little but the madness. Other than that, there seemed nothing strange at all about him. No alienness. No mystical powers. Just an ordinary - if insane - man. She felt certain now.

"Perhaps he is not the one."

Sidious snapped at her. "What do you mean?"

Mara bided her time. She was sure, but she had to work out the how and why.

"Surgeon."

He snapped to attention at her word.

"Have you done a midi-chlorian count? A blood analysis?"

The surgeon reached out and activated a data screen. "Here."

Mara read the data and ran it through her thoughts. She turned conspiratorially to Sidious, masking out the surgeon's presence.

"This man..." She cocked her head towards the room containing Qui-Zhang. "His mother possessed no midi-chlorians at all?"

"None."

"But she was alive." That was something Mara couldn't quite grasp, couldn't quite understand.

"She wasn't dead," Sidious countered. "Her blood, though, its cells contained some elements which were of a similar construction to midi-chlorians. A mutation, perhaps. The Sith worlds she came from were poisonous for us, for the midi-chlorians."

Mara thought a moment, then continued. "And his father was a powerful Jedi?"

"One of their best, though his methods were unorthodox."

"So we'd expect his count to be high."

Sidious nodded.

"Yet this man's count is within the normal range, not high, not particularly weak. And his cells are normal."

"Your point, Mara?"

She could sense a creeping impatience in Sidious' manner.

"We might expect a mutation to be transmitted genetically. There's no evidence of it. Nor does he have a count high enough to indicate his father was strong in the Force."

"So, you think we have the wrong man. No, it's impossible. I had assurances..."

"My Lord," Mara interrupted him. "Qui-Zhang was hidden, yes? Can you be absolutely sure you retrieved the right child?"

- 5 -
Needing some other kind of madness.

Ten days.

Han stood alone on the mesa above the canyon. Stood under the cold, glittering midnight sky. And as he stood he threw a handful of gritty sand out into the dark Tatooine night, out into the abyss, watching it form into misty swirls as it fell.

Ten days.

Jabba had given him ten days to raise the money. He didn't have a hope in hell of doing that on Nar Shaddaa - Lando had slammed *that* door firmly shut, so he'd come here, to Tatooine, hoping to drum up some custom. Eight days gone and so far he'd got nothing. No work. No spice run. Nothing.

Nothing. No voices in his head, either. No insistent urgings to do things that weren't in his own interests.

Ten days. Two days left.

Chewie had complained bitterly but Han, in his sorrow and loneliness, had wandered out here into the desert wastes to brood. And rebuild some of his braggadocio. So far, it hadn't worked. But tomorrow, tomorrow he'd move on to Mos Eisley and see if someone there didn't have a cargo that needed urgent delivery. After all, he still had two days left.

A shooting star caught his eye.

A wish. What would he wish for?

For Bria to come back? Impossible. And he would never trust a woman again. No one would ever steal his heart again.

For his sanity? But strange as it seemed he missed the whispering voice in his ear and almost longed for it to return.

For the money to repay Jabba? That was more sensible. Yes. He wished for the money, for an easy job to fall into his lap.

Another streak traversed the sky. Then another. And a fourth.

Han grinned. Must be a meteor shower. It might yet be a fine sight.

The northern sector of the sky suddenly flared with a dozen, twenty, lights.

That was no meteor shower. That was man-made. Somewhere up there, there was a battle going on.

Much as hated to admit it, the thought depressed him. It soured the moment. He turned and started trudging back towards Mos Espa.

***

Leia knew that it was lost now. That she was lost.

It had been a long shot and it hadn't worked. They'd obtained the plans for the new Imperial weapon, a battle station capable of such mass destruction that it sickened her to even think of it. They'd barely thanked the spies at Topwara when disaster struck. They'd been ambushed by an Imperial fleet. She'd decoded the emergency message from Bail and on his word she'd had the Tantive IV make a run for it here. To Hutt Space. To Tatooine. Find General Kenobi, that had been Bail's instruction. He was their only hope.

They'd had little chance from the outset. A diplomatic ship, a Corellian Corvette, outrunning an Imperial Star Destroyer. They wouldn't make it. She wasn't likely to make it. They'd come out of hyperspace above Tatooine barely minutes before the Devastator. Not time enough even to get an envoy down to the planet. Now the Star Destroyer had them, sucked them in and ripped them open. Stormtroopers had already boarded.

Leia shivered. The Devastator was Lord Vader's ship. A death sentence. They would torture her, of course. She would break. Eventually she would break. Talk. Reveal everything. Betray them all, the Alliance, her father, her colleagues, her fellow travellers. She would rather die. She knew, in that eventuality, that she would pray to the Force to take her. And take her quickly. Well, she wasn't likely to make it through this, but she might yet get their plea for help delivered. She slotted the datacard into the droid's input reader and blurted out what she suspected might be her last message. Her last ever message.

***

Luke Skywalker was a farm boy. Raised on Tatooine, the grains of hot sand had worked their way under his skin and penetrated his soul. He had been born to toil and sweat, it was all he could ever remember. Yet in his mind he was something else. In his dreams he was a warrior, a fighter, a leader. And though he was trapped in this hell, this place of stifling heat and endless menial labour, in his heart he was free.

"Luke!" He heard his uncle call. "Luke!" More insistent now.

"What is it this time?" he sighed as he pulled himself up gawkily from the slumped sprawl he had adopted at the opposite end of the veranda to where his uncle was working.

It was almost midday of the in-phase period of the double suns and thus the hottest of the annual cycle. Both orbs shone down from the zenith and baked the land all around them. He stared over at his uncle with barely concealed hostility. Owen looked so old. This place shrivelled a man before his time, lined his face and thickened his flesh. This was no place for a young man with dreams, for a boy destined for greatness.

"There you are," Owen called. "Come and help with this vaporator before the sandcrawler gets here."

Luke sighed again. He knew he was being uncharitable, unkind. Owen and Beru had always cared for him, loved him even. But he didn't belong here, not with them. He doubted if they were even his real aunt and uncle. Some distant relatives by marriage or proxy maybe, just not his flesh and blood. If they were, wouldn't they understand him better? Wouldn't they? Wouldn't they be able to tell him more about his family? Be willing to talk about his father? His father had been a navigator. Had flown in space. That much Luke knew. That was about all. Luke wanted to be in space, to escape this planet, to traverse the great distances between the stars. But he wanted to be a pilot, not a navigator. He wanted to fly.

"Coming, uncle." He wandered slowly, deliberately slowly to where Owen waited.

"Hurry it up," his uncle chided. "We don't have all day. We need to get those new droids and the Jawas won't wait."

Luke didn't mean to be belligerent. He knew it was unfair to treat Owen this way. But Owen had so steadfastly refused to let him go. Season after season there was work to be done, harvests to bring in. It just wasn't fair. Didn't Owen realise? Luke didn't belong here. He wasn't a farmer. Not in his heart. He bent to pick up a tool. It should be the controls of a ship in his hands, not a spanner, a prosaic tool of the labourer. He threw the despised object to the ground and swore he would stay here no longer.

Luke Skywalker scowled. He looked at Owen and scowled. "I won't waste my life here like you," he whispered under his breath. He wasn't a farmer. In his heart he was his father's son. In his dreams, he was at the Academy, already in training as a fighter pilot.

***

She was in a high tower of the Imperial Palace, a pinnacle amongst the clouds. Windows opened out on the empty vista all around her. Onto the shifting skies of Coruscant.

A princess. She was like a princess. This, to be here, to be given this access, was a privilege.

A prisoner. But also a prisoner. This turret, for the time being, was her prison.

She felt like a princess and a prisoner both.

So Mara sat in her tower and sifted through an eternity of data. Neither the Emperor, nor anyone under him, had ever thought this data would be required again. And yet it had been stored here in case. In case of a situation just like this one. Yet for reasons of security protocol nothing had been uniquely coded. Should anyone break in here they would have a hard time finding anything in the mess. That might well deter criminals and rebel spies, but Mara had no choice. The Emperor had charged her with the search for the records of Qui-Zhang's abduction. She reprogrammed another seekerbot with a data string and set it trawling through the endless files.

Stupid, she thought. Stupid. It was a stupid move. She was stupid giving Sidious this opportunity to exercise her mind. Thinking she could out-think him. He'd touched her forehead with one bony, cold finger and complimented her on her intelligence. Then he'd sent her up here to trawl through the old records, unreferenced, uncoded, unordered. She was to search for the reports on the delivery of the boy they thought was Qui-Zhang to Jabba Desilijic Tiure, what - twenty-six, twenty-seven years ago. Before she'd been born. She scanned through screen after screen, file after file, of records. Nothing. Useless. Boring field reports. Endless logs. Interminable statements.

It bored her. She was a warrior, not a clerk. She preferred action, but she'd make the best of it. She always did. The Emperor gave her so much in return. Without him, without his aid, she would not have access to the Force.

The Force was no help here. The seekerbots kept coming up empty.

Jabba was a fool, she thought bitterly. And Sidious an even greater one to trust him. Jabba relied too much on his scum, his rabble of smugglers and pirates. Sidious had underestimated their greed and their stupidity.

Mara took a deep breath. Doesn't matter, she told herself, you might find something. Something useful. Something Sidious might die for. Or she might kill for.

- 6 -
The night and day of the body.

He stood in the shadows. A man of the shadows. Once he had had a life. Once he had had a name.

He had a name still. Boba Fett. But now his name was no more than a classification.

A byword for fear.

And his life was no more than a cypher. He was nothing, nothing but a shell of armour. A fearsome sight, a reminder of a bygone age, an invincible army, the ultimate foe.

He was a copy, a facsimilie, he was not unique. And so he had made himself into nothing. Expunged his personality, wiped his mind clean of emotion, of thought, of any purpose beyond the next bounty, the next scalp. He hadn't looked on his face for years. It wasn't his face, after all. It was another's. Many others.

He waited. Waited in the shadows.

But this was not prey he waited for. There was no bounty here. This was a mission, if not of mercy, then at least of courtesy. He bore sad tidings, but he felt no sadness. He would shed no tears, feel no pain, no compassion at the news he was to deliver.

The object of his wait drew near. Fett stepped forward, out of the shadows. Light gleamed on the visor of his Mandalorian helmet. This was the moment his quarry would normally quake in fear. This time he would not reap the benefits of a quick dispatch or an easy capture.

The man he had summoned was unaware of him still.

"Han Solo!" He barked the name like a command.

The Wookiee growled.

The smuggler's hand twitched towards his blaster.

"Freeze, Solo." Fett could see the recognition dawn, see the ripple of shock and fear pass across the smuggler's face before he pushed it away. Fett offered reassurance. "Relax, I'm not here for a bounty."

He passed on the message. Bria Tharen was dead. He could see that Solo was shaken. Fett didn't care. He neither loved nor loathed. He simply acted.

He didn't offer any condolences. He simply turned and melted back into the shadows, leaving the smuggler to his grief. The bounty could wait till their next encounter.

***

The dream sea tossed him high on crested waves. Slammed him down onto the rocky shore. Smashing his body with its foam. He felt that somewhere, somewhere in the real world he moaned.

A voice called to him. A sweet voice. "Come to me."

Eirtae. Eirtae. Where are you? The salt was in his eyes, the sea blinded him. He couldn't find her.

"Come to me."

"I can't." He wanted to scream. "I can't find you."

"I'll look." He wanted to weep. "I'll look for you."

He crawled up the beach of melted sand, blackened to glass, slipped and stumbled his way forward. He walked for an eon across the accursed land. Looking and looking, but never finding.

He felt a pull, a tug, taking him away, taking him away from his quest.

No. No. He hadn't looked hard enough. He hadn't found her.

It pulled harder at him. Pulling him towards the heavens.

No. No.

The land tossed and twisted. Crested like waves. Throwing him into the sky.

The dreaming was over. Obi-Wan was shaken awake by the Force. A danger was speeding towards him, on and on relentlessly, speeding towards him across the rocky wasteland.

No, not towards him exactly. But coming all the same.

He got up stiffly. He had been lying under a rocky outcrop, curled foetally into a ball. His old, abused bones could not take such discomfort. He wished for a moment that he didn't feel so old. It wasn't that he *was* old, well, not that old. It was just that Tatooine had aged him beyond his years. He wished again. For a second passing moment he wished he were like the Baobhan-sith and could be whatever age he desired to be.

The Boabhan-sith.

What had she done to him? Eilidh.

He felt that he had lost something, but he didn't yet know what it might be. Did it matter?

How long had he been out?

It was almost the dawn of the primary sun. From the aches in his limbs and his spine it could have been days. How much time did he have? How much time did *he* have left?

Despite the urgency of the Force's urgings, Obi-Wan took his time to work through a set of old, well-remembered moving meditations first taught to him by Qui-Gon Jinn. He moved slowly, fluidly, stretching his muscles and unlocking his joints. Then he sat for a while under the dawning sky and as he sat he rubbed absently at the knuckles of one hand with the fingers of the other, feeling the nodules of knobby growths on bones broken and healed a long time before.

It was time.

He could sense the stirrings of the sand people, sense them moving in for the kill.

He stood and scanned the horizon. There, away towards the north-west. If he hurried, he could be there in time.

Time.

It was time.

Thank the Force, it was time.

***

The adjutant snapped his heels. "The Grand Moff sends word. He has reached the rendezvous point. He is ready to receive you and the prisoner, Lord Vader."

"Good." Vader turned. "Is she ready for transportation?"

The man nodded curtly. "She has been processed."

Vader clenched a hand. A hand? No. A construct of circuits and plasteel. No matter. He was relishing the promised confrontation. A rebellion leader in his grasp at last. He was going to squeeze the information out of her drop by painful drop.

"Has any word been received from the surface? Any trace of the droids?"

"Jawa's salvaged them, sir. Sold them to a moisture farmer. Unfortunately, the farm hand was out working on evaporators with them. But all the witnesses have been eradicated. We're after the boy. It's only a matter of time."

Vader raised his fist. "Tell them they are running out of time."

"Yes, Lord Vader."

The adjutant left rapidly when Vader gestured for him to go.

Before he left for the shuttle, Vader turned again towards the viewing port. Tatooine, the dun sands and rust rocks of Tatooine, lay spread out below him. A home, once it had been a home. Then it had become a tombstone, a memorial to the dead. Now, now it was the acrid symbol of all that remained of his old life.

There were lives down there he coveted, he could sense them, but they would come to him soon enough.

- Interlude -
From Horizon To Horizon.

Running. He was running. He was one with the stag and one with the god. He ran wild and free, his hooves pounding the dry loam, the wind rippling the mane on his back, the antlers heavy on his brow. Stones flew sharply away from his hooves, dead leaves crumbled to dust under their impact, low branches snagged and snapped as he brushed them in his flight. He was the proud beast of the forest, he was the lord of the wild hunt.

Yet he was hunted.

So he ran. He ran.

For while he ran, he was free. He was free. Free of the thing that sought him. As long as the unwelcome thing that sought him was behind him, he was yet free. He ran. He ran so that it remained behind him. So that he remained free.

He was the god, the fertile sun, the ruler of the waves.

He was Mananon.

Yes, he was Mananon, but he denied the gift he had been given. The vision he had experienced. The joy of seeing with another's eyes. The gift of seeing through his son's eyes.

He was tired. Tired of seeing loss and tragedy. Tired of feeling the pain and the joylessness of the realm that the Sith Lord had built. That the Dark Side had wrought. What was that to him now? He possessed the magical joy of the Baobhan-sith. He had Iva.

He stumbled in his flight. Terror and loss assailed him.

He had left Iva. Left her behind along with the call of the Force.

He had failed. He had run. He wasn't Mananon.

He was Qui-Gon Jinn.

***

Han's grief was too much for any man to bear. He couldn't have stopped the tears if he had tried. Even as they unmanned him, they purged him clean. Rejected by Bria as he had been, as much as he had rejected her, he felt her death. It was a painful spike in his heart, it twisted and tore at his conscience.

He didn't love her. He didn't love her any more. He had. But he loved no longer. That was not the pain he felt. The pain he felt was that he had walked away. If had accepted her offer. If he had only joined with the rebellion. Done as she had asked. Then maybe he could have saved her life. Maybe...

Maybe he would be dead too.

Maybe that was what he felt. Guilt that he had escaped so easily again. That luck still stalked him. Luck. Was it luck? Was the voice that told him she wasn't the one, that she wasn't for him, that he should leave her, was the voice the one thing that had saved him? The thought chilled him, chilled him to his core. He felt as though his heart had stopped, that time had ceased. Yes, he grieved. But he didn't grieve for Bria. No, he grieved for the voice. The voice that had fallen silent. The voice that had always guided him. That had commanded and cajoled. That had been his luck. That was now silent.

He was empty. Bereft.

Han hid his face in his hands. He wept.

- 7 -
Like the pale dreams in the past.

The Tuskan raiders were on the hunt. Obi-Wan took all the shelter that the land he knew so well offered him. He slipped invisible across the barren sands like a phantasm, hid in crevasses, melted into the striations of the cliff walls like a chameleon. He made his way towards the appointment he had long awaited. The end of his sequestration. The climax of his life. As he neared the conjunction of time past and time future, he felt a tremor of fear cling to the hem of his robe. He quickened his steps to escape it. Finally, from the abutment of an outcrop of rock, he watched the moment of many destinies unfold. He watched. He watched as Luke came to him. As Luke came to him unaware, unheedless of the danger. Watched as the Sand People stalked and cornered their prey.

The droids seemed more alert to the danger than the boy. Obi-Wan let a brief smile touch his features. Artoo? Threepio? Yes, it was surely them. Had they a role to play in this even now? Obi-Wan feared for a moment that they might have told Luke too much. Too much of his father, too much of the world before his birth. Such words, such potent words of the past, would be a danger. They would unsettle Luke, unbalance his equilibrium with forbidden knowledge, with secrets long hidden. But no. No. Their memory cells would have been wiped long ago. They wouldn't even recognise the clumsy young Jedi he had been in his youth or the idealistic General Kenobi who had fought valiantly in the Clone Wars. They certainly wouldn't know Obi-Wan now, not now, not in this old flesh.

The secrets were safe and Obi-Wan assured himself that he would keep them safe still.

Luke had a laser rifle in his hands now. Obi-Wan doubted he had the skills necessary to defend himself here. Too many traps, too many blind approaches.

Oh, Luke. So gauche. So raw. So naive. "If only I could have trained you," he whispered to himself. That had been his plan. But events, events that brought painful memories to mind, had prevented that. Obi-Wan had had to settle for the watcher's role. To play the waiting game.

And now that the waiting was over, now that the moment was drawing near, he realised he hadn't planned for it at all. What would he say? What could he say to Luke Skywalker, the son of Anakin, spawn of the dark side. How much should he tell him? Of his parentage? Of Anakin's fall? There was so much Luke did not know. And should not know. Not yet. Not before he had mastered the Jedi arts and lived and breathed its codes.

Obi-Wan inhaled deeply, aware that panic threatened his composure. He hesitated, even as he watched the Sand People in their attack. He felt almost nothing as they struck Luke down, he detached himself and invited the Force to take control of his actions.

His mind whirled back through the years even as his body calmed. A parade of images assailed him.

Anakin changing. Changing physically and mentally. Questioning the Force, opposing the Jedi, turning to others, to outsiders, to the Emperor, for advice. Rejecting his master, his tutor, the Council.

Another figure appeared to Obi-Wan. That person, that unknown person, the one whom Anakin went out on frequent nights to visit alone. Whom Obi-Wan spied on in trepidation for the future, for events unfolding, for imminent fall, for pressing failure. The dark figure seduced Anakin away. Away from Obi-Wan, away from the Order.

And Anakin changed, his features became harder, sharper. His attention to duty became lax, his attitude irascible, his emotions clouded with anger and hate, pride and ambition.

The same cloaked and hooded man came to Obi-Wan one night with a message. Anakin isn't yours, he said. He doesn't belong with the Jedi. His genetic make-up was defective, he had been cloned but the process had failed. He had been implanted, his birth mother somehow subverting the embryo's cells. He had been changed by the midi-chlorians in her bloodstream, by the very Force itself. But now the process was rectifying itself. The genes were reverting to their original form. Anakin was no longer Anakin. What had once been Anakin had been destroyed by the thing that now called itself Lord Vader. The Chosen One was a poisoned chalice.

Obi-Wan saw himself turn away in shock, disbelieving. He had kept these things to himself. Hoping it wasn't true, hoping he could prove it wrong. The evidence before his eyes told the lie in that. He had shared the secret and been denied. Yoda had done nothing.

Obi-Wan watched it all unfold again. Watched again as Anakin turned, opposed him, his own master. He watched him fall, fall to a living death, fall to the dark side.

The truth was, Anakin was dead. Luke was their hope now, the future's hope. Obi-Wan would do anything to keep the boy stable, to set him on the path, to guide him into the light of the Force. Knowledge of his father, of who, of what his father was could be a stumbling block before he had even taken a step on the right path. No. Obi-Wan knew he must keep silent. Must lie if pressed.

The visions wavered, the air vibrated with a sound. Ominous and taut in the heat.

Obi-Wan heard a terribly eerie moan. A moaning cry that echoed back and forth across the canyon. He realised it as his own cry. As the Force working in him. He had relinquished control of his body for a moment and it had used him. Used him to drive the Sand People away.

He rushed to tend to the unconscious Luke.

***

Tarkin watched with growing distaste as Vader prepared the torture droid. His personal touch, he had insisted. There must be no technical hitches. It wasn't what Tarkin would have done. Tarkin was not a blameless soul, he had personally overseen pogroms against aliens and put down insurrection on a dozen worlds. This he did for the cause, for what he believed in, for the strength and might of the Empire. He drew the line at gratuitous cruelty and excessive punishment. He would rather see those who opposed them re-educated or humanely incarcerated.

Vader though, Vader relished these moments. The blood on his hands, the broken bodies and spirits at his feet.

In this, Tarkin held the higher moral ground. For Tarkin, this, all this, was political, was ideology. For Vader, this was lust and the pursuit of invidious ends.

"There are easier ways of extracting information," Tarkin said, his voice smooth to avoid antagonising the dark lord of the Sith too openly. "But then you enjoy this don't you, Lord Vader."

Vader didn't speak. His breather hissed like a venomous snake. He looked up at Tarkin, had eyes been visible behind the mask they might have pierced the Grand Moff to the core. It was enough for Tarkin to feel the pressure in the air around him grab his throat with a leaden hand.

He forced words out through constricted vocal cords. "Don't forget that this is battle station is under my command."

The pressure dropped.

"At the Emperor's pleasure, Grand Moff. Don't forget that." Vader bent to his task once again. "Don't forget that."

***

So... So Luke had finally washed up on his doorstep. It wasn't how Obi-Wan had imagined it might be. Luke hadn't listened to him. Hadn't drunk in the details of the Force, the Jedi way of life, the discipline required of a knight, the true worth of a Jedi's elegant weapon. No, Luke was too, too wrapped up in the dreams of glory that came with the feel of a lightsabre in his hands. That was dangerous. See how just the news that his father had been a Jedi and had fought in the Clone Wars, had flamed him with excitement. That was enough to ignite the fancy of a youth barely into manhood. Obi-Wan felt his decision had been right. That information must be rationed, meted out like water in the arid desert.

And yet, as much as Luke's behaviour worried him, something unsettled him more. He hadn't thought of Leia in years, and now this message. Calling on him for aid. How had he, why had he forgotten her? He had wiped her from his mind. Was it too painful? The very thought of her? That she would look like her mother? Would bring Amidala to mind? And if he thought of Amidala, how could he not think of Eirtae?

Well, here she was, if not in person, then at least close. But in danger, a graver danger than perhaps any he had faced. That even Luke now faced. But at last, he thought, he had purpose. He had been called and would obey. It wasn't just Bail Organa he must aid, but Leia. Leia must come first.

And what of Luke? Luke, burned down by menial toil and blinkered by his uncle's outlook, Luke couldn't drag himself away from thoughts of filial obedience. Obi-Wan wanted to take the boy by the shoulders and shake him. Shout at him. Shout that he owed no debt to Owen Lars. That his destiny was with the Force. That Owen had failed him, had tainted him with mediocrity. Obi-Wan wanted to scream. To scream it out. "I should have trained you!"

He couldn't speak. He kept silent.

He picked up a few possessions. His old Jedi equipment went into their belt pouches. A flimsy of Eirtae, worn and tattered by years of his touch, as if by touching it he could be touching her. That went into a pocket close to his heart.

Obi-Wan felt a strange sadness and thrill at leaving his home at last. He climbed into the speeder beside Luke. Soon no one would remember he had ever been here. Already the wind blew even his footprints away.

- 8 -
Trapped In Someone Else's Dream.

As though finally satisfied that the torture droid was ready, Vader turned to Tarkin. "You are welcome to witness the interrogation," he hissed as the droid rose, activated, menacing, from its supports. It hovered in the air behind the Dark Lord, promising pain.

Tarkin waited a moment before replying, hoping to convince that he weighed the offer seriously. "No thank you, Lord Vader. I have other business I must attend to. The dissolution of the Senate offers opportunities for us all."

By his words, Tarkin hoped to signal his superior position in the new political order. He had been opposed to the Old Republic since before he had first held political office. Secretly then. But with passing time, more openly. Since Palpatine's election to Supreme Chancellor after the feeble Valorum had been swept aside, Tarkin had grown confident in expressing his beliefs. In the supremacy of humanity, in the power of military rule. He had never, though, sullied his hands with blood. Subtle threat had always served him well. It was well known that he never played a bluff.

He watched as the Stormtroopers, Vader's personal guard, opened the door to the cell. Watched as Vader entered with the droid.

"And now, your highness, we will discuss the location of your hidden rebel base."

At Vader's words, Tarkin turned and left the detention block. Left before the screaming started.

***

"Killed them! They killed them! It's my fault! Mine!"

Luke was on his knees in the sand. He howled and cried and yelled at the empty air. He had run from the scene of devastation, from the coiling smoke, from the charred wreckage of their bodies, Owen and Beru's bodies, twisted in the torment of a hideous death. He had run from the scene in terror and then fallen to the ground, vomiting with shock. His stomach empty, he felt the anger and the hatred grow, take root there and spread. Anger. Hate. Aimed as much at himself as at the perpetrators of this crime.

"They killed them! I shouldn't have gone after that damned droid."

But words were insufficient. Words, however loud, however heated, would not bring them back, would not have him there to protect them, would not change a thing. Revenge, the thoughts of revenge grew. His father had been a Jedi, hadn't he? It might take some getting used to, but the son of a Jedi ought to be able to exact just reparations for this terrible misdeed. But how? Luke knew he was just a boy still, however big his dreams. Ben Kenobi. He had to get back to Ben Kenobi. *He* would know what to do.

***

Leia kept her chin high and her gaze focused on the black visage looming over her. Inside, it was a different story. Inside, she trembled. Vader didn't scare her, but the intent of his visit did. She refused to be intimidated by the bristling needles and pincers of the droid, but the thought of what that piercing metal could do unsettled her. She drew on all the strength she had ever known, all the protections that the Force had ever leant her. Vader's voice droned on. She knew that this was a preliminary torture. The tormentor telling the victim what was about to happen. She tried to block them out, his metallic words, but they seeped into the auditory centres of her brain all the same.

"Drugs to keep you conscious. Alive. Truth serums, pain amplifiers, drugs to cause paralysis, temporary or permanent. Poisons, nano-organisms which will devour you from the inside."

It was a list of everything that he could do to her. An itinerary of his power over her. But she would not yield. She was determined not to yield. Still, she did not know how much pain her body could take, nor when her mind might betray her. She stared on, trying to intimidate her intimidator. How could she tell if it worked? His mask showed no expression, his voice no emotion.

"Make it easy on yourself, Princess," he sneered. "Give me the location." Now he got to the point.

"Never," she asserted.

"Very well," he rejoindered. Now it would begin.

A simple tone set the droid in motion. Metallic ligatures snaked out to snare her wrists and head, their cutting bite holding her firmly in place, pulling her upright, her head back to expose her neck. A hollow needle pierced her jugular, another her chest. She could feel its cold entry into her heart. She stopped herself from shivering, bit her lip to stop herself from calling out.

"The rebel base?" A final offer.

She sucked in a breath. It made a sound almost like a denial.

"Remember that this is your choice."

She felt a cold rush of fluid into her body. The blossoming of fire. A burning heat inside her skin. She tried to fight. It took control.

Sharp. Ache. Stabs. Heart. Pounds.

Flames in her mind, probing, questing. She resisted, resolved to keep her shell intact.

Fingers spasmed. Hands twitched. Arms contorted. Teeth clenched.

A gasp. A scream. Involuntary. Torn from her throat.

Gasping. Air. Drowning.

Needles in her mind and her muscles.

She fought it. Used the pain as a screen, let it become a cloud swirling across her mind, hiding her secrets further, deeper down.

It stopped.

Nausea. Unfocussed vision.

There was a silence that seemed to last an eternity. Panting breath.

"It doesn't matter that you won't talk now. You will eventually."

The narcotics ran through her again, an electrocution. Stupefying. Excruciating.

Back. Arched. Pain. Explosion.

Leia reeled in her senses. Withdrew her mind. Resisted the temptation of words that spelt disclosure. She used the agony and the terror as her defence.

It stopped at last. If she hadn't been held fast, she would have slumped forward. Spent. Head pounding. Lungs burning.

Mind. Numbed.

"Talk."

She shook her head, fighting the restraints of the droid. She could see something. A vision. No, reality. A bright gleaming river of ice. Carrying her away from here. Safe.

"Talk."

She only moaned.

"I can turn up the flow again. Talk."

She felt it roll off Vader, his pleasure. He was enjoying this. It resolved her to stand firm. It made him weak. She searched for the chink in his armour.

There.

The insights were coming faster now. As the pain increased they flowed over her. She didn't trust herself to recall them later, but she knew now what she could do, what new strengths she had tapped.

She sensed the fear in him. His loss. His anger. He was distracted by a presence, someone he truly feared. Someone he truly feared to face. To face again. Someone he knew, someone from his past.

Could it be? Could it? Could he have a weakness? A flaw? A fissure through which she could enter his lair and defeat him?

Was it just the pain that made her feel that? Or was it something else? Was it real? All this?

Another burst of fire in her veins. Another shock suffused her. The agony renewed again. Propelled her into a place dominated by surges of suffering and dread for which there were no words.

"It will get a lot worse before it stops. I promise." His dissonant voice was in her head, his black countenance beside her ear. "The rebel base. Where is the rebel base?"

"I've got you." She forced the words through the spasms the current induced, she couldn't tell if he had heard. If he understood. He had thought to interrogate her, but she was the one who had learnt her enemy's weakness. She had found a way in. She felt the comforting presence of the Force beneath the shell of her mind. It offered her a haven, safe from the pain. She took it. She walked freely into the darkness of her own mind, knowing that the Force would lead her. Would lead her into the mind of her mortal enemy.

For a while she walked in darkness. Slowly, slowly, the darkness lifted. Lights flared at the periphery of her vision, sparked and glittered, until they almost blinded her. And there, in the scintillating flashes, she saw at last. A pattern. Links, nodes, networks. A whole history laid out before her. She saw shapes, sights, scenes, in the darkness. Scenes which set her teeth on edge and made her eyes burn. His memories, his life.

Images swept by her on either side.

A child leaving home for the last time, sneaking a forbidden look back at his mother. Her death. Guilt. He shouldn't have looked.

A child's triumph in battle, eagerly running to tell his father - no, his mentor. Dead. Struck down by his enemy at the moment of victory. He shouldn't have rejoiced.

A young man fighting by his mentor's side. Pride. Admiration. Trust. Trust broken. The man fighting his mentor. Dismay. Abandonment. Forlorn. He shouldn't have stopped listening.

A man in love with a woman. A sweet face, dark hair, not unlike Leia's own, like looking into a mirror. The woman turned away, hardened her heart towards her lover. He shouldn't have loved.

Leia was swept along on the tide of memories - into the darkness ahead. Into the flowering of wrath, the fruit of fury. Darkness pressed around her again.

His mind, this was Vader's mind. She recoiled, fought against the flow of the current. Felt herself drowning in the maelstrom of virulent thought. No, she told herself, willed herself, go with it, there's a purpose. A purpose here. The Force, she reminded herself. Trust the Force. She regained her balance. There was the spectre of a light ahead. The darkness was not total. She saw that she was passing through a forest of broad metal bars which penetrated the ground on which she walked and soared high above her head. These bars, they were like trees, dense trees, pressing closer and closer upon one another.

Very soon, she had to turn sideways to pass between them, to push and worm her way through, so thick they became. Not a forest, a prison. She thought she had become trapped when finally she squeezed painfully out into a clearing of sorts. A flat grey area encircled by bars. And sitting in the centre under a cold, cold sky was a boy. A boy she had already seen. The boy in Vader's memories. Was this mucky urchin, his nails jammed black with dirt, his cheeks smeared with tears and grime, was he the Dark Lord of the Sith? Terrible indeed those memories must have been to turn this child into such a demonic presence.

Leia sat down beside the boy and spoke softly, hesitantly. "Hello." It seemed a facile thing to say.

He looked up at her. "Have you come to take he back?" he asked. "Did Qui-Gon send for me?"

Leia struggled with the name. She felt she must know it, or one like it, but it had slipped her mind and try as she might she could not recall it. "No," she replied after a moment. "I don't think so."

"Oh," he said sadly and bent his head again.

"But you could get out of here, you know," she added quickly to reassure him. "If you want."

"No, I can't," he sniffed. "I tried."

He was crying now. Leia cuddled him close to her.

"I just end up back here," he snivelled through the tears.

She gripped him by the shoulders and held him away from her so he could see her face. "I got in, didn't I?"

He nodded.

"Then you can get out," she replied. "You are free now."

Suddenly, it seemed as though a wind or a torrent of water had snatched him away, torn him from her grasp. But it was she that was moving. Moving on and through and out. Soon she was back in the deadening blackness of Vader's mind. But she knew now that somewhere inside the monster, the boy he had once been still lived.

She felt a power and a strength growing in her with the knowledge, urging her to let it be born. She knew what she must do. Reach out with her own mind and touch his, to ensure that he too would know fear and agony and pain. No, not just pain. Not just bad things, not just negative emotions. Those he had in abundance. No, she would reach out and ensure that he would feel again, would feel all emotions again. All the emotions that life could offer him. He had been deadened by experience, she would reawaken him into sadness and compassion and love. She willed it.

She shaped the thought in her own mind, made from her own feelings, her consciousness and her empathy. She sent it with a murmur and a kiss into the darkness.

"You'll know what to do," she whispered back towards the forest. "You'll know. You'll remember."

And then the river of thought was throwing her out, out into reality again. Out into the embrace of pain. It jumped through her like electricity, a convulsive snap of torment. Fighting to control her jerking limbs, another whiplash of agony ran up her spine and exploded blackly in her skull. Though the pain shattered her to her core, it did not grow worse. She had planted a seed in Vader's mind that would grow into revulsion at his own self, that would release the child, the soul, trapped inside the ugly shell.

She heard her own scream and bit it off.

***

"I want to learn the ways of the Force and become a Jedi like my father."

Obi-Wan's heart sank. There was a edge of mania in Luke's voice, his tone demanding, not humble, vengeful. Obi-Wan could understand that the feelings rolling off Luke were due to grief, but they were still abhorrent to a Jedi. How could a young man like Luke, full of anger and bewilderment and thoughts of vengeance, be trained? The Council had been right, Yoda and Mace. Anakin had been too old to be trained and Anakin had been nine. Luke was, what, twenty now? Could he really found a new order of Jedi? Obi-Wan doubted it in that moment. And he doubted too that he had very much time left. Still, he had to try. He owed it to the Jedi, all the dead Jedi. He had a debt to pay.

***

Leia slumped against the cell wall, alone and abandoned, cold, as the last painful twitches worked their way out of her arms and legs.

"Strength through pain," she whispered. An old axiom, she didn't know its origin. Perhaps, probably, a Jedi saying. "Strength through pain," she murmured again. "Endurance through sacrifice."

She had been tortured and the torture had taught her a new skill. The pain had given birth to talent.

- 9 -
I want to forget. Shadows.

"You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy."

Obi-Wan was standing on a bluff overlooking the space port of Mos Eisley.

"We must be cautious."

He was hardly even aware of the droids by his side, nor even of Luke, so much did the vista before him take him back. Back to the time of failure and pain. But he couldn't think of that. That was a weakness. He almost laughed. How Qui-Gon would have chastised him for that thought. "Face your weakness," his master would have said, "make it a strength." Tahl, his old friend Tahl, had demonstrated that strength every time she had swum in the pool in which she had been nearly drowned, murdered. He hadn't fully understood it then. And he didn't fully understand it now. He couldn't. And he couldn't think of that time, of the pain and the injuries inflicted on him when he had last visited the spaceport at Mos Eisley. It was a bad time, hard to remember, the best of his life had been over, the worst already begun.

He shrugged. Let it be a flaw, turning away from that memory, he didn't care. He was too old now to worry, and he had so many other flaws. Why else was he here? No, he thought of something else. Another time, but not that far from here. He scanned the horizon, mesmerised by the heat haze and by memory. There. Just over that ridge, the one that resembled the hump of an eopie.

It had been, what, something less than a year, perhaps twelve or thirteen standard months after the incident at Mos Eisley?

Owen called Obi-Wan out of his home before dawn. The worst of the purge against the Order was over by then and with the last of the Jedi Knights slaughtered or in hiding, the non-human races now faced the brunt of the Empire's wrath. Not that Obi-Wan had known it, isolated by circumstance and choice as he was.

Owen called him out into the pre-dawn chill on that night, quietly, furtively. Obi-Wan hadn't seen Owen for months, hadn't thought he would ever see him again. Obi-Wan was aware he was still little more than an invalid, with the waxy complexion and shuffling gait of someone who had been ill for a long time. His beard was thick, but he knew it didn't hide the hollow cheeks and lines that pain and suffering had etched on his face. His skin was pale and sensitive to the Tatooine climate, he had spent too long immobile and under a roof. Obi-Wan knew he was stronger than he had been of late and getting stronger by the day, but he hated Owen, hated anyone, seeing him like this. He had been so close to death. He wasn't able to draw on the Force for healing - no, that was still too dangerous - and had let nature take its course. He knew he would be well and fit again some day, but he despised the waiting and the patience the waiting required.

"There's something I think you should see," Owen said, with no acknowledgement of Obi-Wan, no pleasantries and no greeting. Just a statement, the invitation merely implied. And then he went back to the speeder.

Obi-Wan followed, without a word, walking slowly and carefully, holding himself straight and erect, showing no frailty, no failing. Together, in silence, they left the shelter of the remote valley in which Obi-Wan had made a home of sorts and crossed the desert towards Mos Eisley. A feeling akin to fear gripped Obi-Wan as they approached, but Owen skirted the settlement so that it remained a distant glow in the still dark sky. They drove on until they came to the edge of an escarpment above a wide canyon. Owen got out and walked to the very drop of the precipice. Obi-Wan followed. It was only then that Owen spoke again.

"This started ten or twelve weeks ago."

Obi-Wan looked down. He could see the spiked wire that adorned the fences and walls of the encampment below. The ramshackle tents and hovels inside the perimeter offering scant protection from the elements, the glaring heat of day, the shivering desert cold of night. The troopers, the gun towers and the huddled masses. He could hear the crying of children, the wails of adults who despaired of every being able to bring their offspring what they needed to survive, and he heard, too, the deeper moans of the ill and distressed. He looked at Owen, aghast.

"They just started rounding them up. Those who resisted, they killed. The ones who didn't, they brought here - or to places just like this one."

Aside from the Stromtrooper guards, there were only Jawas and Tuskans in the camp. The primary sun was rising now and the air around Obi-Wan felt instantly warmer. But inside, he was only cold. He shivered. Shivered at the sight below him. He knew what it meant all too well. There were no words. Obi-Wan didn't have any words with which he could reply.

Owen broke the silence. "They're calling them resettlement camps. The Hutts fled back to Nal Hutta with their entourage before this started. The Empire took the Jawas first, seized their goods and businesses. It was too easy. Then they went after the Tuskans. Hunted down their leaders, destroyed their settlements. They've been demonising their culture for a while now. Nobody protests." Owen sounded sad, so sad, as he spoke.

Owen's words meant nothing to Obi-Wan, he couldn't make sense of them, it was all too repellent. Yet he understood how it must help Owen to show him this, to speak of the unspeakable things that those loyal to the Empire were doing in the Emperor's name. Obi-Wan knew, despite the disagreements between them, that Owen was one of those who cared but who could do nothing. As much as he and Owen had argued, Obi-Wan still knew that Owen was a good man. This must hurt him, this must make him rage with impotence, unable to act or make a stand against this abomination. He looked again at Owen and realised that the beads of light reflecting on Owen's face were from the wetness of tears. Obi-Wan wished he could cry too but at that moment he was too shocked to express any emotion.

"There's been an organised campaign." There was a hitch in Owen's voice, but, oh, Obi-Wan sensed how much of a relief it was for him to talk. "Most of those down there are children and their mothers, women still suckling infants, a few old folks, but not the revered elders. They only leave these ones alive, the ones who are untrained or uneducated in the culture. Young Tuskans yet to learn the Tuskan ways. They want them to lose their skills, their abilities to survive in the Tatooine wilderness. They don't care so much about killing the Jawas. Trading's not a threat. But most of the Tuskans resisted, fought back. Some, I would imagine, have been driven deeper into the Jundland Wastes. But I doubt they have weapons, nor equipment or communications."

Obi-Wan cried too then. A dam, a wellspring of emotion, was released. This was just the latest tragedy in a long line of tragic moments that mapped out the contours of his life, of all their lives. Owen took him back to his valley after that and they didn't speak again until they parted. They didn't need to.

"They might come for you again," Owen said as he left Obi-Wan outside his hut.

Obi-Wan simply shrugged in reply. He didn't think they would. He wasn't that important any longer. Luke was the one that needed protection now, Obi-Wan would stay to see that he got it, no matter the cost. He didn't say it, but he knew that Luke would be safe with Owen...

"Ben. Ben!" Luke interrupted his reverie, impatient, with a shout. Obi-Wan turned and the boy was already in the speeder with the droids, eager to be off on his adventure. Obi-Wan wished it were that easy...

He hadn't given Anakin all the guidance he needed to handle his power. In those first few crucial months he had let Qui-Gon's death, Qui-Gon's disappearance, distract him from his real task. He had failed Anakin...

...how could he possible train Luke?

***

Han's luck has run out. He still hadn't found a contract at Mos Eisley. No, it almost seemed like he had been blacklisted. Perhaps he had. The Desilijic's weren't renowned for their compassion and generosity. He knew he was moping, too. And why not? Drinking was no solution, he knew, but here he was, downing a shot or two of expensive Corellian spirits, his last chance to repay Jabba rapidly slipping away, Bria's death weighing heavily on his heart. He expected Jabba's henchmen to come for him soon. Meanwhile, what was the harm of wallowing away the remainder of his freedom in self-pity. There'd been some commotion over at the bar a moment ago, but it had been trivial and he knew Chewie was keeping a eye out for him. He could trust Chewie, he didn't know what he'd do without the wookiee. He'd only saved Chewie's life because that voice had told him too. Chewie didn't owe him that life debt. The wookiee didn't know it but he owed it to the ghost voice that had been haunting Han all these years. The ghost that was now silent, gone. And with it his luck.

***

Luke was astounded and agog. Look at what old Ben had done! That bully's arm had been severed without so much as Ben blinking an eye. Luke dusted himself down, aware that the Jedi were a more powerful force than he had dreamt of. And he was to be one of them. Oh, the omnipotence, the glory. It was his destiny, all he had ever hoped for, it was all in his future. He looked at Ben and grinned.

"I'm going to be just like you," he promised himself, "just like my father."

***

It took Leia some time to recover from the torture, but locked up, thinking about what she had seen, she had all the time in the universe. Strangely, the wild face of the madman from Tarkin's office came into her mind. Why now, she complained to her conscience. The last few days had wiped out all hope that she could fulfil her promises, spoken and unspoken, to him. She could do nothing for him now, here, locked away to be forgotten. She knew full well the torture would continue. If not at Vader's hand, then someone else's. Eventually, she would break. She knew the truth of that. Only death could prevent it. How could she save the one called Jinn if she couldn't save herself? No matter how strongly the Force impelled her and sheltered her. Yet impel her and shelter her it did. What else could she do but try?

***

All actions had consequences. Obi-Wan realised his actions in protecting Luke had a negative effect on the boy. He sensed a gamut of emotions and feelings. Luke's belief in the Jedi, the assuredness of youth mingled with raw pride and self-doubt in equal measure, his idolisation of Ben. Of me, he realised. 'Oh, Luke,' he thought, 'if only you knew how much I let your father down, you wouldn't feel this way.' He didn't like it, what he was feeling from Luke, he wished he'd not drawn his lightsabre at all. But how could he not protect Luke. The choice came down to exposure or neglect. He might not like it, he knew the dangers of it, but he had to opt for exposure over neglect, the choice was not open to him.

"Chewbacca here is first mate on a ship that might suit us," he explained to Luke.

Obi-Wan looked at the wookiee and nodded. It was a contract made, signed and sealed. It would get them out of here, get Luke to somewhere where he could be guided onto a surer path. Yet something nagged at Obi-Wan even as he thought he had found the solution to their predicament. It was the wookiee, something to do with the wookiee. Something, some presence close to the hairy creature, that Obi-Wan was reluctant to face. Like meeting an old friend he had not seen for aeons and was afraid of meeting again.

***

"Hhhhnrrrrggghhhnnnaaarrr."

Chewie's growl intercepted Han's morbid thoughts and sent a message of hope winging its way to his heart. He pushed his drink away and looked up in expectations. The wookiee was standing there with an old man and a boy. Seeking, if Chewie were correct, passage to Alderaan.

Han looked up and saw his saviours. A kid, not too worldly-wise by the look of him, a farm boy, but from the gleam in his eyes, obviously excited by the prospect of travel. And an old man, distinguished enough of feature, by manner and bearing a personage of some renown in his younger days perhaps, but down on his luck now by the state of his clothing. Probably scrapped together enough cash to get them off this rock and to somewhere more civilised. Well, Han didn't care where they were going as long as they stumped up the cash. He tapped his chest. "Han Solo. I'm captain of the Millennium Falcon."

But even as his relief spread like a warm glow through his body, a chill touched something in the depths of his mind. The echo of a voice, the voice, came back to him.

"Look for the one who walks the old paths and the boy who rushes into the future..."

An old man and a boy. These were the passengers Chewie had brought to him. Was the voice, the direction it gave, true? Yet again? Even as he had lost it, did it speak the truth yet again? What did it matter anyway? It was a job. Money. A debt repaid. He pushed all thought from his mind. He made the deal. It wasn't ideal but someone in his position couldn't complain.

***

Tarkin accepted Vader's failure with good grace. Not that Vader had recognised it as failure. No, Vader saw it as another opportunity to prolong the torture. Tarkin recognised the truth. Senator Organa - no, she was a senator no longer he reminded himself, the senate was disbanded. He corrected himself. Leia Organa's resistance to the probes and drugs. She hadn't talked, Tarkin hadn't expected her to. He didn't deal in pain the way Vader did. Pain only worked on the weak. Vader, for all his prowess, didn't seem to recognise the strength in Organa. Tarkin did. He knew Vader would try again on her, try again and fail. Tarkin knew he only had to bide his time, then he could step in and succeed where Vader failed.

"Perhaps she would respond to an alternative form of persuasion," he suggested.

Vader didn't understand. He never understood. Tarkin knew that was for the best, would provide him with opportunities for advancement.

"I think it is time we demonstrated the full power of this station," he explained. Only he knew the full power, first hand, of the Death Star. He turned to the pilot. "Set your course for Alderaan."

***

"Going somewhere, Solo?"

Han was just about to leave the bar when Greedo helped himself to the seat across the table. Directly opposite Han, the scaled creature leered at him. A bluff was required, the purchase of a little more time. Han grinned, this was his terrain, he was back in control.

"Yes, Greedo. As a matter of fact, I was just going to see your boss."

Greedo called his bluff. Demanded the money there and then. Threatened to take the Falcon. No, Greedo didn't seem to care much for Han's offer, the promise of the latest contract and if Greedo didn't care much for it, would Jabba?

"Over my dead body," Han retorted.

Greedo called him on that one too. Han knew he didn't have a choice but what came next was still distasteful to him. Greedo was a complication, a complication that was going for his blaster. Han wished he didn't have to do it, but there was only one course. He wished Greedo away with a shot of his own. He didn't have a choice any longer? It came down to killing or being killed.

Greedo's body crumpled in a flash of light.

Han had done the killing. It was bitter, but now he still had a future.

- 10 -
My Mind Is Closed So My Body Speaks.

The seekerbots had turned up something interesting at last. Mara, long immersed in meaningless data, felt a spark of interest ignite, felt the termination of her tedium beckon. A name. Thus far, it was only one name, but a name was enough. Now she had something more concrete to chase. A name. A name could control a person. A name could open doors.

A name.

Shrike.

She'd been stuck in this tower for days. It felt like a punishment and so she savoured thoughts of freedom, of days to come when her power and her status would be of her own making. She knew it was a daydream, but she could hope, couldn't she? The emperor couldn't deny her that. One day, he might not be able to wield such a firm hand over her. She knew her Force skills came from him, but the Force wasn't the only kind of power that the ambitious could wield. Oh no, knowledge was power too. Knowledge was what she now chased here.

Her seekerbots were still chewing through the data, but it was slow going. What she looking for was, if it existed at all, buried under a mountain of data arrays, was buried deep. She was searching for a child, now a man, whose identity had been erased. Who was he, this Qui-Zhang Jinn the Emperor held such store by? Could this person really be the antidote to the dark side corruption that beset its wielders. And if the man now held on Coruscant was not Qui-Zhang as she suspected, who was he? And more importantly where was the true offspring of the Jedi and the Sith witch? Well, she had a name now, a lead to follow up. It was a start.

Garris Shrike.

Mara pushed a loose strand of red gold hair back from her face and glanced over the series of data strings again. A coded requisition order. From around the right date. One among many picked up by the slicer droids monitoring local com-link bands, one amongst a myriad of messages overheard and routinely stored as was the practice then and still was today. She'd found many such as this already but none pertaining to Jabba or any other Hutts of the Desilijic clan. Until this one. A prickling sensation in her temples told her this was the one to follow up. It was in an old code, unknown to her. She didn't have a override for it, although she was privy to personal override codes furnished by the Emperor himself. Still with the help of the code cracker droid she'd quickly deciphered its origin and its destination. From Jabba the Hutt. To this man Shrike, a criminal, a pirate, a slave trader.

Mara watched as more information appeared on her screen, the message slowly decoded, slowly revealed. It referred to a commission from Palpatine. Supreme Chancellor of the Galactic Republic as he was then. Jabba entrusted Shrike with the requisition order. He was to retrieve Palpatine's misplaced goods and deliver them to Nal Hutta for safe keeping.

A threat.

That the Hutts would hold Shrike fully responsible should any harm come to the package.

A promise.

That other objects in the consignment were for Shrike's own personal use.

A proviso.

That word of this never get out.

And finally, a location.

Shrike had been directed to Corellia.

Corellia meant nothing. It was part of the central hub of the galactic trade routes, a centre if not of political power then of industry and commerce. Mara got the sense that the goods referred to were people, one person in particular. And if that person was Qui-Zhang Jinn, the name Shrike might mean everything, might unravel the mystery.

She recalled and reprogrammed the seekerbots. This time she set their targets wide, set them burrowing beyond the confines of the Emperor's records, out into the Imperial networks and beyond, set them searching for more data now, for information on this Garris Shrike.

***

Han gave a small smirk of satisfaction as hyperspace folded around the Falcon and threw then forward on a trajectory towards Alderaan. They had made it. He had got the old man and the way away from the Imperials. He had made it. Escaped from Jabba's vengeance. For a little while at least.

He turned to Chewie and grinned broadly. His co-pilot growled a reply. Yes, it was a close one. As he began the routine checks He wondered briefly what the story, the real story was, about his passengers.

***

"Something is troubling you, Luke."

Obi-Wan said this as a statement, but Luke responded as though it were a question.

"It's Han."

As soon as the Millennium Falcon had blasted away from Tatooine, Obi-Wan had undertaken to begin Luke's training. Rudimentary it might have to be, but it would be the best and he would cram as much in as he could between here and Alderaan. He began with meditation but quickly became aware that Luke could not sense the point in it. Didn't understand that before he could call on the Force, he had to find that small, still place inside himself. Too many things were crowding in on Luke's thoughts.

"Forget him. Concentrate on yourself."

"But he's reckless, Obi-Wan, can't you see it. He doesn't care about anything."

A cold hand touched Obi-Wan's soul. He shivered. Luke's words were so familiar to him. They brought Qui-Gon to mind. He stepped towards Luke and spoke firmly to him. As a master to an apprentice.

"There's more to Captain Solo than meets the eye, Luke. He may seem callous to you, but he has real substance, his heart is true. Look at the Wookiee."

Luke looked towards the passageway to the cockpit where they had left Solo and his co-pilot to their work. And then looked back at Obi-Wan. Confused. "I don't understand."

"No, you don't," Obi-Wan thought to himself. Despite his heritage and his destiny, there was so very little that Luke Skywalker seemed to understand.

"You must learn to look deeper, Luke," he said aloud. "Only someone special would have a Wookiee for a companion. And you won't find just any Wookiee roaming the galaxy in the company of someone like Captain Solo."

Obi-Wan could see that Luke lacked the capacity, the maturity, to understand that. That could only come from experience. And Luke had little enough of that. Back to the meditation then. Luke should at least learn the forms and principles. He could perfect the technique later. Later, when he was on his own...

***

Mara's initial excitement was waning. Fading into a quiet patience. It would take some time, the data retrieval, but it was there. It was there, she knew it was. Important information buried under layers of redundant data and obfuscating code. All she needed was the door. Where was the door? She didn't yet know, but she had the key. The door, the open portal, the path to take, the link that lead her to the treasure vault. It was there, somewhere it was there. Hours of browsing the files had left her exhausted, her eyes gritty and her shoulders tense, but she carried on. She refused to sleep and drew on the strengths within. Her own strengths. Not hand-me-down's from the emperor. Her own, her very own. She nurtured her own talents and they told her that it wouldn't be long now.

***

Obi-Wan tossed and turned, but couldn't sleep. He had taken the opportunity to grab some rest, left Luke with a training droid, but his body wouldn't let the sweet oblivion of sleep take him away from the world.

He rubbed his hand across his face, felt the loose skin around the eyes, knew he must look tired. He tried to meditate, to practice the Jedi technique of sleeping without appearing to sleep, he even tried lying perfectly still in the hope that he could fool himself into drifting off, all to no avail.

He opened his eyes and peered into the shadows of the dimmed cabin. He thought he saw something moving there. Curling, spiralling, in the darkness. But it couldn't be. He rubbed his eyes and looked again. Nothing but darkened corners.

Han had offered Obi-Wan these quarters for his own use. And without waiting for a thank you or an acknowledgement the smuggler had stalked off elsewhere on the ship. Obi-Wan wondered if it was a deliberate snub. He felt something about that man. Not the Force, something else, something strong but strange. As if the man were marked for greatness, as a leader, as a hero. He seemed to call to Obi-Wan, to draw him near. But the man himself. This man Han Solo did everything he could to push his passengers away, to avoid their company. He gave every impression he was a loner, a rugged adventurer, a reckless ne'er-do-well. Obi-Wan knew it was a sham. But it was a shell that had been built so strong and so thick that now it might never be broken.

"Who are you, Han?" he whispered to the coiled shadows.

They answered him with an image.

A face formed from the patches of darkness and even blacker shadows.

Obi-Wan wanted to shake his head. Shake away this hallucination. But he didn't dare to move.

The features were indistinct, neither male nor female, human nor inhuman. A mouth opened, a maw of infinite depth.

He wanted to turn away, but he kept staring deep, deeper into that mouth, that infinity. The Force never sent him messages in this way, but nor did he sense the dark side.

The utter blackness crept forward, threatening to engulf him.

What was this? A waking dream? A premonition of his death?

A figure, dim in its outline, beckoned to him in the black void. So black was that void, that the figure seemed to be made almost of light. Of light, beckoning to him. Calling to him.

"No," he said, sure of what it was now. "The Force will take me when I die."

Her voice, for it was female, the thing that called him, echoed in his mind, though she did not speak and he heard no words. "Let the Force take your eternal soul. You do not need it here with us. Give the rest, the better part of yourself, to me. "

Obi-Wan wanted to scream. Eirtae's voice. It was Eirtae's voice.

He felt a bitter chill bite into his temple like a needle. Eilidh, the Baobhan-sith, this was their doing. What had they done to him?

"Gave me what they promised you would." Eirtae's voice answered his thought. "Your virtue. Your spirit."

No, no, he wanted to scream. He hadn't given them permission. But he had. It came to him then and he knew what he had done. When he had held out his hand to Eilidh, he had thought of the moment when he had been truly happy. When he had been with Eirtae.

Everything was erased in a sudden flash of darkness. The vision, the cabin, the world.

Obi-Wan called out, but it wasn't Eirtae's name that came to his lips. It was Luke's.

***

Luke slashed and slashed again at the droid. This wasn't training, not to be a Jedi anyway. This was a game for small boys. It was beneath him. First, Obi-Wan had him kneeling still and silent, thinking of the Force, feeling its presence in everything around him, until his feet were numb from lack of circulation. Now he had him dancing around defending himself from the small charges released by this training droid. It constantly hovered and zipped around his ears like a trooshti fly. His patience broke and the anger flooded him. He slashed a final time. His father's lightsabre seethed with a static burst. The droid lay sparking on the floor, its charge drained.

He snapped the lightsabre off and stood grinning before the broken droid. He felt proud of himself at last.

"Luke, oh Luke."

He turned to face Obi-Wan. But as he was about to demand congratulations he recognised the sad tone of the old Jedi's voice and the disappointed look on his face.

"What?" he demanded. "What did I do wrong?"

"You let your excitement and impatience control you. Your anger was echoing clear across this ship. You must learn discipline, Luke Skywalker."

Luke knew the old man meant well, but discipline wouldn't get him anywhere. Nor would training with toys. "It was too easy," he said complacently.

"So is arrogance, Luke. Recognised it as the danger it is and you will have learnt a more important lesson than how to destroy insignificant droids."

"But I need to become a Jedi, Obi-Wan. You said I should learn."

"Luke, it is not all about glory and prestige. It is about humility and sacrifice, too."

Luke nodded. He felt the words were important, but right now it wasn't what he needed. He nodded again and tried to look serious, as though he were absorbing the lesson.

Obi-Wan didn't waver in his intent gaze of Luke, but he seemed to relent. "Very well," he said. "Set a droid to fire laser bolts. Let's see if that's more of a challenge."

***

Mara sat bolt upright with a start. This was it, this was it. Her eyes lit up, a smile illuminated her face, she felt herself flush with excitement as she took in the words on the screen before her. This was it, the knowledge she needed to secure a position of power...

- 11 -
I Have Seen The Moment Of My Greatness Flicker.

Pain. Vader breathed. Through the pain. Despite the pain, he breathed. He breathed deep of the pressurised air within his meditation chamber.

If breathing it was.

His body was a disparate scattering of mangled lumps of flesh, organs kept human, alive, only by the chemicals that flowed through tubes, pumps, controls. Electronics kept his heart beating, his hormones flowing. The rest of him, the bulk of him, was cybernetic. Only his mind was what it once was.

Human.

Though that too was kept this side of death only by the power of the dark side. The dark side had him in its grasp and should it ever let him go, then oblivion awaited him. He had no choice but to embrace it. It gave him life and in return he cherished it. It had called him and it had been too powerful to refuse. It had chosen him and he had given it a home. His heart. And now his heart was a cold, cold stone. Inhuman. Dead. What memories remained of his old life, of the Jedi ways, of the light, he denied. All life, all light would be expunged. In his world, as in his soul.

Pain. Only pain remained. The last gasp of his humanity.

The Sith sphere into which he had just stepped gave him peace of a sort. He couldn't bear to look on Leia Organa anymore. She had resisted him, his invasion of her body, the pulling of information from her mind. He hated failure and he hated her vehemently for the failure she now represented. Soon, so lost was he in his meditation that he could no longer hear the screams of his prisoner as the needles of the torture droid penetrated her once again. He sank deeper into his meditation. It calmed him for a moment but it was not nearly enough. It was not bringing him the forgetfulness he desired.

It rankled. Oh, how it rankled. He felt a growing irritation, a gnawing discomfort. Not in his body, though that pained him as it ever did. No, he felt it in the depths of his heart, in his mind. In his soul.

Vader felt himself being drawn, down, down, deeper into his thoughts and his memories. He thought he heard Obi-Wan reprimanding him. His mother calling him. Qui-Gon's hands upon his shoulders.

No.

He fought for breath as a scream threatened to emerge from between scarred chords.

No.

Calm, he urged, calm. He fought to restrain the memories. He struggled to pull himself out of it. Reached with a gloved hand for the control panel which he knew should be within reach. But it wasn't there. He couldn't feel the world around him. Couldn't feel the walls of the chamber. It was as though he was sinking into quicksand, deep, dark, relentless.

He felt an inkling of panic.

This was wrong. The technology of the meditation sphere was Sith, the very fabric of its construction wrought from the dark side of the Force. It should not allow this.

He felt a remorseless freezing grip upon his heart. A clutching darkness to which he nearly surrendered.

No, no. Was this death? Not yet, not yet. The sphere should give him strength. Not this.

Something else then. The light side, chasing him, reclaiming him. How? He had buried it deep. No one, not the Jedi, not the rebels, no one, could drag him back.

A small voice cried out inside him. Yes, yes. I want to go back, back to the light.

No. No, I killed you. You are dead.

Let me out. Qui-Gon. Obi-Wan. I want to go home.

Dead. Dead. You're dead. I killed you.

Vader knew, even as he conversed with the voice he knew was Anakin's, knew was his own, that this was madness. It had always beckoned. The pain and the evil, the dark side and the anguish, they had always conspired to steal his sanity. Was it that?

No, no. Not that. Something had changed. He had felt something, that first time with the Princess, another mind brushing his. Hers? It couldn't be. He couldn't sense that strength of Force in her at all. It couldn't be.

I'll find my way out. I will. I will.

Anakin's voice murmured on. Vader fought, fought hard to repress it. Still it murmured. His power was ineffective against it.

The murmuring grew to a crescendo. A mighty, roaring wind.

Vader's mind flailed against it. No use.

The blackness shattered, fractured and flew apart. He was surrounded by images, all around him, taking shape, changing, fading, blurring into one another. A boy, a man, a sword. A hand reaching for his. They lasered through him, a stream of eerie delights, a universe of mirror shards, glimpses of a thousand lives he could have lived and had lost. Fear, living and pitiless, caught him up in its embrace, a deathly chill burned him, devoured him into non-existence. He was drowning in emptiness, snatching at the blackness.

This, this was Vader's mind. He had no reason to fear it, it was his after all, stolen by the dark side though it had been. But he could not face the relic of his past which dwelt at its centre. He saw the boy, the boy who was himself, alone, a smouldering ember in the barren ashes.

Set me free.

There was no one to hear him, no one to hear Anakin. No one but himself, no one but Vader. And Vader had refused to listen before. He refused again.

He shrieked into the shadows. He called on the darkness and he felt it squeeze him hard as it hauled him back towards the surface of his own mind.

"I'm dust on the wind," he thought as the world settled into place around him. "I let the dark side take me, I never fought it." He knew then that he was dying. A path already taken had led him to an unseen destiny. He had to face himself. He had to face the past. The end was now in sight.

He knew there was no turning back.

***

"Leave... Leave..."

The Emperor's perpetual scowl deepened as he studied the holographic transmission from the cells in his private skyhook. The prisoner was screaming again.

"Stop... Stop stop... Stop..."

The Emperor bent forward. "What shall I do with you, Qui-Zhang Jinn?" he hissed.

If you are Qui-Zhang, he thought. That was the paradox. If Mara was right...

If Mara was right, then this man he watched here, this man who now screamed in pain and terror under the attentions of the Empire's best torturers, was not his salvation. If this was not Qui-Zhang...

So many questions. That left so many questions. Who was this man then? Where was the real Qui-Zhang? What hope did they now have, did Mara have, of finding him? How? How had it happened? How had they been duped?

The Force must have a hand in this, the Emperor cursed it. It had duped him. The dark side had failed him. Perhaps because *he* had failed *it*. Perhaps because he had stopped hiding in the shadows. Because his clone, the one who's name and place and face he now usurped, had been weak. This was not the destiny he had seen or sought. He should have still been Sidious, Dark Lord of the Sith, hiding behind the throne, controlling it. Manipulating his puppet. Instead his puppet was dead, and he, Sidious, stood in his place, was now Palpatine. The offices of state now took all his energies. Even with Vader, with his Hands, with Mara, at his beck and call he could not dedicate enough of himself to the Dark Side. To its urgings.

He had failed it and it had been weakened. He had allowed the Baobhan-sith witch in all her corruption to undermine its plans. Its plans for him, its plans for the Empire, for the galaxy. He cursed her as he cursed the Force. She may not have been of the Light Side, but she had stood in opposition to the darkness. She had offered the Jedi an alliance, and one of their number, the strongest of their ranks, had accepted.

Sidious, Palpatine, whoever he was now known as, had sought to divert her plans, their plans, and thought he had succeeded. Now, if this was not Qui-Zhang, he had failed. Failure flooded his being with bitterness. Thoughts of vengeance possessed him. This man screaming here was the embodiment of his failure. But he could no more destroy Qui-Zhang, no more kill him, than he, Sidious, could grow young again without the Baobhan-sith blood.

For while the one they still called Qui-Zhang was alive, then payment in pain could be extracted. This might be an innocent bystander, a blameless victim, but Sidious had him in his possession and there were so many pains, such sweet torments, that could be inflicted.

"Death. Death. Let me die. I want to die."

Qui-Zhang screamed again. Sidious smiled at the sound of those screams, but there was little pleasure in their hearing. No matter the delights of retribution, still they represented his failure and heralded the moment of his demise.

- 12 -
Sometimes We All Must Fight Against The Cruel Heart Of Doubt.

Mara sat back finally, breathless. What she had seen astonished her. She ran her fingers through her hair, pushing it back from her face. Oh, but she was tired. Still, rest could wait, now that she had found this data there was so much else to do. What did it mean? She wasn't yet sure she fully understood all the implications of it. What it meant. What it meant for her. In power. In leverage. Her dealings with the Emperor - Sidious, Palpatine, whatever he called himself - would be on a different footing from now on. He no longer had quite such a hold on her as he had before. Before she had uncovered the workings of Shrike's operation, his acts of piracy, of murder, of deceit. And his ineptitude too. Oh yes, his ineptitude...

She stretched, her upraised arms and arched back, the fall of her vibrant hair, rendering her feline for a moment. Then she leant forward, reached out towards her datapad and replayed the data, the last entry in a ship's automatic log, one more time. This time through she was ready to notice and to etch in her memory every detail of the deceit, of the ineptitude.

***

Han banged his tools down hard on the deck and hefted the hatch wide open. He knew why he was irritable, and not just because of his unexpected passengers, but knowing didn't make it easier to bear. It made it worse, if anything. He felt as if there were a empty hole in his chest. A void that had once been filled by a presence he had not recognised until it had left. A part of himself, yet not of him.

He tried to push the feelings away, to concentrate on the task at hand. As he lowered himself into the compartment beneath the floor, he told himself this probably wouldn't be necessary. The decks of the Falcon had several such spaces - vital for a smuggler. Used for the storage of contraband, they might also work to hide a crew. Or passengers.

They were a danger that pair, with the old man's mystic ways and the boy's wild fantasies. The Jedi. The Force. Han tutted sceptically as he worked to install the heat disperser in the compartment. He had to do something. To occupy himself. To keep him away from that pair. They gave him the creeps. He shivered just thinking about it. It wasn't like him, Han knew he wasn't an habitual worrier, wasn't a fearful person. But he knew they were trouble, knew they would bring trouble down upon him. He didn't know it because the Force directed him. He didn't believe in the Force. It was a superstition. No, he knew it because he always knew these things. The insights, his ability to read people, his innate luck. He would rely on those as he always had. And he would rely on technology, on what he could hold in his hands, on solid matter. Like a blaster. Like these dispersers. Better than relying on the Force as old Obi-Wan seemed to.

He and Chewie had jerry-rigged a couple of diffusers from the Falcon's cooling unit so that they might hide here in an emergency undetected by searchers with body heat sensors. Anything more advanced and they would be found, but the Empire was getting lax these days. The Stormtroopers could be sloppy. And even this small protection was better than nothing.

Perhaps they wouldn't need it...

Perhaps the emptiness in his soul was an illusion...

Perhaps rancor beasts might grow wings and learn to fly...

***

Mara felt a strange sense of intrusion as she watched the scene unfold. It was as if a sensation of tautly wound pleasure, of voyeuristic excitement, had taken hold of her and lifted her up onto another plane of pleasure. Her skin tingled, her mind whirled. Like sex. Better than sex.

She knew this holo-record was of a time many years before but she sensed that the ripples of this event were yet to impinge upon the future. She couldn't sense, either, the emotions or the hopes and fears of the players involved in the sadistic game being played out. Time and technology intervened. But she could read the clues well enough in their faces and in their bodies. And this much was clear to Mara: the fool Shrike thought he was manipulating his captives. But there was an intelligence and hardness in the man's eyes, a defiant arrogance in the woman's stance, that told a different tale. They were nobody special, Shrike's victims. Well to do, by the cut of their clothes and the fittings on their ship, but not ostentatiously wealthy. Intelligent, well spoken, but not self-important. Just a couple, a man and wife with their children, travelling on family business perhaps. Not the sort of people that Shrike would normally waste his time upon. That much alerted Mara. It was an oddity that shouted here, here is the solution to your mystery.

***

Han rubbed his palms on the fabric of his trousers as he walked through the Falcon's corridors back to the flight deck. He still wore that item of his dress uniform, the one's with the Corellian bloodstripe. He was proud of it, though he didn't admit that to anyone. He hoped they took it as a subversive touch, the bloodstripe declared his bravery, the indifferent shirt and practical vest an insouciant touch, announcing that he couldn't care less.

"Captain Solo."

Han's heart sank. He had been avoiding Obi-Wan and now here the old man was sneaking up behind him with his eldritch Jedi ways. He pretended not to hear.

But Obi-Wan wouldn't let it go.

"Captain Solo, I must speak with you."

Han stopped, waited a moment and then turned with resignation.

"Make it quick, old man. I don't have the time for idle chatter."

Obi-Wan didn't reply, merely looked at Han. Searched his face as if he should know him but couldn't recognise him, as if he recognised him but couldn't place him.

Han shifted uncomfortably. Obi-Wan's gaze didn't falter. Han broke first.

"Look, if you've got something to say, say it. But I've got better things to be doing."

Obi-Wan frowned, but did not let his concentration on Han's face drop. "Captain Solo, do you have somewhere more private we could go? There is an important matter I must discuss with you."

Han resigned himself to an hour or two of the old man's proselytising. "Alright," he sighed. "My cabin."

***

Mara watched the drama carefully. It all happened so quickly. The pirate vessel struck the private ship twice, effectively disabling and disarming it. Then they docked and sliced the airlock open with an efficiency that came only with practice. Shrike's men, four of them, rushed onto the small flightdeck, two of them dragging the man away from the controls. Behind them a woman screamed and rushed forwards, was silenced with a rough hand over her mouth and an arm across her upper body. The fourth man stood, legs apart, arms across his chest, waiting, standing guard. Mara could see the alarm in the man's, the husband's, face, the desperate urge to fight back. She could see too the warning in the woman's eyes, the slight shake of her head - no - despite the restraining grip that held her fast.

The pirates turned as Shrike strode onto the deck. Mara knew it to be Shrike even before he was named. Here was a man who radiated brute force despite his lack of bulk, a deep sadistic streak made this man a controller, though he had no obvious leadership skills. Shrike pulled two children along behind him, holding an arm, painfully tightly, in each hand. The children, both boys, both about two years of age, were crying - wailing really, Mara thought - and looked at the adults, their parents, both bewildered and scared, pleading for help and comfort.

The woman struggled but was held fast. Terrible muffled sounds emerged from her muzzled mouth.

"Shh," the man soothed. Though whether to his wife or the children Mara could not tell. Probably to all three.

A blow to the face silenced him and he staggered back, would have slumped to the floor if the pirates either side of him had not held him upright.

One of the small boys screamed for his mother, the other sobbed in great heaving breaths.

"We seem to have a problem here," Shrike announced. "We came for a child and we seem to have two."

He walked to within a few inches of the woman, the boys dragging behind him, their feet barely carrying them.

"Which one is it?" He spat the question into her face. "Which one is the bastard Jedi?"

She screwed her eyes shut tight and uttered a stifled denial.

"Leave her alone!"

Shrike turned and glared at the man. "Perhaps you'll tell me then?"

The man merely lifted his chin in defiance.

Shrike nodded to the fourth pirate and the thug strode over towards the father. In the blink of an eye he had landed four or five heavy blows to the man's torso. The men holding him let go and he crumpled to the deck unable to draw breath, writhing in agony.

"Daddy." One of the small boys was whimpering.

Shrike shook them both harshly.

Mara winced, but not from shared pain, rather from the lack of elegance in these pirates' actions. No, she would have used a much more refined - and productive - method of interrogation.

"Well?" Shrike demanded of the woman.

She shook her head, though tears coursed down her cheeks.

"Get him up off the floor." Shrike nodded to his men.

They hauled the man upright.

"I'm alright, Jai," he gasped. "Don't say anything."

"Never mind," Shrike said, almost laughing. "I'll take them both."

"No," the woman's struggles increased and she broke from the pirate's grip. She threw herself onto her knees, towards Shrike, towards the children. She grasped one of them, the slightly taller of the two. "Han," she whispered. "My baby."

Shrike reached down towards her. Something glittered in his hand. Mara knew that it was a vibroblade. Shrike slit the woman's throat with no hesitation. Her hand reached up as if to seal the wound, but blood, thick and crimson, gushed from between her fingers.

A child cried.

A man screamed.

There was silence.

A gurgle. A final breath. She was gone.

The man thrust himself forward, towards his wife, took her in his arms. "Jaina, oh Jaina."

Shrike kicked him hard, away from the body. "So this is your son," he hissed, pushing the boy Jaina had hugged to her breast towards the man.

He hesitated a moment, Mara noticed his eyes darting briefly to the other boy. A look of love and despair swept across the man's face. Was there, and was gone.

"Ye.. Yes," he stammered. "This is Han Solo. This is my son."

Shrike lifted the other boy up. His mouth curled in delight and derision as he examined the child.

"So this is the Jedi scum that Jabba wants so badly."

He looked round in triumph at his men.

"Doesn't look like much does he?"

Shrike threw back his head and laughed. His men, his obedient pack, followed suit.

Shrike thrust the child into a pirate's arms. "Get this Jedi spawn to Jabba as fast as you can."

The pirate snatched the terrified and now silent child and left.

Shrike then looked down at the man at his feet and at the boy now huddled in his arms.

"As for you..." he hissed.

He left the threat unspoken, grabbed the remaining child and pulled him from the man's arms, looked up at another of his thugs and issued his commands.

"Kill him. Slowly..."

When, finally, the man lay dead beside his wife, Shrike looked at the boy he was holding, unmoving, in his arms.

"This one is too pampered."

He handed the child to another of his company.

"Take him down to Corellia. Get him acclimatised to life on the streets."

***

In his cabin, Han gestured to the only chair and Obi-Wan sat down. Han took up a defensive posture on the bunk. He still felt the singular stare of the old Jedi on him.

"Fire away," he said, spreading his arms wide in a symbol of reluctant acceptance.

Obi-Wan frowned at him. "It is you, isn't it?"

"Yes," Han sighed, "it's me, Han Solo, captain of the Millennium Falcon. What are you babbling on about, old man."

Obi-Wan ignored the sarcasm. His curiosity about Han was strong, he sensed something about him. He had wondered at first if it had been Force sensitive, a untrained raw talent. But it was something else. Something much darker. Something much closer to his heart.

"I knew it," he said. "I felt it before I even met you, I sensed your presence even in the Wookiee. I've searched for you for a long time, Qui-Zhang clann'ic Solus."

***

Mara knew full well what she had seen.

Two children. There had been two children. Of much the same age. Who were even similar in appearance. One, the offspring of a Jedi master and a Sith witch. The other, just a boy.

Shrike's stupidity had failed them all. The Solo couple had fooled them all. They had hidden the cuckoo in their own nest, then willingly given up their own offspring in the hope of saving the one with a destiny. And it had worked. The man had given it away in that small glance of love, but it had worked. Mara was at once appalled and admiring of their actions. She respected them more, much more, than she respected Shrike, despite the fact that by their very act they were her enemies.

Or would have been, she reminded herself, if they were still alive.

But at least now she knew who she was looking for. The son - she checked again with the registration records of the ship, the logs of which she had been examining - of Jonash and Jaina Solo. The adopted son, who might still believe that he *was* their son. The boy that had been called, who might still call himself, Han Solo.

***

Han's eyes widened as he gawped at the old man. "Pardon?" He half spoke, half laughed.

But his laughter died as he looked at Obi-Wan. In the old man's face and in his hands, he saw the traces of old injuries, the scars and deformations of a dreadful beating, beatings. Han's hand rose unbidden to his chin, felt an old scar there. He remembered his own beatings at the hands of Shrike. As he stared at Obi-Wan, he wondered. He wondered about the man, the life that he had led. Perhaps he should listen to Obi-Wan. Humour him. Just for a while.

Obi-Wan returned his look, and it was a look of deathly seriousness. "I knew your father. I was there at your birth. Your mother named you Qui-Zhang."

Han stared back, open mouthed again, uncomprehending and disbelieving. And then he did laugh. Humour this old fool? Never. He stood up and took a step towards the door. He could feel Obi-Wan's gaze following him, the old man's stare burning into the back of his neck.

"Han, you have a destiny. Your father was a Jedi knight."

Han turned back, annoyed, angered. "Oh, no. I'm not that stupid. You said that to Luke too. Remember."

Obi-Wan looked shocked. "No, no. It's not like that."

"What is it like then, eh? I don't know what kind of a con you're running here, but..."

Obi-Wan interrupted his tirade. "No, listen to me. It's not a trick. The Jedi are in your blood."

Han felt that he had listened quite long enough. "Look, it's a good one, I'll grant you. 'Your father was a Jedi.' It might work on naive farm boys like Luke out there but I know a thing or too about con tricks and it ain't gonna work on me. And don't lecture me about the Force. It's nothing. An old belief. A tale. Nothing more."

The Force is not for me. He added the last under his breath. His voice, his lost inner voice, had told him that.

But Obi-Wan kept on at him. As Han stormed out into the corridor, Obi-Wan

followed.

"Who were your parents? Did you know them?"

Han spun round and faced the old man. "No," he shouted in Obi-Wan's face. "They died when I was... when I was very young. Don't you, you Jedi, dare to speak of them."

Han resumed his stride. He didn't know where he was headed, he didn't care. He didn't want to think. Behind him, Obi-Wan kept talking.

"They were not your parents, Han. Not your true parents. You were born on Corellia, but your parents, your true parents were not Corellian. Your mother may have been, her ancestors came from a world in the Corellian system. They were made slaves, a long long time ago, millennia, shipped across the galaxy, a great war, it wiped out their oppressors, they flourished, eventually, but in isolation. They drew strength from the dark side. She was an adept, a woman trained in ancient Sith arts, who could draw on powers we never dreamt of. Your mother returned... returned when... when my master and I... when we were sent there by the Council... on a mission. He brought her back. Married her..."

"Shut up." Han stopped and turned again. Turned back to silence the words, the strange words that disturbed him. He knew, he knew they were not true. "Lies, lies. I told you, you're not conning me."

Obi-Wan gestured towards Han. "This is the truth. Don't you want to know who your parents were?"

Han shook his head. Dislodging the suggestion the thought was his own.

"Solo. I'm a Solo. Jonash. And Jaina. They were my parents."

"Foster parents."

"Look, I've met my relatives. The Sal-Solos. Explain that, eh? The likeness? The family resemblance?"

"You saw what you wanted to see. Or were supposed to see. Perhaps it was what the Force wanted you to see. What the Jedi and the Baobhan-sith engineered."

"Oh, yes. And if that was true - which it isn't - why? Why would anyone do that?"

"To hide your origins. Your mother knew that you were special. That you possessed your father's soul. That you had a destiny. That there were evil beings who wanted you, to possess the promise that you hold in your bloodstream."

The old man was babbling now, but Han could not shut out the voice. Obi-Wan prattled on.

"I didn't see it at the time - what Anakin was, his potential. When I did it was too late. Then I blamed Qui-Gon. It all started to go wrong when Qui-Gon brought Iva back from - no, no.."

Obi-Wan shook his head.

"You don't want to hear about that."

Han signed in impatience. Obi-Wan continued all the same.

"I thought it was all his fault. I respected him, I loved him, he was a father to me, a teacher and a guide, but I put it all at his door - what went wrong. I blamed him, for disobeying the code, for following his heart, for leaving me, for running away, for dying. I didn't see the Council's part in it. The fault lay with the Jedi, the way we were organised, the stringent rules, the arid lives we led. I thought Qui-Gon's obsession with the Baobhan-sith destiny caused it all. It didn't. It was a symptom of a greater ill."

To Han it was just words. He didn't know, couldn't know what Obi-Wan spoke of. "Listen old man. None of that means anything to me. Half of it doesn't make sense. And that stuff about the Jedi, well, that doesn't mean anything to anyone anymore. The Jedi, they're just old legends. They're figments in nobody's imaginations but Luke's. Leave him alone. He doesn't need your dreams."

Obi-Wan stopped short, stopped stalking Han. Han, despite himself, stopped too and turned back to look at the old Jedi. Obi-wan looked confused, embarrassed. It was as though he couldn't stop the words from pouring out.

"I'm sorry, Han," the old man said. "You seem so like him, but your not. He really was an old dear friend, I thought for a moment I was talking to him. Forgive me. But Luke... You and Luke are part of the same destiny... I see it now. Your fate was meant to be..."

That was too much for Han. Too far fetched for belief. But he felt aggrieved. Aggrieved at the idea that he had been a pawn in someone else's game. He retaliated with acrimony.

"Ah, I see. So you had me kidnapped by Shrike..."

"Not me."

"Your Jedi, then. It's all the same."

Old Obi-Wan looked sad. Han felt something akin to guilt in that moment. Obi-Wan's voice was sorrowful now as he continued.

"Not the Order. Just one, acting alone in cohorts with your mother. Adi Gallia hid you, put false information in the Correllian registers and then later wiped your father's name from the records. So that you might be hidden. And when the time was right you would return and deliver us."

"Oh great. I had to go through all that, all that death and despair, for what? To offer you a little hope..."

"No. To keep you safe. There were those who wanted you for their own purposes. Whatever happened to you was the lesser of two evils, believe me."

"... false hope. I'm not your new Jedi. Luke might have fallen for your con tricks, but I know better..."

"You had to be kept safe. I didn't believe in it then. But Adi did. She had to ensure your safety. She had to keep you alive..."

"Why? What's so great about me. I'm a good smuggler and one of the best pilots this side of the core, but I'm not buying into your Jedi folly."

"... so you could fulfil your destiny."

"Destiny? I don't have a destiny. Things happen. You're in the right place or you aren't. That's all there is to it."

"You've been guided, Han. I'm sure of it."

The voices, Han's heart sank. How did this deluded fool know about the voices? It strengthened his resolve not to be taken in.

"You don't believe that, old man."

"Your mother did. To her people she was a prophetess. She saw the future."

Han still couldn't believe what he was hearing. He turned to walk away. He cursed under his breath.

"My father said you'd be a difficult old man..."

He stopped. A shock ran through him. There was silence. Finally, Obi-Wan spoke.

"Your father? But you said you don't remember your father."

Han was angry now, angrier than he had been at Obi-Wan. Angry at himself.

"I don't..."

"But you just said..."

"I didn't say anything, keep out of my way, old man, I've got a ship to fly."

Han turned around. Where was he anyway? He recognised the corridor. He didn't need to be here. He was going in the wrong direction. He pushed past Obi-Wan, intent on finding a pressing job to do, embarrassed and confused by his slip of the tongue.

It was the voice, the still, small voice of his insanity, now absent, that he remembered warning him of Obi-Wan's intransigence, not his father.

Why, why had he said father?

- Interlude -
Through Air That's Crystal Black Ink Shadows.

It was a time of gloom, of cold and ice. Winter. The season of death and dark had fallen quickly over the twilight lands of Tamhasg. In the space of days the landscape had changed from bright autumnal groves to quivering skeletal trees haunting against the night sky. Sadness covered all the land.

Yaddle tramped through the sleeping forest fearful of what she would find at the sith-bhrugh. Caer Ibhormheith was their personification of the Cailleach Bheur who as the hag would smite the land in winter with her icy touch and as the maid would cause the world to blossom in the spring. This glacial chill that had fallen upon the world was unnatural and Yaddle feared for Ibhormheith. For her safety, for her sanity.

She and Even both had felt it drawing near, the semblance of their old lives, of the Force, calling them. Did it call to Qui-Gon too? Had it claimed him already? Had he now turned away from the Baobhan-sith ways? Was that why Iva had smothered the land with the curse of winter?

Yaddle hesitated before the entry to the barrow. It was quite and still in the clearing. Ice lay across the ground, hung from the bare branches of the trees, weighed down the gorse and heather like grief. She took one step forward, reluctant to speak, to intrude upon the uncanny silence. The sith-bhrugh was dark, no candle flame illuminated the chambers, no incense burnt its fragrance into the air.

Yaddle sighed. Oh Iva. Oh Qui-Gon. What has happened to you? She did not want to venture further, did not want to face the awful truth, yet know she must.

She stole forward silently between the great stones that lined the passageway to the central chamber. But all was empty. It seemed she was alone, yet she sensed something beyond, just beyond, the bounds of her perception. Something not quite alive, something not quite human. She peered into the shadowy alcove at the rear of the chamber.

"Iva," she called, sure it was her.

A voice came back to her, the hoarse cry of a raven. "Gone, it's all gone now."

Yaddle crept forward slowly, knowing she had to confront the thing that was Iva and yet not Iva. The Cailleach watched her approach with sharp eyes that bore the same chill as that which had fallen over the twilight lands. Yaddle resisted the temptation to cower back in awe and fear. This was only Iva, clothed though she was in the skin of the winter hag. Beneath the ashen skin, the blue-black lips and the tangled darkness of the matted hair, there was the wild, strange woman Yaddle had grown to admire, that had shared blood, her virtue, with the Jedi, with Yaddle herself. Though she appeared in this fearful terrible form, Yaddle did not fear her.

"What is that?" Yaddle nodded towards the Cailleach's hands. She cradled something there. Something small and hard.

Iva held out her hands. A rock. Stained crimson. "Fuil nan sluagh," she said.

Yaddle understood. The blood of the sluagh. The host of the unforgiven dead, the most formidable of the sithich folk. Yaddle knew that it was only crotal, a lichen, beautiful and red, the sign of rocks melted by the frost. She knew too that it was an omen of a great battle. That Iva would read it as their doom.

Yaddle reached out and touched the skeletal, clawed hand. "Iva, what is happening here? Where is Qui-Gon?"

"Gone. Left to be with the Force. Gone."

Yaddle could hear the despair behind the harshness of the words. She didn't believe that. Not that Qui-Gon had gone back, could go back, not without them all.

"No, Iva," she said. "That's not true." Yaddle knew her own confusion as she felt the Force again after all these long years. "He's not gone. Just confused. You must go to him, you must find him."

"He left. He didn't say a word. He just left."

Yaddle could sense the loss in Iva's voice. It was grief that had called the Cailleach. Misery that had turned the land over to winter. As she looked she saw the hag's ghastly face shift, to reveal the tenderness of the woman's eyes beneath. Eyes that held unshed tears.

"And do you believe that means he does not need your help?" Yaddle knew she must spark motivation. "That he doesn't want you to go after him. That he doesn't want you?"

Iva only sighed. The Cailleach's hard shell formed over her again.

Yaddle knew she must resort to harsher means. Despite the disparity in size, she hauled on Iva's arm, pulling her across the chamber to where a chest overflowed to spill possessions, the tools of Iva's art, onto the floor. Yaddle held a mirror up to the Cailleach's face. "Do you think that if you wear that, Qui-Gon will not want you?" She shook Iva. "If that is so you are mistaken. He loves you. He needs you. He needs you now. Now, most especially."

The Cailleach turned from the mirror, Iva turned her face, her own face, ivory skin, red-brown hair, rose-flushed lips, on Yaddle. Her mouth opened slightly, the formation of a no.

"*I* need you, Iva. Even needs you."

"The Force. It's reclaimed him. He's going back to the Force."

Yaddle couldn't think what to say for a moment. That was true. That was what she had sensed. Better to face the truth then.

"Well of course he is." Yaddle spoke slowly. "It's time, isn't it? The time of the prophesies. Your prophesies."

Iva lowered her head. "My work's done."

Yaddle didn't want to believe that. This woman, for all her strangeness, had saved them. This woman was part of their future, a cog in the wheel of destiny that would return the Jedi, the wielders of the light, the Force, to their rightful place in the order of the universe. She stepped back, put her hands on her hips.

"No." A scolding tone. "No, it isn't Iva. The Force and the Spirit have to become one. They have to meld, remember? You're both needed. You and Qui-Gon. He can't do it without you."

"Why did he go?"

Yaddle sensed that Iva's grief was too deep to assuage with mere words, mere argument. Still she tried.

"To think things through. To straighten out his feelings."

Iva looked at her sharply, despairingly. The Cailleach still lapped at her features, am impression of great age and ugliness washing across her face like waves upon a shore. Love, Yaddle knew, this was all about love.

"He loves you, Iva. He still loves you. But this is hard for him." Yaddle knew this was true. It was hard for her too. She transposed her own feelings onto Qui-Gon. "He's been here thirty years. Lived with you. Lived according to your ways. Now it's changing again. It's as hard for him as it is for you." She took Iva's hand. "As it is for me," she added softly.

Iva said nothing. Yaddle felt for both of them. She wanted Qui-Gon back too. He was their guide, their anchor. She and Even looked to him.

"He still loves you, Iva."

Iva closed her eyes. Tears welled out from beneath the lids. But there were no sobs. This was no longer grief. Finally she spoke, hesitantly still, but calmer now.

"Do you think it will work out?" she asked.

"Yes, I'm sure of it."

Yaddle knew it had to. Why else were they here? But she had her doubts about the future too. Why not? Iva was a ban-fhaidh, a seer. She could trace the threads of the future, of destiny, in the tapestry of time. Yet if she knew how changeable the sands of time could be, how then could Yaddle know. It was no weakness, to doubt like this. Yet it must be overcome.

"Qui-Zhang will lead the children here," she said. She put more assurance than she felt into her voice. "Prophesies don't always work out in the way we expect. We both know that."

Yaddle knew that. All the Jedi had known that. The Chosen One had not brought them the salvation they had expected.

"But he will do it," she added, certain now. "Yes, I'm sure."

Iva nodded.

"So am I, Yaddle. It's just..."

Yaddle knew what she meant. Exactly what she meant. She felt it to, for Even.

"I know." She looked at Iva and smiled. A shared secret, a secret of love that only women knew. "Go find, Qui-Gon. It's coming, the future, and we can't face it without him."

- 13 -
A Shallow Grave, A Monument To A Ruined Age.

Leia knew they'd been travelling some distance. How far? Where? She didn't know. She had no idea of time. She thought that as much as a week might have passed, but it might have been only a few days. They brought her food and water, but irregularly. The lights in the cell were kept at an eternal twilight. Twice more Vader had let his torture droid loose on her, each time she had resisted. The secret knowledge of her incursion into his mind kept her strong. She didn't attempt the same again for fear that he might sense her, but she had her own secret access to the Force now and it sustained her.

She heard a noise outside the cell and tensed.

They had come for her again.

But this time it was different. They took her not to the interrogation chamber but to the bridge of this great ship. Its size awed her, the power it must contain frightened her. But she wouldn't let it, or her captors, intimidate her. Still she shivered when she stepped onto the bridge. She knew it was him before she saw him. He scared her in a way that Vader could only pretend at.

"Governor Tarkin," she said before he had a chance to speak. "I should have expected to find you holding Vader's leash. I recognized your foul stench when I was brought on board."

***

Mara had glanced through all the files on Garris Shrike and had watched the recording of his theft of the children and the murder of their parents one more time. Shrike's tastes and requirement for child labour were renowned. He'd had a long record of using children as slaves, as pickpockets on Corellia and elsewhere, as press-ganged recruits for his pirate clan. Shrike's operation had folded about ten years ago, he was believed dead. But back then... Back then, when he had been sent by Jabba Desilijic Tiure to retrieve a precious item and keep the remaining cargo for himself... Back then, Garris Shrike had made a catastrophic, but to Mara not unwelcome, mistake...

Two children. Less than a year, perhaps much less, apart in age. But twins? No, not twins. Mara was even now checking the birth records from the Corellian data archives. Not twins. Jaina Solo had given birth to one son. There had been a cuckoo in the nest. They were not unlike, those two children that she had watched with such intensity of feeling on the viewer. Easy to get confused. Especially for low-life scum like Shrike. Which meant that the other one, the cuckoo, might be the one the emperor searched for, the real Qui-Zhang.

She had to be sure. She had to determine something of this other boy's origins. This Han Solo.

But the Corellian records didn't make much sense. There were too many entries. Too many entries on the Solo's. On their child.

What... Wait a minute. They were data-phantoms. Someone had altered the records. There were data-phantoms everywhere. Clever, yes. Very clever. Whoever had done this had been skilled. Mara knew that anyone but herself would likely miss the clues, so shrewdly had the trails and codes been covered and disguised. It may even indicate the hand of the Jedi in this. A conspiracy. Yes. A conspiracy to hide a child. Mara had her proof.

She would keep this as her trump card. This, the Emperor did not need to know. She turned to her droid. It had been waiting patiently, silent, at the rear of the room all this time.

"Kaythree, inform the Emperor I have not found his answer yet, but tell him I am close. He will have the data soon."

She sent it as an alibi, sent it to cover her tracks.

Satisfied she sat back. Later she would find out all she could about this Han Solo, track him down and lure him into her confidence, use him for her own ends. For now, though, she could rest. She stood up stiffly, ready to retreat to her bed for a long, much needed sleep.

And then it hit her.

A pain. Deep in her mind, searing, screaming.

Her eyes widened, her hand reached out for the chair she had just vacated, she took deep breaths.

Pain. Yes, it was pain. But she knew its origin. Not her, it wasn't her pain.

It was the pain of countless other souls, crying out in death.

The Emperor. The Emperor, what had he done this time?

***

With reluctance and with sorrow Obi-Wan made his way back towards the central hold of the Millennium Falcon, the place where he had left Luke to his practice of the Jedi fighting arts. He watched Luke, but he saw only Han's eyes, the image burned into his memory, of disbelief in those eyes. Yet those eyes, Obi-Wan still felt the same about those eyes. That somewhere inside the brash young smuggler, his old master, Qui-Gon, looked out from behind those light brown eyes.

"Good," he said almost absent-mindedly as Luke finally mastered a difficult lightsabre move without endangering himself. "Now I want you to try a defensive manoeuvre."

As demonstration, Obi-Wan ran through the moves and then stepped back again, sat down away to the side. Pondering.

There was more though, wasn't there? Obi-Wan saw Luke only dimly as he attempted to figure it out. Han wasn't just rejecting his identity, the truth of his birthright. He was rejecting the Force. It wasn't what Obi-Wan had expected. He had expected to find, even after all these years, a man prepared to take up the Jedi cause. To help protect and train Luke. All he had found was a restless smuggler who wore his roguishness as a shell, a cover for the emptiness, the hurt, inside. Who put no trust, worse - had no faith in, the Force. Obi-Wan felt too sad for words. Perhaps he was wrong. Perhaps Han wasn't the one he sought. If so, he left this world with many things undone.

A voice intruded on his worrisome thoughts.

"Don't centre on your anxiety."

Obi-Wan looked around sharply. The Wookiee and the droids had not moved. Luke still practised his moves. No one had spoken.

But then he already knew that. He knew the words were Qui-Gon's. Obi-Wan remembered so clearly the moment his master had spoken the words. So many years ago. So near the end.

A memory, a voice from the past, a trick of an old man's mind. That was all.

Yet when Qui-Gon had spoken those words, he had no longer quite been a Jedi. He had been taken, had given himself, to the Baobhan-sith by then. Qui-Gon had been possessed by Baobhan-sith magic, ancient Sith alchemy. He had belonged to them when Iva had conceived their child. If Han was that child then Han was one of them too, owned by and imbued with the spirit of the Baobhan-sith.

Obi-Wan waited a moment for the reality, the truth of it, to sink in. He knew then that Qui-Gon had been right, even as he still questioned the morality of what his Master had done. It had been the Force which guided Qui-Gon to accept the alliance the Baobhan-sith sought. The Force had wanted this.

Han, then, was more Baobhan-sith than Jedi. There was nothing Obi-Wan could do for Han Solo. He would have to find his own way, he would have to look out for himself. Luke, Luke was Obi-Wan's sole responsibility.

He stood up, ready now to move Luke's training on.

An emotional hurricane swept over him. Pain, anguish, death. Wave after wave of it.

Obi-Wan staggered. Fell back into the seat.

Luke rushed to him. "Are you all right? What's wrong?"

Obi-Wan barely heard the words of concern. What's wrong? What's wrong? He didn't know. How could it be that? How? But it was true. It was terribly, terribly true.

The feelings of the dying and the dead. Voice upon voice. Million upon million. No, not that. Not yet.

"A disturbance..." He managed to speak through lips frozen by dreadful emotion. "A great disturbance in the Force... as if... voices... as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced."

The feelings passed. The dead were moving on.

"I fear something terrible has happened."

It was true, then. The end *was* near.

Obi-Wan looked at Luke. And you are not ready, he thought. You are not ready.

***

Alderaan filled the forward viewing panel. Leia felt its pull. Her planet, a large and dominating presence before her. She longed to be down there, with Bail. To be home. But Tarkin soured the thought. He was using it. Using it to break her, to get her to freely speak when Vader had not been able to force the words from her with his threats and infliction of pain. And break her, he could. Though not yet, not just yet. Though her body was now a diagram of Vader's torments, she would hold back from the final betrayal while she still had some strength of mind.

"Dantooine," she whispered. Barely audible. She dropped her head. A feint, a lie. She hoped that Vader did not sense her subterfuge. "They're on Dantooine."

"There. You see, Lord Vader, she can be reasonable."

Although Tarkin addressed Vader, his eyes flashed back to Leia frequently as he spoke. His triumph writ large.

"Continue with the operation. You may fire when ready."

Leia's small moment of triumph was broken in an instant that stretched out to eternity. So slow. So fast.

The planet burned bright and then died. A sea of asteroids. An astral cemetery.

"No!"

It was gone. All gone. She had failed. She was now an orphan. A refugee. An empty shell.

- 14 -
Just One Last Word Before You Go, Why Should I Ask For More?

Tarkin escorted Leia back to the holding cell personally. Striding just before her, his back was a unbreachable wall. Stare at it with anger and hate she might, but it had no effect. She may as well be nothing. She was nothing.

He opened the door to the cell and smiled malevolently at her as she entered. She stepped in, chin raised confidently. She would not let him see her despair. She welcomed the solitude the cell offered. The chance to be alone with her grief.

But all her self-possession eroded away as he stepped in behind her and, with a nod to the guards, shut himself in with her. She sat down onto the hard bunk, defeated.

She felt her flesh crawl, the hairs on the back of neck rise, as he came close and loomed over her.

"Now, Leia, perhaps we should have a little talk. Just you and I."

His voice was a freezing knife. She feared what he would do to her. She hung her head in sorrow and defeat, but she would not rise to his bait.

"I'm sure you know what comes next."

Tarkin's voice was silky, but Leia knew she could never accept whatever pact he was about to offer.

"Stand up," he commanded.

She felt a sigh welling up inside her, but she didn't give vent to it. She simply stood. She still had to look up to the Grand Moff.

"Your execution will come soon, you can be sure of that, my dear."

She didn't flinch as his hand rose to stroke her hair. It took all the control she could muster, but she didn't flinch. But her head span and she felt an irresistible nausea begin to rise.

"You are a very pretty girl, Leia."

He didn't move his hand. She wanted him so desperately to move his hand.

"And you are strong. Vader doesn't see that, but I do. You could always have a place on my staff. My household would welcome you. There are many things you could do for me, Leia."

He moved his hand then. Down to her neck. Not that, she thought, please not that.

His hand moved on, across the skin of her throat and down towards her breast.

Though the fabric of her dress was a barrier between them, she jerked away, involuntary. She could no longer show that she didn't fear him. She was too afraid, almost too afraid to go on living.

He seemed disappointed for a moment. She could feel his anger surge. Expected him to raise a hand and strike her. But he only smiled again.

"What's wrong, Leia. Don't you want the chance to live. To serve a worthy cause. You and your rebels have it all wrong."

He stepped close to her again.

"Let me tell you about the Empire, Leia. Let me explain to you what we really stand for."

***

Boulders. Huge chunks and small. A storm of motion that threatened to hole the Falcon.

Where a calm void should have met them on exiting hyperspace, there were only asteroids.

Han wrestled with the controls; Chewbacca knew from instinct and from experience exactly how to work in unison with Han. Together they avoided the worst of the rocky tempest.

They were where they should be. It was Alderaan that was missing.

***

Tarkin cursed loudly as he stomped his way into the conference room. How dare Vader call him away from his seduction of Leia. He had been close, so close, he almost had her.

Dantooine was a lie. Of course, Dantooine was a lie. But in front of Vader he could not reveal his personal plans for Leia Organa.

Still, he had little regret with what he did next.

"Terminate her," he snapped. "Immediately."

Other opportunities always arose.

***

Tarkin had left, called away, but his leaving afforded Leia no relief. She more than suspected they had detected her deceit by now. The Alliance had abandoned the base on Dantooine some time ago. Too many Imperial military units in that area of space for comfort. If they were still there, it wouldn't take them long to determine there was no rebel base on Dantooine.

The only thing Leia had managed to do was buy herself time. Time that could only be spent in grief for the myriad dead of Alderaan. The destruction of the planet tormented her. It tormented her more than Vader's tortures had. More than the fact that she could no longer do anything for Qui-Zhang Jinn did. More than her own imminent death.

They hadn't come for her yet, but they would. All she could do was wait. So she lay down in the cell to wait and to indulge her grief, although no tears would come.

***

Darkness. Darkness pressed in close, too close in the cramped space. The bare lines of light around the hatch, the only illumination.

The Falcon moved slowly, helpless, towards the looming curve of the Death Star. Han and Chewie sat motionless, helpless, in the smuggling compartment. It was a bitter taste in his mouth, but Han had to trust old Ben knew what he was doing.

Old fool, he thought as he waited. He had to hope the old man's plan worked better than his patter about Jedi fathers. He checked his blaster. If the chance arose, he had his own plans. He nodded at Chewie.

The Wookiee bared his teeth in reply. Chewie knew what to do. He could always be trusted.

***

The feeling prickled across the thin, scarred skin covering Vader's skull. Like ripples of electricity, the familiar presence set his senses reeling with tiny convulsions of pain.

Obi-Wan Kenobi.

"Never give up!"

Obi-Wan's voice. Obi-Wan's words.

"Never give up!"

Louder now. More assertive.

Vader sneered. Those words. An early lesson for Anakin. And Obi-Wan had taught him well. Vader had taken the lesson to heart as well.

He had sought the Jedi, slain the Jedi, single-handedly destroyed them all. The purge was of his making. Of Palpatine's orders, but of Vader's making. He had never given up. He was stronger than the Jedi, than all the Jedi together.

There was, though, one who had as yet eluded him. He had heard reports of Kenobi's death and had discredited them all. He had sensed Kenobi, back there on Tatooine, but that had not been the ordained time. Now Kenobi was here and the dark side commanded Vader. The apprentice had grown stronger than the master, Vader was stronger than Obi-Wan. Never give up!

Obi-Wan was here, Vader knew he would win. He stalked the corridors and compartments, he would quarter the Death Star if he had to to track the last Jedi down.

Vader clenched his fist, his fist of metal and circuits. "I will have you now, Master. I will have my revenge."

***

Eyes. All Han could see were her eyes. She had such deep inviting eyes. Brown pools of luxury. For a moment they looked back into his. His heart leapt in his chest. His stomach turned somersaults.

"They went down in the cell bay."

Han heard the shout but couldn't break the look, a deep reluctance to let the moment end had taken hold of him.

The eyes belonged to a face, the face to a voice. The voice admonished him.

"Looks like you managed to cut off our only escape route."

He didn't like the tone in her voice. He admonished her back.

"Perhaps you'd like in back in your cell, Your Highness."

But he couldn't deny her words. They *were* trapped. Time for action. His kind of action. He broke the look at last.

***

Vader hurried to the conference room, troopers and techs alike stepping aside to let him pass. Tarkin, miserable, conniving Tarkin, was there as expected.

"He is here..." Vader hissed.

"Obi-Wan Kenobi! What makes you think so?"

Unbelieving, cynical Tarkin. Vader wished he could snuff out his life right here and now. But he had uses for the Grand Moff yet.

"A tremor in the Force," he replied, certain that he was right and Tarkin mistaken.

Vader no longer consciously heard the other voice, the voice that was a ripple in the Force, a whisper inside his skull. But it remained...

"Never give up!"

A murmur now. A clarion call. A reminder for Anakin's ear alone.

***

The dark figure of Lord Vader, bulky in its prosthetic armour, stepped in front of Obi-Wan.

"I've been waiting for you, Obi-Wan. We meet again, at last. The circle is now complete."

It was time. The circle had turned. But Obi-Wan wasn't ready. He had had all the time in the world to prepare. He still wanted more. He wasn't ready, he never would be.

He stepped closer to Vader. Fired his sabre into violent life. He hadn't been this close to Anakin for so long. And this was Anakin, he reminded himself, though he had kept that fact from Luke.

The battle he could no longer ignore began. He remembered the moves, his body fought with an ease he had lost long ago. Despite the pains of age and infirmity, Obi-Wan fought to the best of his ability. He gave his all, though he knew he was to die here, on this day.

He couldn't win and even if he did he was trapped. Hemmed in now by Stormtroopers. But he sensed Luke very close. Luke could escape. Leia too.

He parried Vader's blow and spared the time to glance in their direction. He saw Luke mouth the word...

"Ben?"

He heard Eilidh, an echo of the witch's voice...

"The hour of your death is at hand."

He called Eirtae's face to mind.

'I'm sorry,' he thought, as he lifted his sabre for the last time. "I should have loved you more than I did.'

And in the moment before Vader's sabre fell, Obi-Wan gave himself up to the Force.

- 15 -
The Spectacle Of The World Cut Open.

"Why have you stopped? They could be after us."

"Tell me where you want to go to get my payment and then I'll take you wherever you want."

Luke's voice was full of woe. Han's reply cold. The smuggler had taken them far enough from the ruins of Alderaan and from the immense power of the Deathstar to confuse the Empire, but not far enough for Luke's peace of mind. Han had taken them an hour into a journey in an unknown direction and then brought them to a standstill. The Falcon had dropped out of hyperspace and now hung silent, dead, in empty space.

"Payment." Luke looked aghast. "You can ask for payment now?"

Han spat a reply. "We had a deal."

The smuggler stood, belligerent in pose, in the entry way to the central hold and Luke stood, defensively, in the centre of the room, staring back at Han with a look that paralleled hatred.

"Deal?" Luke retorted. "In case you didn't notice, there's a hunt going on and we're the prey. Ben is dead."

"Too bad, kid. That's the way it works. All I know is Jabba wants paying and if I don't deliver, I'll be dead too."

Leia looked back and forth between the two men. She could sense the tension in them both, the unacknowledged emptiness that Han held in his eyes, the turbulence of grief in Luke.

"What does that matter now?"

Luke was close to tears, Leia could hear it in his voice, but there was an undercurrent too, an undertone of righteousness.

"There's more at stake now," he went on. A boy speaking as a man for the first time in his life. "I'm a Jedi. The only Jedi now. The last one. We have to strike back, defeat the Empire. You have to follow me."

Han snorted. "Jedi! There are no Jedi. Forget Ben's tales."

"They're not tales. It's true. I *am* a Jedi."

"Yeah, let's hear it, eh? How d'ya know it's true?"

"My *father* was a Jedi. *I* will be a Jedi too. Ben would never lie."

"No? What exactly *do* we know about old Ben?" Han pointed at himself, smirked. "My father was a Jedi too, ya know."

"Yours? Never? You don't have the Force in you." Luke's voice was accusing.

"Well Ben said so. So it must be true." Han paused a moment, pulled himself up to full height. "Han Solo, son of a Jedi."

Luke looked stricken with confusion and doubt. "No," he mouthed.

Han laughed, a small laugh, short, cut off. "No. Course it isn't true. Me, a Jedi's son? Not on your life. But Ben still said it. Make's him a liar then, doesn't it?"

Leia knew she could stay silent no longer. She moved towards Han, she was already close to him. Reached out and touched his arm lightly.

"Han, Obi-Wan Kenobi was a great Jedi. He was a general in the clone wars. He fought alongside my father."

He turned and looked at her. Staring down into her eyes again. With that look. That look of hunger and loss.

"Hey, I don't dispute that, Princess." Han's hand lay splayed against his chest. "But by all accounts he was a long time alone in the Jundland Wastes, twenty years or more. That alone can do terrible things to a man's mind. Who knows what went through his head, what delusions he entertained."

That was true, she thought, but didn't have a chance to reply. Luke spoke, interjected in what seemed to her like the beginnings of a private moment between her and Han. Luke spoke and turned a stream of vitriol on Han.

"Shut up! You're just a criminal. You don't care about anyone but yourself. You don't care about the Force. You're as bad as them. The Empire."

Leia found herself looking at Luke with disgust. Who was he to speak to Han, to anyone, like that?

All the pain, all the honesty and truth, she sensed in the room came from Han. And when she looked in his heart, she saw a surging sea beset by a raging storm, the foaming crest of each crashing wave an emotion. Reaching for the heavens, screaming for release. Each one, each feeling, brought down, dragged down, by the next. Fear. Loneliness. Loss. Despair. Bitter disappointment. Hope. A faint glimmer of hope, drowning in that great sea.

Han. He was the one she wanted to save. To soothe and to caress. His was the honest heart condemned to a life of pain by the blight the Empire had laid on the galaxy.

Not Luke. No, not Luke. Not Luke, with his grand vision and his ambitions to stride forth as the Jedi hero. Who was he to lay claim to that destiny? It had to be borne by a humble being. The Force did not demand bloodshed and murder, nor pomp and ceremony. The Force had called to her and gifted her with secrets which she dare not share, which might be used to the good of all. But this plan of Luke's for war? No, that was not the Force, not the Force she knew. Hers was a gentle Force, loving, giving. It reclaimed the broken soul and healed the evil in the world. It accepted all kinds, all beings, sought to embrace them all, respect them all for their own strengths and skills. It did not seek heroes and it did not seek warriors. Nor did it seek to exclude those to whom it did not gift its powers, as Luke did Han. Those to whom it was gifted were indebted to the rest, were expected to give their lives in service. Not as leaders but as protectors. Luke's way? No, she wasn't sure Luke's way was the right path at all.

Han was the one she wanted to trust. She wanted to love him, to give him a place in her heart, to calm his seething soul. But she could not. To do so would bring him further loss, would condemn him too.

***

Luke snivelled like a baby. He had run from Han's accusing gaze and found sanctuary in the engine room. He curled there and snivelled like a baby.

He knew it. He knew it was unbecoming. He knew he had behaved badly in front of Leia and Han. But his grief and despair were too much. He wanted comfort for the hurt. The comfort Beru had always given him. The comfort he would never have again. The love and kindness he would never again know. And now Ben. Ben too. Gone. Gone forever.

Luke realised what he must do. What he must become. He must take on Obi-Wan Kenobi's mantle. Become his replacement in the world. So that Leia, and those like her, would send him messages. "Help me Luke Skywalker. You are my only hope."

Would that ever be?

Yes, he whispered to himself in the dark. Yes, it would. It would one day come to pass.

***

Leia had retreated to the main cabin after the confrontation. Confrontation, that was the only word she had for it. Three individuals, three hearts, three minds. All of them emptied, all of them laid open by grief. Each one seeking redemption in their own way. It should not be, they should not fight like this. She had ended it by promising to honour the payment Han was owed. She could at least save him from these Hutt gangsters.

In the mirror, the face staring back at her looked haunted. The skin drawn, the eyes ringed with dark shadows, the hair mussed, but after all her ordeals it was the least she could expect. The ache in her muscles had slowly subsided, though she hadn't slept at all in some time and had long given in to perpetual wakefulness. Her world was gone, all those people dead. The unflattering refection showed eyes rimmed with tears. No, she told herself, you've cried enough. This is not a time for tears, it's a time to regroup, to prepare for future triumphs over evil.

Yet she sighed at her own thoughts. That sounded like Luke. It wasn't her. She wasn't a rebel. She wasn't a diplomat. Not even a princess, though everyone called her that. She was a fraud. She was just a child who had lost her family and her loved ones. She had felt all those deaths, and they weighed heavy on her soul. She had resisted Vader's tortures for what? So that the deceitful Tarkin could act the autocrat. She hoped that her father, that Winter, that someone she knew was still alive. But still her world was gone. She was empty. Too young, far too young for this. She longed for home, a home she would never see again. All gone. Alderaan, her people, her family. All gone.

She knew it was selfish. She knew it was selfish to wish for her own loved ones to be safe, when all those millions had died. She sat down, a picture of despair writ large, on the corner of the sleep couch and wept even though she told herself not to give up yet.

Finally she rose. Her tears spent. It was too hot for her in the cabin. Too close. Too closed in. She wanted to be out, out under the open skies of Alderaan. But that now could never be. She was lost. Lost like Han. Forever a restless wanderer. They were like two souls who shared a curse. She had recognised it in his eyes. She felt a need, a pressing need, to speak with him, to share with him. To understand him.

She pushed the damp strands of hair, wet from her tears, behind her ears and stepped out into the corridor.

***

Luke's grief gave way slowly to excitement. The thrill that he had done it, had succeeded. He had rescued the princess, saved her. She had called for Obi-Wan Kenobi and he had come. Delivered her. He, Luke, now filled Ben's shoes. The last Jedi Knight was dead. But there was another willing to take his place. Luke stood up. He was ready.

In his new found zeal, Luke did not realise the danger. Obi-Wan, nor any Jedi master, was no longer there to point it out to him. He failed to notice the swelling of his pride, the growth of his ambition. He did not acknowledge the realisation of how dangerous was the path he now took.

***

Leia had taken no more than a few paces down the long curving corridor than she was face to face with Han. She stopped. He stopped. They faced each other across a great gulf of life. So close.

Neither moved. Only the sound of breaths, laboured in their intake, could be heard.

His eyes flicked up and down her body. Hers searched his face.

They both felt it, the attraction. She knew they did. But she couldn't give in to it, mustn't give in to it. She felt it from him too. The burning desire, tempered by reluctance and fear. That each had to protect their own soul, not condemn the other.

How? How could this have come to pass? That she could find someone into whose arms she could throw herself. And have to draw away.

But she didn't move. And he didn't move. They were barely a breath apart. How had they moved so close? When had they moved so close?

No.

Oh, I want you.

No.

His mouth was on hers. Her arms pulled him in close and closer. He kissed her. Harsh and harsher.

Yes.

I can't do this.

Yes.

"No," she screamed.

She pulled away and ran, ran back to the cabin. Away from the threat of love. Away. Back. Back to the safety of solitude.

- 16 -
Hold Me Now While My Old Life Dies Tonight And I Surrender.

"Your report."

The Emperor snapped at Mara, impatience simmering beneath the surface of his counterfeit smile. She had been summoned to his presence unexpectedly and was more than a little afraid he would discover her prevarications.

"Nothing yet, Lord Sidious." Mara nodded. "But I am close."

"Close." The Emperor sneered. "Close. It is unlike you to admit defeat." He grasped Mara's wrist tightly in his gnarled hand and squeezed until she winced.

"Not defeat, Lord. Merely unexpected difficulties."

"Why do I get the feeling you are lying, my sweetest Hand?" He bent her arm backwards until the tendons burst and snapped. "What have you found?"

"Nothing." Mara's reply was uttered through teeth clenched against the pain. "Nothing yet. I am close. I feel it. But my work was interrupted."

The Emperor gave Mara's wrist one last twist and she felt something give with a snap but blotted out all feeling from the offending limb.

"There was no interruption," he hissed at her. "You were free to work undisturbed."

Mara clutched her damaged wrist to her chest but would not be cowered. She had sustained worse injuries. "I felt it, Lord. The destruction of Alderaan."

"That!" Sidious raised his voice until it was a screech. "That was nothing to do with you. Forget it."

"How can I forget it. I felt it. You destroyed a planet! Its entire population!"

"Mara, Mara. Not I. It was on Tarkin's orders."

"And who does he answer to, that toady? To you. This is your doing." She stamped her foot in anger.

"Why, Mara, you disappoint me. Is this compassion I feel from you? Condemnation?" The Emperor reached out to touch her face.

She shied away from his bony hand.

"Oh, Mara." His voice deepened, reproaching her. "This will never do"

The hand that had a moment before reached out so softly, now swept towards her in a gesture of disquiet. Jagged sparks, blue, ethereal, sprang from his fingertips.

Mara could only gasp as the force of that gesture lifted her up and slammed her into the wall behind her. She could not utter a reply, could not form words. The breath had been expelled from her lungs as bones had cracked in her chest.

Sidious was screaming at her now, screaming incomprehensible accusations as the blood sang in her ears. She felt herself taken up in the Force that flew from his hands, felt herself slammed again and again into the wall. She felt no pain, did not lose consciousness, but slowly, slowly, her senses dulled into torpitude.

***

Leia could still sense the emotions. Could sense the emotions of the two men, alone, each lost in their own dark worlds. Han - so stubborn, so deadened by his harsh life. Luke - so naive, so eager for the promise of his future. And herself. Yes, herself. Her own emotions. They were so unclear. She pushed them away. Concentrated on what she had sensed, what she could still sense, from Han and Luke.

Their emotions were like distant echoes now their feelings had boiled away into the darkness. But she knew what it meant. It meant that what she had suspected had come true. Something inside her had been turned on. The torture, the pain - it had acted as a switch. Her strength in the Force had grown. Luke. Did Luke understand it could be like that? Did Han?

Han? Yes, perhaps he did. As her lips had met his, she had felt it all. All his loss, all his pain, all his fears and all his hopes. The staunch belief he held in himself, his strong bond with the Wookiee, his capacity - his great capacity - for love. Hidden away, all hidden away, beneath a hard shell that he believed no one could ever break.

She could break it. Leia knew that she could break it.

No. No, she could never love Han. *That* was why she could never love Han.

But you do.

Leia tensed. The voice was her own.

You do.

She felt it inside, strong, shouting it out to the world, to those sensitive enough to hear. It was a flag, red for danger.

"I can't." She spoke aloud. Giving herself instruction. "I can't."

You can.

Her heart would not be silenced. She had sensed an affinity with Han Solo. One she would struggle to deny. That she would struggle to deny even as she persuaded herself that it was unsafe to love him. That she would endanger him and damn him with her love. It could not be. It could not be allowed to be.

But it can.

Leia stood and shook her head, hoping against hope to dislodge her own voice, her own desire, from her mind.

You can.

But it would not be dislodged.

***

Mara couldn't move for the longest time. Perhaps an hour, perhaps more. She lay still, alone, knowing no one would come for her. Even breathing was an effort. She could draw on the Force to dull the pain, but she was defeated, humiliated. She couldn't move. She didn't want to move.

***

A sharp rap interrupted Leia's thoughts. She jumped forward, was drawn back to the moment. A knocking at the cabin door. A voice, all too familiar now, all too welcome, called to her.

"Leia."

An almost questioning tone.

"D'you need anything?"

She recognised the concern beneath Han's gruff tones. No, she didn't need anything from him. Yet she got up, reached out and let the door slide open.

"No," she said, as nonchalant a tone as she could muster, directly up into his face. Confronting him to notice her tears and grief.

He leant, half swaggering, against the door frame. How could he act so unconcerned after what had happened? She wanted to dismiss him hurriedly but she couldn't. She backed away from him and sat down. Oh, how she hated her show of weakness. But it overcame her again. After what had happened. It was as though she were realising it for the first time, all over again. She cried. In fact, she wailed. She wept for Alderaan, for all the dead souls of Alderaan.

Han crossed to her quickly. She didn't realise at first how close he had come. He was close enough now to touch her. He sat down next to her.

"Hey, princess. Let it out. You'll feel better afterwards."

Trite, it was so trite. How could he say that? In that tone? She hated him for it. She threw her arms around his neck and kissed him. Passionately. On the mouth. Deeply. She didn't stop. Just kissed him. And went on kissing him.

He seemed startled and pushed her away.

"Look," he said, pinning her with his gaze, an amused smile lifting the corners of his mouth as he wiped the traces of her kiss away with the back of his hand, an unspoken vow in his eyes. "I'm flattered and all, but I don't need this right now. I've got problems of my own and believe me, you don't want to get involved in those."

She ignored him. She just grabbed him again and pulled him towards her. Kissing him again, more deeply, more tenderly. She ran her hands up the back of his neck, into his hair. It felt softer than she had imagined. His chin harsher against her skin.

Why was she doing this? Why? What had possessed her? But, oh, it was good. So good. So good she couldn't stop. She couldn't stop now. He wasn't resisting despite his words. He wasn't resisting at all. He was massaging the muscles in her lower back as he returned the kiss. She couldn't stop now and she could sense that neither could he.

She didn't know quite how it happened. It all happened so quickly. Before she knew what she was doing her clothes and his were piling up on the floor around them and she was pushing him down onto his back. She was straddling him and he was looking up at her with a scoundrel's grin. But she didn't care. She didn't care about that or anything else.

"That is your first time, isn't it?" He said it softly.

She felt the flush of embarrassment on her cheeks.

"It's okay," he whispered, "it'll only hurt a little bit."

He rolled her over and was on top of her in an instant, pushing her down into the bedding, separating her legs and pushing himself inside her, hard and hot.

She gasped in surprise as much as shock. What he said was true. It did hurt, but only a little and the other sensations were so good it didn't matter anyway. Hurt, what was hurt? She could take it. After all that had happened to her of late, she could take it.

She gave into the sensations, the explosion of pleasure, a current running just beneath the surface of her skin. She wanted it, she wanted more of it, but it peaked as Han ran his hands across her breasts and pushed himself hard against her. She wanted to cry out, so hot she felt, so hot and tingling with an electric burst of stars.

It was such bliss that, forgetting herself, she opened her mind to the Force. She felt she was hurtling into Han's mind, joining with him on a level she had not dreamt possible. Striding into his innermost soul as openly as she had crept furtively into Vader's. She felt Han reach a climax inside her as she felt his mind overflow in synchronicity. He grunted in pleasure.

Then it hit her like a tidal wave. Shock, violation, defence. Her own conscience accused her. She needed to protect herself. Not open herself up like this. She could endanger Han. She had been so lost in herself, she had almost forgotten he was there. How could she have forgotten he was there? The one who was giving her so much pleasure? It frightened her.

He didn't seem to have noticed her entry into his mind. He had fallen on top of her with his exertions spent and she pushed him off, wriggled away to escape his touch. A touch that threatened her hard, hard shell, her veneer of protection. She got up off the bed, wrapping herself in a sheet, went and stood, defensive, rejecting, in the corner of the cabin.

Han stared at her, dumbstruck. She couldn't look back at him.

"I want to be alone now, please." That was all she said.

"Huh?" He seemed shocked, abandoned.

"Please." She could hear the whine in her own voice.

"What, you're throwing me out? Off my own bunk? After such a great time?"

She thought a moment. She didn't want to hurt him. Under other circumstances she might have encouraged him. "It was great. Thank you. But I'm not myself. Alderaan... Obi-Wan... You understand, don't you, Han? I can't..." Her words trailed off. She realised how awful they must sound.

"Fine. If that's the way you want it..." He hissed, half-whispered the words, as he pulled his clothes back on, but she knew he meant her to hear. As he left, he turned back and smiled. She wasn't sure if it was from affection or distaste.

"Next time you get the urge, try the farmboy. Then come back and tell me *we* didn't have a great time."

His sarcasm fuelled an unaccustomed anger in her. "Why you mangy smuggler..." Her voice tailed off. It was all she could manage in reply.

Han turned away, muttering. "Just a stuck up princess, that's all you are. Shouldn't have expected any more."

"Just get out," she yelled back. "And don't touch me again."

"Fine, I won't," he spat. "That suit's me."

And then he was gone.

She showered quickly in the refresher and tried hard to compose herself. She had no time for romance and once this journey was over she need never see Han Solo again. She would keep her true self hidden. Even from him. Her shell was inviolate. It had been a close call and she had enjoyed it, would do it again if the opportunity arose, but it was done now and over with. He had stolen a little piece of her heart, but her shell was inviolate and would remain so. Her true self was still safe. She was Leia Organa. Orphan. Stateless refugee. No longer a child, she was a woman. A woman hiding her strength in the Force. Fighting for what she believed in. Leia Organa. Rebel. Covert Jedi.

***

Finally, Mara realised that she had won. In some strange way, she had won. Her body was crushed, but she had not revealed to Sidious the secret of Qui-Zhang Jinn and the man known as Han Solo. And now she never would.

It gave her the strength to go on living. To breath. To move. It gave her the strength to drag her racked body upright. To move, slowly oh so slowly, but to move, yes. To place one leaden foot in front of the other and make her way, her painful way, back to her quarters.

What she saw in the mirror of the refresher when she reached her rooms was not comforting. A swollen face, bruised lips and eyelids, the jaw a livid purple, one eye almost closed. But it would pass.

She slid her hand across her body, sensing with the Force, drawing on it to reduce the injuries. A broken collarbone, several ribs, two or three small bones in her wrist. She would heal.

After she had straightened her broken bones and smeared bacta on her bruises, she did not have the energy to wash. She simply dragged herself to the bed and lay down, flat, stiff, and waited for sleep. A healing trance.

It would be several days before she would feel able to resume her search for Han Solo, but when she regained her strength she would. She would find him. And then, then she would make him her own.

TBC