Archive of Our Own

The hallway felt wrong, and even though the entire fortress was seeped in the Dark Side, it wasn’t that.

Obi-Wan had felt it the moment he'd stepped through the doors—it wasn't just the cold pull of the fortress, the ambient malice baked into every wall, but something worse. Something preserved. He stood in front of the cases and tried to keep breathing.

Jedi. Dozens of them. Suspended in amber fluid behind transparisteel panels. Some of them he recognized. A Twi'lek padawan who'd he seen in the Temple. A Cerean knight who'd served on the Outer Rim campaign. A Creche Master looking as if he might wake up at any moment.

“What did you discover down there?” He could hear Tala in the comms.

Obi-Wan pressed his hand flat against the transparisteel and felt nothing through the Force. Just the dead, dense weight of the dark side smothering everything else. Remnants of people he'd known, entombed in glass like specimens in a lab. He tried to feel them—any trace, any echo—and there was nothing. Whatever the dark side had done to this place, it had swallowed even the memory of their light.

“I think I know what they are hiding here. This place, it’s not a fortress, it’s a tomb.”

He needed to move. Leia was somewhere in this fortress, a ten-year-old girl in the hands of the Inquisitors, and every second he spent staring at ghosts was a second wasted. He pulled his hand back.

The Force cracked open behind him.

There was no other way to describe it. The air split, sudden and enormous, like a door being kicked in from the other side of reality. Two signatures slamming into existence where nothing had been, one blindingly bright and the other so dark it swallowed the light around it. Obi-Wan spun, hand going to his lightsaber.

Two figures. Standing in the middle of the hallway. A man and a woman. Both human, both young—late twenties, maybe early thirties. They hadn't walked in. They hadn't come through a door. They were simply there, as if reality had blinked and they'd been inserted into the gap.

The man wore pale robes, Jedi-cut but rougher than what Obi-awan used to know, and had a lightsaber on his belt. He was blond, blue-eyed, and for a disorienting half-second he looked like someone Obi-Wan knew, but the resemblance slipped away before he could pin it down. The man stumbled slightly on arrival, like he'd been shoved, and caught himself with one hand on the wall.

The woman stood perfectly steady. Black robes, fitted and armored at the shoulders and forearms, the imperial symbol on her shoulder, a billowing cape around her. A black-hilted saber on her hip. Dark hair pulled back tight. Her presence in the Force was—

Obi-Wan's hand tightened on his saber.

Dark. A Sith.

The man straightened up and turned to her. “It worked."

"It worked," the woman repeated, and her voice made the words sound like an accusation. "You absolute— it worked? This is your metric? This idiotic plan was your idea, and you're surprised it worked?"

"I said it would work!"

"You could have killed us both! Never mind us, the fallout could have taken out an entire sector!"

"Well, it worked, so—"

"So we are now in the middle of—" She stopped. Looked around. Took in the hallway, the cases on the walls, the amber fluid, the dead. Her jaw tightened by a fraction. "Nur. Lower levels, we're near the inquisitors training section."

"That's good isn't it? I aimed for Obi-Wan, I didn't exactly get to pick the room—"

"You aimed for Kenobi." She said it the way someone would say you aimed for the sun. "You didn't think to aim for, I don't know, the prisoner? The person we're here to—"

"I aimed for the strongest light-side presence I could recognize! That's how it works, you need an anchor—"

"I know how it works. I told you how it works. I told you how it works and then I told you not to do it—"

"And yet here you are," the man said. "Right next to me. Almost like you followed me in."

The woman's eyes went flat. "I followed you because you were going to die."

"But I didn't."

"You almost did. Three times during transit. I had to hold your signature together through the—" She cut herself off. Pressed her fingers to the bridge of her nose. "We're here. Fine. We're here. I'll deal with this." Somehow her expression remained Obi-Wan of Anakin when he was dealing with Ahsoka as a Padawan.

"We'll deal with this."

"No. I will deal with this, because you have put us in the middle of an Imperial fortress with no extraction plan, no intel beyond whatever I can remember from—"

"I'm sorry," Obi-Wan said.

They both looked at him. The man startled, visibly, as if he'd genuinely forgotten there was someone else in the corridor. The woman did not startle. She looked at Obi-Wan as if he was insignificant, a mere annoyance that she will need to solve.

"Kenobi," she said. Well, she definitely was a Sith, somehow they all had the same tone when speaking his name.

The man elbowed her. She didn't react.

"Hello there," the man said. He was pulling his expression together into something that was meant to be reassuring and was landing somewhere closer to manic. "We're—sorry about this. We're here to help."

"Who are you?" Obi-Wan did not take his hand off his lightsaber. The dark-side presence rolling off the woman was enough to set every nerve on fire, but the man—the man was bright in the Force. Incredibly bright. A Jedi, or something close to it. The contradiction was giving him a headache.

The woman opened her mouth, and Obi-Wan had the distinct impression she was about to deliver a cover story she'd been constructing since the moment she arrived. But the man got there first.

"I'm Son," he said. He was smiling. It was a real smile, slightly crooked, and he looked extremely pleased with himself.

The woman turned to him. Slowly. "What."

"Son. That's my name. For this." He was still smiling. "Think about it."

She stared at him. He watched her get it, the flicker behind her eyes, and his smile got wider.

"No," she said.

"It's perfect."

"It is not—"

"Think about it."

"I understand the etymology. The answer is no."

"You don't get to name me. I'm Son."

"You are not going by—" She stopped. Took a breath. Closed her eyes for one second. When she opened them, something in her had recalibrated, the same way Obi-Wan had seen battlefield commanders recalibrate when a plan went sideways and arguing about it was going to get people killed. Pick the fights that matter. Let the rest go.

"Darth Revaris," she said to Obi-Wan. Flat. Moving on. "My name is Revaris. This is, apparently, Son."

Obi-Wan looked at the man. "Son."

"It's a family joke," Son said.

"It is not a joke," Revaris said. "It has never been a joke. No one is laughing."

"I'm laughing."

"No one whose opinion matters is laughing."

Obi-Wan kept his saber hand where it was. He was watching them with the specific attention he reserved for situations that were either very dangerous or very insane, and this appeared to be both.

"You're a Sith," he said to Revaris.

"Yes."

"And you—" He looked at Son. "You're a Jedi?"

Son hesitated. "Yes, a Jedi knight."

"A jedi knight," Obi-Wan repeated. "And you travel with a Sith."

"She's trustworthy. I know how that sounds."

"It sounds insane. The Sith exterminated us from the galaxy"

"Yeah, I know. Revaris doesn’t care about killing Jedi.”

"We don't have time for this," Revaris said. She'd already stopped engaging with the introductions. She was looking at the cases along the wall—the dead Jedi behind the glass—with an expression that was harder to read than Obi-Wan expected. Something clinical, but not quite indifference either. She looked at them as if they were ghosts, similar to how Obi-Wan looked at them.

Son followed her gaze. His reaction was immediate and unconcealed. The color left his face. He took a step forward, then stopped, staring at a Nautolan woman. Then at the Cerean knight beside her. Then at a human man, young, still in his padawan robes, frozen mid-fight with his braid floating above his shoulder.

"What is this?" His voice had changed. The brightness, the jokes, the crooked smile—all of it was gone. He looked sick.

"Trophies," Revaris said. "Lord Vader has some issues."

Son looked at her.

She shrugged. Barely. "And you surprised the inquisitors are a bunch of nutjobs. This is how the Empire trains dark siders."

"You're very calm about it."

"As you remember, I've been here before."

That landed in several directions at once. Son's jaw tightened. He looked like he wanted to say something and couldn't find words for it, or didn't trust the ones he had. He turned back to the cases. His hand came up and pressed flat against the transparisteel, exactly where Obi-Wan's had been a minute earlier. The same gesture. The same useless reaching for something that wasn't there anymore.

Obi-Wan filed it all. The woman had been inside the Fortress Inquisitorius before. She knew the layout. She called Vader as Lord Vader. She wore the imperial insignia. The man hadn't been here, but he knew Vader, knew him well enough to be gutted by what he was seeing, about the woman being here before. Obi-Wan could almost believe he cares for them, for the Siths. And he may for Revaris, but why would he care for Vader? 

"You call him Lord Vader," Obi-Wan said.

Revaris looked at him. "We're both Sith. What else would I call him—Anakin?"

The name dropped into the silence and sat there. Obi-Wan's hand moved a centimeter closer to igniting his saber. Son noticed and put a hand up—not in threat, just wait.

"You know who he is," Obi-Wan said. Carefully.

"Yes," Son said.

"We both do," Revaris said. "And unless you'd like to spend the next ten minutes explaining things we already know, I suggest we move on to the part where we help you."

"Help me with what?"

Revaris looked at him with an expression that suggested she was reconsidering the entire rescue. "The girl, Kenobi. The one you're here for. Leia Organa. Bail Organa's daughter. Currently being held somewhere in the upper detention levels."

"How do you—"

"We need to reach her before Vader takes too close an interest in who she actually is."

The way she said who she actually is carried weight. They knew about Vader being Anakin, they might know who Leia is. A Sith aware of her is probably one of the worst possible scenarios.

"How do you know any of this?" he asked.

They exchanged a look. Quick, private, loaded with shared context he had no access to.

"It's complicated," Son said.

"Then uncomplicate it."

"We can't. Not right now."

"That's not good enough."

"I know," Son said. And he did look like he knew it — he looked like he wished he could say more, like the secrecy was costing him something. "But the girl doesn't have time for the full explanation. Neither do we."

"You don't even know how much time—"

"Vader is in the detention level," Revaris said. She said it the way someone reports a weather condition — factual, certain, already accounted for. "He's with the girl now, or near her. He's interrogating her. Standard procedure. But she's Force-sensitive and she doesn't know how to hide it. He will take a blood sample soon, and when he does—" She stopped. "We need to move."

"How do you know she's Force-sensitive?" Obi-Wan asked.

Nothing. Revaris was already looking down the corridor, mapping routes in her head.

"How do you know Vader is in the detention level?" He tried another angle.

"I can feel him in the Force," Revaris said. "So can you, if you stop asking questions and start paying attention."

Obi-Wan could feel him. The massive, black-hole gravity of Vader's presence, somewhere below them, pulling at the Force like a wound. She was right. She was right and she was rude about it and Obi-Wan was starting to understand that those two things were not going to be separable with her.

"How do you know this fortress?" he tried, one more time. "How have you been here before? Who are you?"

Revaris didn't even look at him. She was studying the corridor junction ahead, counting doorways or cameras or something else he couldn't see. Son gave him an apologetic look, genuinely apologetic, the man seemed constitutionally incapable of rudeness, and shrugged.

"Later," Son said. "I promise. Just— later."

It was not acceptable. None of this was acceptable. But the girl was in a cell somewhere above them with Darth Vader, and these two strangers, were offering to help, and Obi-Wan was alone in an Imperial fortress and running out of options.

"Fine," he said. "Later. What's the plan?"

Revaris turned from the junction and faced them both.

"The detention level is six floors above us," she said. "Main access is through the central turbolift shaft, but that's monitored. There's a maintenance shaft on the east side —less traffic, no cameras past the fourth sublevel. I can reach the detention block in twelve minutes if I don't run into Inquisitors."

"If," Obi-Wan said.

"There are at least seven active Inquisitors in this facility. Probably more. They patrol in pairs on the upper levels, single on the lower. The detention level itself is low-patrol—Vader's presence keeps it locked down. No one goes near it when he's there."

"You know the patrol patterns," Obi-Wan said. It wasn't a question.

"I know enough." She looked at Son. "I go to the detention level. I find Vader and keep him occupied. You and Kenobi get to the girl, get a ship ready, and—"

"No," Son said.

Revaris's expression didn't change, but something behind it shifted—the very specific frustration of someone who had predicted this response and was annoyed about being right.

"He'll kill you," Son said.

"He won't kill me."

"You don't know that."

"I've fought Sith Lords before. It's what I do."

"You've fought—I remember the last time you fought Vader, you lost your arm and almost your life."

“You have fought Vader? When?” Obi-Wan added.

"A long time ago, it was part of the plan, I can… distract him."

"That was a dumb plan and you know it."

"The plan is sound. I find Vader, I engage, I buy you time to—"

"The plan puts you alone with the most dangerous person in this building."

"I am the most dangerous person in this building."

Son opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. Obi-Wan watched this with the detached fascination of a man observing a very specific kind of argument—the kind that had been happening in various forms for years, where both participants knew their positions and each other's positions and were going through the motions anyway because neither could let it go.

"I have a different idea," Son said.

"Of course you do."

"You know this fortress. I don't. I've never been here—I don't know the layout, I don't know the patrol routes, I don't know where the detention level is, I don't know how to get there. You do. You said so."

"I said I could reach the detention block in twelve minutes."

"Exactly. So you go find Leia. You know the way. You'll be faster than either of us." Son pointed at himself and then at Obi-Wan. "We'll handle Vader."

"Handle him," Revaris repeated.

"We'll make a distraction. Vader's looking for Kenobi—so we give him what he wants. We draw him away from the detention level and buy you time to get the girl out."

"You want to use Kenobi as bait."

"Kenobi's already bait. He was bait the moment he walked in. I'm just making it official."

"And you?"

"Moral support."

"Moral support," Revaris said. "Against Darth Vader."

"Two Jedi are better than one."

"Two Jedi against Vader are two targets instead of one."

"But we're very distracting targets."

Revaris stared at him. Son held the stare. There was something underneath the back-and-forth—a real negotiation happening below the surface, conducted in the Force as much as in words. Obi-Wan could feel it, could feel them testing each other's resolve, and he knew the moment Revaris decided to give in because the tension in the Force shifted. Not relaxed. Just redirected.

"Fifteen minutes," she said. "Get him away from the girl and give me fifteen minutes."

"Done."

"And if he's still in the cell when I get there—"

"Then you handle it. Because it's what you do."

Something moved across her face. Gone before Obi-Wan could name it.

"I haven't agreed to any of this," Obi-Wan said.

They both looked at him. For a half-second, identical expressions—oh, right, he's still here—and the similarity was so striking that Obi-Wan almost said something about it.

Definitely siblings, that would explain why Son is so convinced in Revaris's intentions.

Son turned to him with that bright, earnest expression. "You came here to rescue a ten-year-old girl from a Sith fortress alone. You didn't have a plan for Lord Vader—you were going to avoid him and hope. Now you have two people offering to help, one of whom knows this fortress and the other one of whom is a Jedi. This is better than what you had."

"One of whom is a Sith," Obi-Wan corrected.

"A Sith who's going to save that girl's life."

"You keep saying that. You both keep—you know things you shouldn't know. About Vader, about the princess, about this fortress, about me. You call me Obi-Wan like you've met me before and I have never seen either of you before. If you're a Jedi—" He looked at Son. "If you're a Jedi, we've met. You're old enough that you would have been in the Temple. I should remember you."

Something complicated moved through Son's expression. It was there and gone—quick, deep, and Obi-Wan couldn't tell if it was sadness or something else.

"We haven't met," Son said. "I wasn't trained at the Temple."

"Then who trained you?"

"It's—"

"If you say complicated, I swear on the Force—"

"Okay, that's fair." Son held up his hands. "I know this is frustrating. I know you have no reason to trust us. Either of us. But the girl is running out of time and I can explain everything later. Everything. You have my word."

"Your word. The word of a stranger who won't tell me his real name."

Son flinched. Small, involuntary, real. He covered it fast, but Obi-Wan saw it, remained him of Anakin again, when Obi-Wan caught him doing something bad.

It was bizarre how much Son remained him of Anakin. And as he looked at Revaris, he noticed similarities, not between her and Anakin. Her and Vader. The poster, the presence in the Force, the way she talks.

As if the Force was showing him his failures in the two strangers. Anakin and Vader, side by side.

Revaris had been watching this exchange with her arms crossed. Now she shifted her weight, a small movement that somehow pulled both their attention.

"Kenobi," she said, "He's not going to betray you. He's constitutionally incapable of it. It's one of his more irritating qualities. And I'm not going to let Vader find out who that girl is, because if he does, the consequences will be worse than you can imagine. You don't have to trust me. But you can trust that I want the same thing you want."

Obi-Wan looked at her. She met his eyes. Nothing wavered.

"Fifteen minutes," Obi-Wan said.

Revaris turned on her heel and moved down the corridor without looking back. Her footsteps were silent on the metal floor. The dark-side presence moved with her like a second shadow, and within seconds she'd turned a corner and was gone.

Obi-Wan and Son stood alone in the hallway of the dead.

Son was still looking at the spot where she'd disappeared. The complicated expression was back, protective and frustrated and resigned and something deeper that Obi-Wan didn't have a word for.

He caught Obi-Wan watching and straightened up.

"She's not what you think," Son said.

"I don't know what to think. That's rather the problem."

"Yeah." Son's mouth twitched. Not quite a smile. "Yeah, that's fair too."

The first Inquisitor found them not even two minutes after that.

Obi-Wan felt her before he saw her—a sharp, aggressive presence in the Force, fast-moving, converging from a side corridor. He raised a hand to signal Son, but Son had already stopped, lightsaber in hand, head tilted like he was listening.

"One," Son said. "No—two. One behind the other."

"You can distinguish them at this range?"

"Can't you?"

Obi-Wan could, in fact, distinguish them. He just hadn't expected the younger man to do it so casually. Whoever had trained him—whoever the complicated answer was—had done serious work.

The first Inquisitor came around the corner fast—a Mirialan woman with the standard-issue red blade, already spinning. She saw Obi-Wan and her eyes went wide with recognition.

"Kenobi." Was there a Dark Side conference about his name that he wasn’t aware of? 

Son ignited his saber. Green. The blade hummed to life, and for a disorienting half-second Obi-Wan was somewhere else entirely—a memory of blue light in a Jedi's hand, years ago, a lifetime ago. He blinked it away.

"Hi," Son said to the Inquisitor. "You must be fifth sister. Sorry about this."

He apologized to her, and then he moved. And apparently knew which inquisitor she was.

Obi-Wan had trained Anakin Skywalker. He'd sparred with Mace Windu. He'd watched Yoda fight.

He knew what exceptional looked like.

Son was exceptional.

His primary form was Ataru—Obi-Wan recognized it immediately, the acrobatic bursts of speed, the way he used the Force to amplify every movement until the distinction between swordplay and flying blurred. He remained Obi-Wan of Qui-Gon, a much shorter version, but someone who trusted the Force without hesitating, letting himself be guided almost completely by it. Underneath the Ataru was a bedrock of Shii-Cho, solid and adaptable, the kind of foundation that let a fighter switch approaches mid-strike without losing momentum.

And he knew how to fight dark siders. Son didn't hesitate. He read the Inquisitor's aggression, rode the momentum of her attacks instead of resisting them, and turned her fury into openings. He'd done this before. Often. Probably against his Sith sister, for him an inquisitor was probably a child play.

He drove the Inquisitor back six steps in three seconds, caught her spinning blade on his own, and Force-pushed her into her partner just as the second one rounded the corner.

They went down in a heap of limbs and red lightsabers.

"That works," Son said, not even breathing hard. "How far to the main corridor?"

"Two levels down." Obi-Wan was recalculating. He'd planned this rescue alone, moving quietly, avoiding attention. This was the opposite of quiet. "You understand the plan is to draw attention, not to fight every Inquisitor in the building."

"Right, yeah. Just drawing attention. Loudly." Son looked at the two Inquisitors already scrambling back to their feet. "How many Inquisitors are there?"

"Accourding to your sister, more than two."

"You figured that one out didn’t you? Great."

The Mirialan came at them again, and this time her partner flanked wide. Obi-Wan ignited his own blade and fell into Soresu, letting the attack come to him. Son operated differently, pure Ataru, relentless offense, closing distance, never giving the opponent room to set up.

It worked. It worked well, actually. They fit together in a way that shouldn't have been possible without practice—Obi-Wan holding the center, Son ranging forward and pulling back, each of them instinctively covering the other's openings. Ataru and Soresu. It was like a conversation between two people who spoke the same language, and Obi-Wan had only ever had that with one other person, and he was not going to think about that right now.

"You've fought with a Soresu user before," Obi-Wan said, deflecting a strike over his shoulder.

"What?" Son ducked a sweep, came up inside the Inquisitor's guard, drove her back with three fast strikes. "Oh. Yeah. Once or twice."

"Your form complements it. You range forward and create pressure, and you trust the person behind you to hold. That's a trained instinct, not improvisation."

"Is this really the time for combat analysis?"

"I'm trying to understand who trained you."

"And I told you—"

"Complicated. Yes." Obi-Wan caught a blow, redirected it, sent the Mirialan stumbling past him. "Your master used Soresu."

Son didn't answer. He was suddenly very focused on the fight.

An alarm started blaring. Red lights strobed along the corridor ceiling.

"That's probably about us," Son said. Obviously relieved by the change of subject.

"That is certainly about us."

"Good. That's the point." Son deflected a strike, kicked the Inquisitor in the chest—it was not elegant, but it was effective—and glanced at the corridor behind them. "We need to keep moving. If we stay in one place, they'll box us in."

He was right. Obi-Wan disengaged, and they ran.

The next pair of Inquisitors found them two corridors later. These were better—a Zebrak and a human, working in tight coordination, clearly used to hunting together. They came at Obi-Wan and Son from opposite ends of a junction, cutting off retreat.

Son grinned.

It was the wrong response to being cornered by Inquisitors, and Obi-Wan was going to have a conversation with this young man about appropriate emotional responses to mortal danger, but not right now. Right now, Son was already moving, and the green blade carved a path through the junction that forced both Inquisitors to give ground.

They fought through the junction. They fought down a corridor. They fought past a sealed blast door that Son ripped open with the Force like it was made of paper, which, that was a lot of raw power, casually deployed, and Obi-Wan filed it alongside everything else he was filing about this impossible young man.

Three pairs of Inquisitors down. An alarm screaming through the fortress. They were leaving a trail of chaos through the upper levels that would be visible to every sensor in the building, which was exactly the point.

"How long has it been?" Son asked, breathing harder now.

"Eight minutes."

"Seven more."

"You're counting."

"She asked for fifteen. I'm giving her fifteen." Son deflected a blaster bolt from a security droid—when had security droids gotten involved? And kept running. "She'd give me fifteen."

The way he said it—certain, no hesitation—told Obi-Wan more about their relationship than anything else had. Whatever else was going on between them, whatever the arguments and the insults and the Sith-and-Jedi impossibility of it, there was a foundation underneath that was unshakeable. They'd die for each other. They'd done things close to it.

"You trust her," Obi-Wan said.

"With my life."

"She's a Sith."

"Yeah." Son knocked a security droid into a wall without breaking stride. "She's the best person I know."

Leia moved through the fortress like she'd built it.

She hadn't, obviously. But she knew it—the layout, the patrol patterns, the blind spots in the security systems. She'd been here before, memorized these very things for her escape attempt, and the muscle memory of it was so deep that she barely had to think. Left at the junction. Up two levels via the maintenance shaft.

The stupidity of the situation was not lost on her. Luke's plan, if it could even be called a plan, if I'll use the Force to travel back in time and save young Leia qualified as a plan rather than a particularly elaborate suicide attempt, had worked. Against all probability, against everything she'd told him, against the explicit warnings she'd given him about temporal mechanics and the catastrophic energy requirements and the near-certain likelihood of his consciousness being scattered across every point in time simultaneously, it had worked. He was alive. They were here.

And now she was navigating an Imperial fortress that she'd last seen when she murdered everyone inside of it, managing a rescue operation she hadn't planned, working with an Obi-Wan Kenobi who didn't know who she was, trying to extract a ten-year-old version of herself before her Master figured out that his prisoner was his daughter.

She was going to kill Luke when this was over. Assuming Vader didn't do it first.

The detention level was cold and quiet. The Force was worse here—thicker, heavier, saturated with years of fear and pain soaked into the walls. Leia ignored it. She'd lived inside worse. She'd been worse.

She could feel the girl. Small, bright, terrified, and angry, a pinpoint of furious light in all that darkness. Ten years old and burning like a signal flare. The girl didn't know what she was doing. Didn't know she was doing anything at all. But the Force poured off her, raw and undisciplined and unmistakable to anyone who knew what to look for.

Leia knew exactly what to look for. She'd been that girl. She remembered being that girl—remembered the cell, the cold, the terror, the fury that had felt bigger than her body could hold. She remembered believing someone would come.

She also felt Vader.

He was already there. In the cell. The massive, suffocating weight of him in the Force, so close to that small bright point that they were almost overlapping. Leia stopped at the corner of the corridor and pressed her back to the wall. She closed her eyes and reached into the Force, past the dark, past the noise, reading the shape of what was happening thirty meters ahead of her.

If Vader found out who the girl was, the calculation changed completely. A political prisoner could be bargained for. A daughter could not.

Leia opened her eyes and moved.

Two stormtroopers flanked the cell door. She didn't slow down. She reached out with the Force and slammed them both into the opposite wall hard enough to dent their armor, and they crumpled and didn't get up. She stepped over them and through the door.

The cell was small, gray, standard detention block. The girl was strapped to an interrogation chair—too big for her, her feet didn't reach the floor. A medical droid sat beside the chair, its needle arm retracted, its internal systems clicking and whirring as it processed data. A holographic display was flickering to life—results coming in, genetic sequences scrolling, numbers beginning to populate the screen.

The girl's face was tear-streaked and defiant and furious. There was a small spot of blood on the inside of her arm where the needle had been. Her fists were clenched inside the restraints. Her chin was up.

She was looking at the holographic display. The numbers were climbing. The droid beeped— once, twice, then a rapid series of tones. Urgent. Insistent. An alarm.

The girl stiffened. She didn't understand the data, couldn't read the genetic sequences, but she could hear the alarm. She could feel that something was wrong. Her eyes went wide and her breathing went shallow and she looked at the display and then at Vader and then back at the display.

"What does it say?" she demanded.

Vader wasn't listening to her. He was staring at the holographic screen, at the numbers still climbing—fifteen thousand, eighteen thousand, twenty—and his hand had gone still at his side, fingers slightly curled, not moving. The droid beeped again. Faster. A different tone now.

Familial match detected.

The words scrolled across the display in pale blue light. Below them, two names were populating, letter by letter, and Vader was watching them appear with a stillness that had nothing to do with calm.

"What does it say?" the girl asked again, louder, pulling against the restraints—

Leia crumpled the droid with the Force.

The cell went quiet.

Vader turned.

He'd been so fixed on the screen that he hadn't registered her entrance. Now he saw her, a woman in black in his doorway, a saber in one hand, dark-side presence pouring off her like heat from a furnace, and the Force between them went taut.

"Who are you?" he said.

She was already calculating how much he'd seen before she killed the droid. The midichlorian count,  yes, he'd seen that. Twenty thousand and climbing. He knew the girl was powerful. The familial match, maybe. It had started to populate. The names, no. She'd been in time. The names hadn't finished scrolling. He had pieces. He didn't have the picture.

But he'd have it soon. He'd seen enough to start asking the right questions, and her Master was not stupid. Obsessive, broken, consumed by rage and grief and the dark side's endless hunger—but not stupid.

"No one you know," Revaris said. Hands visible, away from her saber. "I'm here for the girl."

"The girl," Vader said, and the way he said it told her everything. He was looking at the dead droid on the floor. At the dark screen where the data had been. At Revaris. He was connecting things. A midichlorian count above twenty thousand. A familial match, interrupted. A stranger who'd arrived at the exact moment the results were coming in and destroyed the droid before they could be read.

"You knew," Vader said. "You knew what the test would show."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"You destroyed the droid to prevent me from seeing the results. You know who she is."

Revaris said nothing.

"Who sent you?" Vader's hand went to his saber. "Kenobi? The rebels? Who knows about the girl?"

Behind him, Leia, strapped to the chair, forgotten for a moment, was looking between them with the sharp, calculating expression of a child who understood she was at the center of something without understanding what. "What girl?" she said. "I'm right here. Stop talking about me like I'm not—"

"Be quiet," Vader said, without turning.

"Don't tell me to—"

"Be quiet."

The Force pressed down on both of them. And unlike Revaris, her younger self did not know how to resist it yet. The girl's mouth snapped shut—from the sheer weight of the Force. Her eyes went wide with outrage and fear in equal measure.

Vader ignited his saber.

Red light filled the cell. He stepped toward Revaris, putting himself between her and the girl. Not like an interrogator positioning for advantage. Like a protector.

"You will tell me what you know," he said. "And then you will die."

Revaris ignited her own blade. Red on red. The cell turned into a furnace of light.

"I know enough," Revaris said. "I know what that count means. I know what the match was before I destroyed the droid. And I know you were already planning to destroy it yourself—you can't let anyone see those results. Not the Inquisitors. Not the Emperor."

That landed. She saw the minute shift in his posture, the recognition that she was right, and the fury that she'd seen it.

"So let her go," Revaris said.

"You understand nothing—"

"I understand what happens if she stays. You'll train her. You'll tell yourself you're protecting her, that you're making her strong, that the dark side is a gift. And piece by piece, year by year, you will destroy her." She kept her voice level. This wasn't a performance. She was trying something stupid and probably futile, something Luke would have done, and she hated herself for it. "She's a child. She's your child. And if you keep her, you will break everything in her that's worth keeping. You know that. Somewhere under all of this, you know that."

The silence that followed was heavy in a way that had nothing to do with the Force.

"You dare," Vader said. Low. Dangerous.

"Let her go. I'll take her somewhere safe. Somewhere you don't know about, somewhere no one can trace back to you. She disappears. Your secret stays buried. And she gets to grow up without—" Without becoming me.  "Without this."

"Or I will kill you," Vader said. "That is also clean."

"You will try."

He tried.

The first strike drove her back into the doorframe. He was fast, faster than she'd expected, and the rage behind each blow was enormous and focused. He wasn't confused anymore. The unknown Sith in his cell had gone from a puzzle to a direct threat to the most important secret he'd ever held, and Vader dealt with threats the same way he dealt with everything else, total, overwhelming force.

So she fought. She fought the way she'd been trained,  using the walls and the low ceiling and the cramped geometry of the cell to limit his angles. She caught a strike that would have taken her head, redirected it into the wall where it left a molten scar, and used the half-second gap to reset her footing. She was good. She'd been trained by the best the dark side had to offer.

It wasn't enough.

Vader drove her into the corridor and back into the cell in the space of thirty seconds. He caught her blade in a lock and pressed down, and her arms shook and his didn't, and the heat of both sabers was close enough to singe her hair. She disengaged, rolled sideways, came up with her blade in a low guard—

And he hit her with the Force.

She went backward into the wall hard enough to crack the paneling. Her lightsaber stayed in her hand—muscle memory, grip trained into her by years of combat—but the air was out of her lungs and her vision sparked white and for two seconds she couldn't move.

She never fought her Master with him truly intending to kill her, and apparently, he went easy on her all of those years. Because this is brutal. This was her Master, the chosen one, in his prime. Protecting the only thing he still cared about.

Vader advanced. His saber came up for the killing stroke.

Leia moved.

Not away from him. Sideways. Toward the chair. She deactivated her blade, grabbed the release on the girl's left restraint, ignited the blade again, and had the red edge level with the girl's throat before Vader's stroke came down.

He stopped.

The saber hung in the air above her. The red glow from his blade mixed with the red glow from hers, and the girl was caught between them—small and trembling and absolutely still, her eyes fixed on the humming edge of plasma two inches from her neck.

"Back up," Revaris said.

Vader didn't move. His breathing was the only sound. In, out. In, out.

"You won't," he said.

"I'm a Sith." Revaris's voice had gone flat. She'd dropped into the place inside herself where the logic was simple and the answers were cold and nothing else existed except the outcome. "You should know how easily we cut younglings."

Vader reached out through the Force. Testing. Probing for the bluff, the crack, the tell that would reveal this as leverage and nothing more.

He didn't find a bluff.

She meant it. She was telling the truth. She would kill the girl. The Force confirmed it. Because Leia knew, that she would rather die, would kill her younger self, before she would let her go through what she went through. Luke and his plan be damned; she would end this whole thing here before she let him do it again.

Vader's saber didn't move. His breathing didn't change, couldn’t change. But something in the Force between them shifted, a recalculation, fast and brutal, the mathematics of a man who could not afford to be wrong about whether the woman in front of him would kill his daughter.

"What do you want?" he said.

"I told you. I take the girl. She goes somewhere safe. No one finds out who she is. You keep your secret."

"So you would train her as a weapon against me?"

"I won't, I have no intention to train an apprentice. I would give her to Kenobi, or Ahsoka, someone from her family who cares. Not you. But you should trust that I'll follow through on what I'm promising right now." She didn't move the blade. "Both things I'm promising."

The girl was breathing in tiny, shallow gasps. Her freed left hand was clenched into a fist at her side. She wasn't crying. She was staring straight ahead at nothing, her jaw locked, holding herself together through sheer stubbornness.

"Let us go, enjoy the knowledge you hadn't killed her with her mother," Revaris said. "I walk out with her. You wait here, go after Kenobi for all I care. But if I see you before we leave, this ends the other way."

Vader looked at the blade. He looked at the girl.

He deactivated his saber.

One step back. Two. He moved like the floor was pulling at him, each step a fight against every instinct screaming at him to lunge, to strike, to take the risk. He didn't take the risk. He couldn't. Any scenario where the blade moved an inch closer to the girl's throat was unacceptable, and the woman holding it had no reason to hesitate.

Revaris freed the second restraint. The girl's right hand came loose, and she slid off the chair on unsteady legs. Revaris picked her up, keeping the saber close to her throat. Good thing her younger self was frozen in fear; she could apologise later.

If they both survive this.

They were through the door. Into the corridor. Past the unconscious stormtroopers.

And she started to run.

"Don't look back."

Behind them, Revaris felt Vader standing alone in the cell with the dead droid and the cracked walls and the dark screen where his daughter's name appeared.

He started moving towards Luke and Obi-Wan the minute they were out of sight.

She'd expected that.

They were on their fifth pair of Inquisitors when Son suddenly stopped fighting.

Mid-swing, he pulled his blade back and went still, head tilted, eyes unfocused. Listening to something beyond the corridor, beyond the fortress, beyond anything Obi-Wan could reach.

"She has her," he said.

Obi-Wan deflected a strike on reflex. "What?"

"Revaris. She has the princess. They're moving." Son refocused, parried, kicked an Inquisitor sideways into a wall. "We need to go. Now. Hangar. Closest route."

"How could you possibly know that?"

"I know. Trust me."

Obi-Wan did not trust him. Not fully, not yet, possibly not ever. But Son was already running, and the Inquisitors were regrouping, and somewhere below them Obi-Wan could feel a dark presence moving through the fortress with speed.

Vader. Coming toward them. Fast.

"Yes," Obi-Wan said. "Now would be good."

They ran.

The hangar was too open. That was the problem.

In the corridors, Vader's size worked against him — low ceilings, tight turns, limited room to build momentum. In the hangar, with thirty meters of open floor and a ceiling high enough to dock a shuttle, there was nothing to limit him. He was free to move, and Darth Vader moving freely in a fight was not something Obi-Wan had been prepared for.

He'd known. Intellectually, he'd known. But knowing and seeing were different, and the thing in front of him, the suit, the mask, the rasping mechanical breath, the sheer overwhelming wrongness of Anakin's presence in the Force twisted into something that barely resembled what it had been—

Obi-Wan blocked a strike and his arms shook with the impact. He gave ground. He gave more ground. Soresu was defense, patience, endurance, waiting for the opponent to make an error, but Vader wasn't making errors. Vader was hitting him like a siege engine and Obi-Wan's footing was slipping and he couldn't breathe and he couldn't think—

He'd gotten soft. Ten years on Tatooine, watching a boy grow up from a distance, and his body had forgotten what it meant to fight someone who wanted him dead with the full weight of the dark side behind it. His blocks were a half-second too slow. His footwork was sloppy. He was surviving on muscle memory and instinct and both were running out.

Son appeared on Vader's left flank.

He'd circled wide, using the parked ships as cover, and came in fast with an overhead strike that forced Vader to pivot. The green blade clashed against red and Son held the lock for two seconds before disengaging and sliding back, pulling Vader's attention with him.

It worked. Vader turned toward the new threat, and Obi-Wan had a moment to breathe, to reset his guard, to look at the situation clearly for the first time since they'd entered the hangar.

Son was holding his own. Barely. He was faster than Vader and he used it—constant movement, never in the same place twice, making Vader chase him. But his face had changed. The easy brightness from the corridors was gone. He looked, not afraid, exactly. Something worse than afraid. Something that looked like grief.

"Revaris was right," Son muttered, ducking a horizontal sweep that would have taken his head off. "This is so much worse than I remember."

"You've fought him before?" Obi-Wan re-engaged, catching Vader's backswing on his blade, giving Son room to reposition.

"What do you think, that I leave all the fun to Revaris?" Son's voice was tight. "He was—different. Less—" He gestured vaguely at all of Vader, the fury and the power and the relentless grinding pressure of him. "Less this."

Vader said nothing. He fought in silence except for the breathing, and somehow that was worse than any Sith taunting could have been. He was driving them apart—systematic, efficient, isolating Obi-Wan on one side, Son on the other, preventing them from coordinating. And it was working.

Son caught a blow on his blade and skidded backward three meters, boots squealing on the deck plating. He recovered fast, faster than he should have, planting his back foot and absorbing the momentum through the Force, but Vader was already pressing, already closing, and Son's defense was starting to crack under the sheer relentless weight of it.

Obi-Wan came in from behind. Soresu to Vader's back, pulling attention, buying Son a second to breathe. They'd been doing this for five minutes, trading off, cycling aggression, never letting Vader focus on one of them for too long, and it was working in the sense that they were both still alive, but not working in the sense that they were no closer to ending this than when it started.

But Vader wasn't fully committed. That was the thing Obi-Wan couldn't make sense of. He was fighting them, yes—fighting them hard—but his attention kept sliding. Every few seconds, his helmet would turn a fraction toward the hangar's main entrance. Toward the corridors beyond. He was waiting for something. Listening for something.

Obi-Wan caught Son's eye across the hangar floor. They were running out of time.

Then the side door blew open and Revaris came through it at a dead run with a ten-year-old girl in her arms.

She was carrying the Leia, one arm under the girl's legs, one across her back, the girl's face pressed into her shoulder. The girl's arms were locked around Revaris's neck and she was holding on. Revaris was running full speed and the girl's weight didn't seem to slow her at all. 

Revaris took in the scene in about half a second. Son and Obi-Wan separated, Vader between them, the nearest ship fifty meters away.

"Why are you not on a ship?!"

"Can't you see we're busy?!" Son yelled back, parrying a strike without looking at her.

Vader turned toward Revaris and the girl in her arms. His entire body reoriented, the fight with the Jedi forgotten, dismissed, irrelevant, and the Force around him shifted into something singular and absolute. He took a step toward her. Then another. Building speed.

He was going after the Leia.

Obi-Wan understood, in that moment, something he hadn't understood before. Vader's distraction during the fight. The way his attention kept sliding toward the entrance. He hadn't been fighting them because they mattered. He'd been fighting them because they were in his way. He'd been waiting—waiting for Revaris and Leia to appear, waiting for the thing he actually cared about.

"Oh no," Son said. He'd felt it too. He threw himself at Vader's back, saber swinging, and Vader batted him aside with a Force push that sent him skidding across the floor without even turning around. Obi-Wan came in from the right and Vader caught his blade one-handed, held the lock for a second, and shoved him backward. He didn't slow down.

He was walking toward Revaris. 

Revaris set Leia down. She put her on her feet, steadied her, and dropped to one knee so they were eye to eye.

"Listen to me," she said. Her voice was low, fast, stripped of everything except precision. "When I tell you to run, you run to Ben. To Kenobi. The one with the blue lightsaber. You don't stop. You don't look back. Do you understand?"

Leia nodded. Once. Hard. Her face was white but her eyes were clear.

Revaris stood and put herself between her and Vader.

He was twenty meters away. Fifteen. His saber was lit and his breathing was loud and everything in the Force was bent toward the child standing behind the woman in black. He didn't care about Revaris. He didn't care about the Jedi or the Inquisitors or Kenobi. He cared about one thing, and it was behind her.

"You made a mistake," Vader said. His voice carried across the hangar—flat, mechanical, and underneath it something that was not calm. "You should not have brought her here."

"You gave me very limited options," Revaris said.

"You will return her to me."

"No."

"Then—"

Revaris raised her hands.

The lightning came out of her like it had been waiting to be let out—a torrent of blue-white energy that screamed across the hangar floor and hit Vader square in the chest. Aimed at the suit.

Vader quickly caught it on his saber. He had to. The blade absorbed the lightning, channeling it away from the electronics that kept him alive, and for those seconds—three, four, five—he could do nothing else. He was locked in place, saber up, lightning cascading off the red blade in branching arcs that scorched the floor, every system in his suit screaming warnings.

"Now," Revaris said.

Leia ran.

She ran like she'd promised—flat out, arms pumping, small and fast across the open hangar floor. Obi-Wan was already moving to meet her. He scooped her up without breaking stride and she grabbed his neck and buried her face in his shoulder and he didn't slow down, heading straight for the nearest shuttle with an open ramp.

Son fell back to cover them, saber up, eyes on Vader. Revaris held the lightning for another two seconds—every one of them costing her, Obi-Wan could feel the effort burning through her even from across the hangar—then cut it off and ran.

Vader staggered. His suit sparked and hissed. Something in the chest plate was clicking, irregular, wrong. He took one step, then another, his movements jerky for the first time all day. Then he found his footing and ignited his saber and came after them—not toward Obi-Wan and Leia on the ramp, but toward Revaris, because she was between him and his daughter and she was the threat.

Revaris felt him coming. She was ten meters from the ramp. Son was ahead of her, already turning back to cover her retreat. Vader was behind her and closing fast, his stride lengthening, the suit recovering from the lightning faster than she'd hoped.

Son stepped past her. Green blade up. He planted himself between Revaris and Vader and held for three seconds—three seconds of brutal, impossible pressure, catching a strike that drove him to one knee—and then Revaris grabbed his arm and pulled him backward and they were on the ramp together.

Son hit the door controls. The ramp sealed. Revaris shoved past him into the cockpit, and by the time the ramp locked she already had her hands on the controls and the ship's engines were screaming to life.

Through the viewport, Obi-Wan saw Vader standing in the hangar below them, saber lit. Not watching them go. Reaching—one hand extended toward the shuttle, the Force pulling at the hull, trying to hold them down. The ship groaned. Metal creaked. Revaris slammed the throttle forward and the engines howled and for a long, terrible second nothing happened—the shuttle straining against the invisible hand holding it.

Son closed his eyes and raised his hand.

Obi-Wan felt it, the push, enormous and focused, slamming outward through the Force against Vader's grip. The shuttle shuddered between the two of them, caught between opposing wills, and then something gave. Vader's hold. Son broke it.

The shuttle lurched upward hard enough to slam Obi-Wan sideways into the bulkhead. He twisted, shielding Leia with his body.

He stared at the back of Son's head. The young man was breathing hard, but otherwise steady. Obi-Wan had felt the weight of Vader's grip on the hull. He knew what that kind of strength in the Force meant. And Son had matched it.

Revaris punched the hyperdrive before they'd even cleared the upper atmosphere. The stars stretched. The shuttle jumped.

Silence.

Leia wouldn't let go of him.

Obi-Wan sat on the floor of the shuttle's small cargo hold because there was nowhere else to sit, and Leia was pressed against his side with her arms locked around his ribs and her face against his chest and she was shaking.

"You came for me," she said. Muffled. "I knew you would. I told them. I told them someone would come."

"Of course," Obi-Wan said. His hand was on her hair. He didn't remember putting it there. "Of course I came."

"They said no one was coming. They said no one knew where I was. They said my father couldn't help me and nobody else would try. A-And that you were dead. I told them they were wrong. I told them—"

"They were wrong." His voice was steady. He was not steady, his hands wanted to shake, his ribs ached, his mind was still half in that hangar with Vader's hand reaching for the shuttle, but his voice was steady, and right now that was all the girl needed. "I will always come for you, Leia."

She held on tighter.

In the cockpit, he could hear Son and Revaris talking in low voices. Operational. Something about fuel levels and hyperspace routes and whether the shuttle had been flagged in the Imperial registry. Normal post-escape logistics.

Leia pulled back enough to look up at him. Her eyes were red-rimmed but clear. "Who are they?" she asked. "The woman, she's scary. She fought Darth Vader."

"I know."

"She fought him. With a red lightsaber. Like him. And she—" The girl's voice caught. Not from tears. From something else. "She told him she would kill me."

Obi-Wan went very still.

"In the cell," the girl said. "To make him let me go. She put the blade right here—" She touched her throat with small fingers. "And he stopped. He stopped becuse… they said I’m his, that he's my… my dad."

The cargo hold was quiet. Obi-Wan looked toward the cockpit. Son had gone silent. Revaris was still working the controls, her back to them.

So Leia knew who Vader was to her.

"Rest," Obi-Wan said. "You're safe now."

"I'm not tired."

"Rest anyway."

She made a face, the specific face of a ten-year-old who knows she's being managed—but she leaned back against his side and closed her eyes. Within two minutes, her breathing evened out. Within three, she was asleep. The crash after the adrenaline. He remembered that from the war.

Obi-Wan waited until he was sure she was out, then carefully disentangled himself and laid her down on the bench with his outer robe folded under her head. She murmured something and curled onto her side and didn't wake.

He stood. His knees protested. His back protested. Everything protested. He ignored all of it and walked to the cockpit doorway.

Son was in the co-pilot's seat. Revaris was in the pilot's seat. They both looked at him when he appeared, and they both saw his face, and Son's expression immediately shifted into something bracing.

"She told me," Obi-Wan said. Quietly, so the girl wouldn't wake. "About the cell. About the lightsaber at her throat."

Revaris didn't look away from the viewport.

Son closed his eyes. "Revaris."

"It worked," she said. Flat. Unrepentant. Still not turning around.

"You held a lightsaber to the throat of a ten-year-old girl," Obi-Wan said.

"I held a lightsaber to the throat of Vader's daughter, and Vader let us walk out." Now she turned. Her face gave him nothing. "It worked. I didn't kill her."

"That's not—" Son pressed the heel of his hand to his forehead. He didn't look horrified. He looked tired. Deeply, specifically tired, in the way of someone who had seen this particular pattern before and had hoped, maybe stupidly, that it wouldn't happen this time. "You could have told me. Before. That there was even a chance you'd—"

"There wasn't a chance. There was a necessity. He wasn't going to let her go. I tried talking to him first. I tried your way first." Something sharp moved through her voice. "I told him he'd destroy her if he kept her. I told him to let her go. I tried the light-side approach and it didn't work, because it never works, because he's—" She stopped. Reset. "He left me no option. So I took the only one available."

"You took Leia hostage."

Revaris turned back to the viewport. "You can be disappointed later. Right now we have operational problems."

The word disappointed made Son flinch. Obi-Wan watched it happen—watched the young man absorb it, watched him decide not to push further, watched the resignation settle into his shoulders. Not acceptance. He wasn't accepting it. He was choosing to fight about it later, when they weren't in a stolen Imperial shuttle with a sleeping child in the cargo hold.

Obi-Wan was not ready to stop.

"Would you have done it?" he asked. "If he'd called your bluff?"

Revaris was quiet for a moment. When she spoke, her voice was stripped back to something that was almost honest. "He didn't call my bluff."

"That's not what I asked."

"It's the only answer I'm going to give you."

Son just looked at her with a knowing look.

"It wasn’t a bluff, was it?"

“He would—she would be better off dead than what he was planning for her, and you know it.”

“W-Wasn’t a bluff?! You would have killed her?!” He yelled at her.

“I’m a sith, I know exactly what his training her to be his apprentice would have meant, I—if someone had given me the choice, I would have rather died than go through it.”

Obi-Wan looked at Son. The young man met his eyes and shook his head—small, private. Not now. Let it go. 

Obi-Wan let it go. For now.

"This shuttle," he said, shifting. "It's Imperial."

Revaris, still not looking at him, was already running diagnostics. "Lambda-class. Standard crew shuttle, light armament. Hyperdrive is adequate."

"You seem very familiar with it."

"It's a common model."

"You knew the launch sequence before you sat down. You knew where the hyperdrive controls were without looking."

Revaris kept working. "I've flown Imperial shuttles before."

"You've flown this class of Imperial shuttle before. You knew the cockpit layout by feel, you have the Empire symbol on your uniforms, and those are uniform." Obi-Wan looked at her. "You're Imperial."

Son made a sound. It took Obi-Wan a second to realize it was laughter—short, bitten-off, slightly hysterical. The man was laughing.

"Something amusing?" Obi-Wan said.

"Sorry. No. It's just—" Son pressed the back of his hand to his mouth, trying to stop. "It's not—she's just, it’s funny."

"She's a Sith Lord who can fly Imperial shuttles and navigate Imperial fortresses, she wear the imperial symbol."

"Yeah, that's—those are facts, that's true. But it's still funny."

"I fail to see the humor."

Revaris glanced at Son. The look was brief and sharp and carried an entire conversation: stop talking. Son held up his hands in surrender but was still fighting the smile.

"There's a tracker on this ship," Revaris said, and the operational tone was back—dismissing the previous exchange. "Imperial standard issue. Vader will have our trajectory within the hour if we don't deal with it."

"You're sure?" Obi-Wan asked.

"Every Lambda-class shuttle has one. Hardwired into the secondary transponder relay, behind the floor panel under the co-pilot's station." She looked at Son's boots on the console. "Move."

Son moved. Revaris was out of her seat and pulling up the floor panel before Obi-Wan could object. She reached into the nest of wiring underneath with both hands, working by touch, and Obi-Wan watched her separate, strip, and bypass a connection in about forty seconds. She pulled out a small device—flat, black, blinking red—and held it up.

"Tracker," she said. Then she crushed it in her hand. The blinking stopped. "We're clean."

“I’m not repairing your arm again when you treat it like that.” Son added.

She dropped the fragments, closed the panel, and wiped her hands on her robes. Son settled back into the co-pilot's seat. Revaris returned to the pilot's seat. They moved around each other in the small cockpit with the ease of people who'd shared tight spaces before.

Obi-Wan stood in the doorway and felt the edges of something enormous pressing at the limits of his understanding. There was too much they knew. Too many things they shouldn't have been able to do. And under all of it, under the combat skill and the fortress knowledge and the impossible cooperation between a Jedi and a Sith—there was something he couldn't name. A shape in the Force. A resonance between the two of them and everyone he ever held dear.

"I want answers," Obi-Wan said.

Son's smile faded. He looked at Revaris. She didn't look back.

"You knew about Leia," Obi-Wan said. "You knew about Vader. You knew the layout of an Imperial fortress that barely anyone in the galaxy knows exists. You knew where the tracker was before you looked for it. You—" He turned to Revaris. "You both have fought him before, but somehow this was the first time he saw you. You knew exactly what would stop him. You knew his weakness. You knew the patrol patterns and the access codes and the maintenance shafts. You knew what the blood test would show, and that he would do one."

Revaris still wasn't looking at him. She was looking at the hyperspace tunnel through the viewport, the blue-white smear of stars.

"You look at that girl," Obi-Wan said, quieter now, "like you know her."

Silence.

"Who are you?"

More silence. Son was watching Revaris. Waiting. Not pushing, just waiting, the way you wait for someone to make a decision you can't make for them.

Revaris turned from the viewport. She looked at Obi-Wan, and for the first time since they'd met in that hallway of the dead, her face wasn't locked down. It wasn't open, either, she wasn't the kind of person whose face was ever going to be open, but there was something visible in it. Something old and sharp and specific.

"You told her that you will always come for her. I'm the girl you didn't come for," she said.

The words sat in the air between them. They didn't make sense. Obi-Wan heard them and they didn't make sense, and he opened his mouth to say so—

And then Revaris stood up and walked out of the cockpit. He heard her footsteps cross the cargo hold. He heard her sit down near the bench where Leia slept. And then he heard nothing, because she wasn't going to say anything else.

Obi-Wan stood in the cockpit doorway and did not move.

Son was watching him. The laughter was long gone from his face. What was left was patient and sad and bracing for whatever came next.

"Sit down," Son said. Gently.

"Explain that," Obi-Wan said. "Explain what she just said."

"I will. Sit down first."

Obi-Wan sat. His body folded into the pilot's seat Revaris had vacated and he realized his hands were shaking again. Not from the fight this time.

Son leaned forward, elbows on his knees. He looked down at his hands for a long moment. Then he took a breath.

"My name isn't Son," he said. "That was, it was a joke. A bad one. My name is Luke." He paused. "Luke Skywalker."

The cockpit hummed. Hyperspace pulsed blue through the viewport. Luke Skywalker is a ten-year-old boy currently safe on Tatooine. Not a fully trained Jedi in his twenties.

Obi-Wan's mouth was open. He closed it. He pressed his palms flat against his knees and tried to think and couldn't.

"And Revaris—" Luke started.

"Don't," Obi-Wan said. Because he could hear it now. He could hear it in the way she'd said it. I'm the girl you didn't come for. He could see it in the face he hadn't recognized because he'd been looking for a child and found a Sith instead. He could feel it in the Force—the resonance, the shape, the thing that had been nagging at him since the hallway, the connection between the woman in black and the girl asleep on the bench.

If someone had given me the choice.

"Her name is Leia," Luke said anyway. Quietly. Like an apology.

Obi-Wan closed his eyes.