PSL: Naboo

[hisfathersimage]

Luke ignored Vader for the rest of the trip.

For a moment, he had almost forgotten who and what he was dealing with. A totally self centred, self absorbed creature of darkness, boiled in rage and suffering who wanted him to convert to his way of thinking and start up a second reign of terror and horror after killing Palpatine.

And in aid of doing that, they were going... to Naboo?

He wasn't really sure why they were on their way there. It was his mother's home world. It was Palpatine's home world. It was a paradise of water and greenery that had produced something so rotten and evil that the galaxy heaved to try and dislodge it from itself.

He stands in the cockpit's doorway, nursing his stump in his left hand and watching hyperspace, preparing for the shock of dropping back out again.

Comments

[nouskaiananki]

"Yes."

A single word.

That is all. A single word but weighed heavy with grief and regret and longing.

[hisfathersimage]

Okay. Obviously more answers aren't forthcoming at this moment.

Maybe they had planned on it being their home, before Vader?

He sits and waits. And hopes there's hot running water.

[nouskaiananki]

The island under them has a large villa, clearly built originally by someone with money, and a lot of it. It had been furnished and touched up over the years it stood.

The landing pad, clearly meant for smaller personal craft than Vader's was cleared but the stone steroids leading from the beach to the entrance are covered in... much.

Candles, some bare, some in glass. Silk ribbons, many in shades of orange or red tied to stone, flowers and petals scattered about, grape leaves artfully laid out, pieces of bread left as offeringsto the birds.

The residual grief was only drowned out by the love and deep respect the mourners had left, but the emotional wave left Vader feeling like he was attempting to walk through hard-set gelatin. He couldn't actuality say whether he grasped Luke's shoulder as they walked out the shuttle for his son's support or his own.

But under everything, Padmé's touch lingered.

He could feel her here. He wants Luke to feel her.

[hisfathersimage]

Luke can't pick the emotions apart. It's just an overwhelming melange of feelings, too many and too much, twenty three years of grief and love lost poured into the grounds.

He shuts himself off from it, focusing his attention to the dull ache in his far too healed stump. Puts one foot in front of the other, Vader's hand tight on his shoulder, guiding him slightly ahead of the giant.

[nouskaiananki]

Psychometry was a common enough Force talent, and he's always been good with it. On contested ground it could be overwhelming, here Vader could pick out each visitor. Could tell her handmaidens all still made regular trips. Her sister. Her nieces. People he didn't know but knew of, former Queens he'd met once or twice, the puppet Queen Palpatine installed, her advisors and security team. Gungans.

Vader weaves his way through the echos, across the stone pad, up the stairs Padmé had climbed so many times.

Paused at the small stone idol she'd placed of her moon goddess when she had brought the large ones to Coruscant, crowned with a headdress Padmé had oft wore a likness of. The stone was marred, two red dots on her cheeks, a red mark splitting her lower lip, her thumbnails marked white. Luke wouldn't recognize it of course, but Vader did.

A young queen, somber and resolute, face painted white, royal robes of red. Dots of symmetry of her cheeks, a mark of remembrance on her lower lip, thumbnails painted white (the only personal custom she'd added to the royal markup). My fate will be no different than that of our people.

He didn't mean to stop. To project that image, those words, into the Force, to add to the echos already here, to place his free hand reverently against the body of the idol, head bowed. But he doesn't stop for long, continuing to usher Luke up and inside.

[hisfathersimage]

Whereas for Luke... it just wasn't a natural talent. Telekinesis. Empathy. But not psychometry. There was grief and it was more complicated but he didn't want to feel it and it was easier not to.

He hears her. Sees her, looking far too young and serious, her voice heavy with the solemnity of her role. And then it's gone and Vader is pushing by the grip on his shoulder, up to a door to head inside.

[nouskaiananki]

Had Vader known Luke isn't gifted in psychometry, he would have been saddened - it is the easiest way to share Padmé with Luke - and quietly relieved.

Ahsoka struggling though a battle field beside him, crying out for the dead-

-Vader slams that memory shut as he opens the door. The Villa was clean, the bots there kept it dust and cobweb free, but nothing had been touched since she was last here.

And her touch is everywhere. The art. The textiles. The light streaming in the windows, lighting up her things. The door closed, the overwhelming emotion left outside.

Vader drops his hand from Luke, walking side by side now. Letting him look at the villa, his mother's things.

Hidden in the private rooms her private life, but this was Amidala's life. What the public saw.

[hisfathersimage]

It... doesn't really mean anything to Luke.

He thinks maybe it should, but this life is so far removed from anything he understands and a woman he only learned of days earlier that it just fails to connect to anything in him. It might also be the lingering shock of everything that's happened, but he somehow doesn't think so.

He does look. Wanders through these impersonal areas and looks at the objects that would have bought a family's freedom back home. He is curious, but he doesn't feel anything.

[nouskaiananki]

Several of them did buy families freedom, not that either of them are aware.

Vader stays close, watching Luke, but also looking. Occasionally glaring at a piece that hits a memory too hard.

Once they have wandered back, Vader opens a door and pulls Luke through. Here, the personal rooms are hidden away.

A dining room, open and airy, able to be opened to the outside. A kitchen obviously set up to be used. A sitting room, a study, bedrooms. One door, ornately carved, fabric torn from black lace and deep red velvet tied around the handle. That's new, in a way - not here when he was here last - but the fabric itself is old.

Vader puts a hand on the door and leans his head against it. Rests.

Then turns to the door perpendicular to it and presses the doors open.

Unlike the others, it's not finished. A mural is started, Naboo's hills and rivers spilling over the walls, star maps started, figures outlined by not finished, ghostly in their appearance. The windows large and lighting the room with golden light. Some furniture, a chaise, a rocking chair, paints long dried out, brushes rotting, a beautifully woven wicker basket on the floor, lined with soft cloth and filled with tiny bundles fabric. A dark, agonist black pile of woolen fabric near a ladder. A crib, in pieces, never put together.

[hisfathersimage]

It's interesting.

Until the nursery.

Luke stops at the door. He can't explain why, but he doesn't want to go in there, into a room that was being finished for a baby who would never grow up there. It feels like he shouldn't be there, because he wasn't there when he was meant to be.

"I'm not going in there," he tells Vader.

It's the first thing he's said since they came here.

[nouskaiananki]

It seems at first like Vader doesn't hear him. It was how it had been when Padmé and Anakin Skywalker had last been here. He's sure of it, circling room, fingers touching the walls, faint outlines of the mural still marked but never finished.

Overhead star maps making routes they'd planned to take, places to show off their family, oncethey could.

"Why not? I told you you were wanted."

[hisfathersimage]

"I believe you. I don't want to." He turns away from the nursery, walking back towards the kitchen area. Kitchens were the heart of any home.

[nouskaiananki]

Vader doesn't follow, at least not immediately. He lingers in the room, an all too familiar ache washing over him.

Twenty-five years he'd mourned a child and a wife, when he been lied to. Somehow that didn't erase the mourning he'd already done.

Eventually he started towards again. "Do not want to what?" Believe him or walk in.

[hisfathersimage]

Luke has sat himself in the kitchen. Everything is too clean and empty, unlived in, but it's at least something vaguely familiar.

"Go in there. I don't want to go into a room that's like a memorial for a child that could have happened. Especially knowing that child was me."

[nouskaiananki]

"You did happen. You were stolen but you happened." It had been bothered him for months.

He had knows she was alive, he'd felt it, until he arrested, died, on that table. He been unable to sense she wasn't when he'd came to. But Palatine had known. But hadn't known their child lived. It was a mystery he doesn't like.

[hisfathersimage]

"That child never happened. The one she dreamed of raising."

The future had died when Anakin decided to throw his lot in with the Dark side. When he killed children who should have had a future, who maybe should have been his play mates growing up.

"I wasn't stolen. She gave me to someone she trusted to keep me safe. From you and your owner."

[nouskaiananki]

"She wouldn't have sent you to Tattooine." He is unshakeably sure of that. It hadn't been Padmé who had sent Luke to that wasteland. "She had other people, people she knew."

[hisfathersimage]

"Maybe. Maybe not. Point is, she wanted me far away from you and your owner. And if that meant Tatooine, it meant Tatooine."

Luke has faith in this. Mothers wants their children safe and loved. And he was.

[nouskaiananki]

"She wanted me to leave with her." She'd have never sent her child away. Family was too important to her. "She wasn't afraid of me." Upset with him yes.

Plotting against him? Maybe. But never afraid of him.

[hisfathersimage]

"She might have thought you were dead," he concedes. "Which made keeping me from the Emperor even more important."

[nouskaiananki]

"Only if someone lied to her. Obi-Wan knew I was alive when he left." There's real anger to his tone: deceit, lies, betrayal. Things he didn't forgive.

Yes, they must have lied to her.

[hisfathersimage]

"And we're back to, even if she wasn't scared of you, it doesn't mean she wanted you raising a child when you more than willing to kill children. Or that she wanted me raised around the Emperor, after what he'd done to you!"

[nouskaiananki]

"She knew. She still wanted us to raise our child together." Luke can believe it or not - but she had wanted that.

"I never planned on you growing up around him regardless. I told her that as well."

[hisfathersimage]

Luke doesn't believe it.

"I'm glad you didn't. It might not have had luxuries, but I grew up happy and loved."

[nouskaiananki]

"I was only keeping him alive until you were safely born. After she died, so did my use for him." Given how much he hates Palpatine, how much he wants to kill him, is there any question why the Force moved so Darkly as he said that?

"You would have grown up loved and happy. And safe with us."