Anakin stared at the Grandmaster as if he had just insulted Anakin's nonexistent father.
That might have actually been easier to process.
"Oh. So. You know about that. Somehow," Anakin said slowly, watching as Yoda's wrinkles curved in amusement. "I honestly don't know what to say to that, Grandmaster."
"Oh? Short of words, you are?" Yoda teased before sobering slightly. "Saw you, I did. Both of you. Meditating deeply, I was, at the time. Unexpected, your meeting was."
"Grandmaster, with all due respect, how do you think I feel?" Anakin asked, rubbing his eyes as he finally let out some bottled-up exasperation. "Have you told anyone else?"
"No. Nor plan to, do I. Your tale, it is," Yoda assured. "But speak with me, appreciate it, I would."
Anakin nodded. Honestly, he had been wanting to talk to someone about this. "Well, I met a person who seems to be my son from the future. But everything he tried to tell me sounded wrong. Like, it was a different history. An alternate universe? Timeline? I don't know exactly. He said that Obi-Wan trained Vader, which was the biggest clue."
Yoda nodded thoughtfully. "Troubled, you must be."
"Oh, immensely!" Anakin said before pausing as he studied the old Jedi. "You... don't seem that surprised, Grandmaster. About the idea of another timeline. Did you...hear everything?"
Yoda shook his head. "Heard fragments, I did. To similar conclusions, my mediation was leading me. Please, continue. Need to speak it, I believe, you do."
Anakin looked more than a bit grateful for that as he leaned back in his seat and looked at the ceiling. "Ignoring everything he told me, the question just comes back to why? How is kind of easy, the Force after all. But why have Luke and I met when we're from different timelines? And was it actually real? Are there more versions of our realities, or was that vision of my alternate son just a very intense and strange kind of vision? At the time, I just assumed there were because it was easier than thinking he was just a vision or illusion."
"Answer that, for certain, I cannot say," Yoda admitted with a frown. "Your feelings, Young Padawan?"
Anakin looked back down to meet Yoda's gaze. "I've had visions before, Master Yoda. This didn't feel like one. It felt more like...like I was talking to a holocommunicator. They're not really there, but they are real somewhere else," he answered with great certainty.
Yoda nodded slowly. "A future altered, Vader did, somehow. Like your son's future, I believe, Vader changed."
"But people change the future all the time. You've told me of visions that people have avoided, and nothing like this happened," Anakin recalled with a frown. "Why is this different?"
"Know that, I do not. But suspicions, I have," Yoda said gravely. "Mere vision, Vader did not have. Taken place, something greater has. Like broken glass, seeing the future has become."
Anakin furrowed his brow. "I've heard of scientists who talk about a "fourth dimension" as a dimension of time. Maybe timelines are like a place to travel to? And cutting off the part to one doesn't erase it? I don't know, the Force is already complicated enough without trying to think about time like that," Anakin said with a headshake. "When I talked to Luke, I assumed that we- our timelines are more or less the same. Just that Vader was trained or even born earlier."
Yoda picked up on the grave undertone that the boy now had. "A concern, you have? Your son's words?"
"My son. That is so weird to think about, Jedi code or no. Stars, I'm not even an adult yet!" Anakin said with a headshake before growing grim again. "From what I gathered, Sidious in Luke's time got everything he wanted. The Jedi were wiped out, and the Republic was turned into an empire. But there was also something else. A war. A civil war, and a large one."
Yoda tilted his head in interest. "Still to come, you believe, this war is?"
"Not the same one, no. Luke made it seem like just two sides, tearing the Republic in two. We're going to probably have more than two. Right now, I'm more worried about the other half of it," Anakin said, rubbing his chin. "Luke called it the Clone Wars. He told me a little bit about it before we...stopped being able to see each other? A large faction of systems split off from the Republic. They had armies of battle droids, so the Trade Federation was definitely involved. The Republic, however, had an army of actual clones."
Yoda's ears perked up at that. "Great plans, Sidious had. Great, but terrible. And yet live, his master does. Exist, this clone army might."
"Grandmaster, between growing up on Tatooine and five years learning under Qui-Gon, I know a little about many things," Anakin remarked thoughtfully. "But I know nothing really about clones or cloning. Is making a clone army even possible or efficient?"
Yoda chuckled wryly. "All knowing, neither am I. I know little of, some things, there still are," he admitted. "Long and varied, the histories are of this practice. Laborers and soldiers, yes. A novelty, for some. Yet also, necessary it is, for others. Saved many species, it has."
Anakin hummed. He was wary of the idea of cloning sentient beings like a product. It reminded him too eerily of slavery, yet also worse in many ways. But if it was used for maintaining the populations of endangered creatures, both sapient and wild, then it definitely had some benevolent uses. He imagined some people could even use cloning to raise children.
Though he could only imagine how strange that might be at times, raising and interacting with a younger version of yourself.
"Look into this, I will. Few in numbers, the candidates, there should be," Yoda assured before changing the subject. "More to speak of, do you? Of this, or Albingi?"
"Albingi? I'm sure Master Qui-Gon relayed my suspicions about Damask and Bohhuah Mutdah," Anakin said, pausing to perceive the nod from Yoda. "Then not really? I'm just worried about how many other schemes we'll be seeing in the future. Or people trying to scheme, anyway."
"Overestimate, some do, their cunning and intelligence," Yoda agreed with a frown. An enemy with a foolish plan could be just as dangerous as one with a brilliant one. Entire worlds had been scarred by those who thought they were in control of a situation they could never fully grasp.
"As for Luke, though," Anakin hesitated a bit. "There is one other thing. Luke mentioned...something. Something the Empire had that he helped destroy."
Yoda narrowed his eyes. It was rare for Skywalker to sound this on edge about anything.
"He called it the Death Star."
Meanwhile
Ever since he began his journey five years ago, temporarily displaced on Naboo, Vader had learned to adjust to many things. Being regarded as something heroic, if in a dark sense, or appreciating the unexpected ripple effects his actions were having on the galaxy.
"Welcome home, Sarhoha."
Being greeted warmly like that by a smiling Twi'lek was something he was not yet used to, even if he pushed any reaction aside.
"T'lanan," he acknowledged as he met her outside the training area. He took a moment to examine her, seeing that the pigmentless skin was covered in a splattering of scorch marks, bruises, and healing cuts. All signs of very intense training with a lightsaber. "You have been practicing."
"Of course, Sarhoha," she said, her smile edged with an emptiness. "I hope you will be happy with my progress. But please, before that? I hear you have found your "great prize" that I have heard of. Is it true? I mean no insult, but I hope it did not prove too difficult to reclaim."
"Indeed, the Executor is mine once more," Vader answered, not elaborating on just how "complicated" it had been to reclaim the ship. "It will require time and resources to repair, but merely having it is a boon in itself."
"I am pleased for you, Sarhoha," T'lanan answered softly.
Vader narrowed his eyes as he probed her presence in the Force.
T'lanan sensed him and offered no resistance, welcoming his inspection as one only could after living and embracing a life denied even the simplest privacies.
"I believe it is time for a spar, T'lanan," Vader decided suddenly as he headed into the training room.
"As you wish, Saroha Vader," T'lanan accepted with a deep bow of her head as he passed her before following after the Dark Lord.
The two of them walked down into the dueling circle in the middle of the room. Despite the calm T'lanan projected, there was a slight tremble to her hands as she held a lightsaber in one of them, igniting to reveal the red glow as she turned to face Vader.
The Dark Lord stood at the other side of the ring like a black monolith. He made no move to bring out his own lightsaber, his hands resting on his belt.
"Sarhoha?" T'lanan asked, a flash of hesitation. Had she misunderstood his intent?
Vader said nothing as he summoned the Dark Side to him, bringing a rush of fear over the Twi'lek.
T'lanan trembled as she understood the meaning, the reminder. This man, the master she chose, was not someone she had to fear harming during her training.
She had to worry about surviving.
"Begin."
At Vader's word, T'lanan rushed forward, holding her saber firmly with both hands as she swung hard from the side.
Vader side-stepped her.
Someone like him should not be that swift, that agile, or so T'lanan's sense of reality told her. And yet, Vader moved as if her blade was a mere inconvenience, a petty annoyance.
She swung faster, harder, aiming more wildly.
Vader stopped dodging.
But he still did not draw his saber.
Instead, he casually brought up his hand and caught the blade.
T'lanan inhaled sharply, eyes wide with incomprehension as she stared. It was worse than catching, she realized. Her weapon was halted by nothing but the Force, and yet it felt like there was an invincible wall between her and Vader's hand.
Vader waited only long enough for her to understand this before he brushed aside her blade.
T'lanan shuddered for a moment. It was only by the pure whiteness of her skin that no one could tell how hard she was gripping her saber.
She pressed again, trying to find a way to slip past his defense, but she found nothing. Any attempt to misdirect or slide around his hand proved useless, and outpacing him was not an option. It was like trying to scale the sheer cliff of a mountain without equipment, and finding only a smooth surface with no purchase to be found.
Eventually, Vader had decided this was enough. When he deflected the saber again, it sent T'lanan tumbling into the air and falling to the floor on her hands and knees.
She looked up and found Vader pointing a red saber at her face; her own, of course. She merely stared for a moment, unflinching and unresisting, until Vader deactivated the saber. Only then did she rise, and only to her knees, looking up at her teacher for instructions, for his critique of her progress.
"You have a long journey," Vader said without sympathy or softness. "Your form is barely that of a brawler in a bar, and even most Padawans would have little trouble keeping up with your speed or power."
"I apologize, Sarhoha. I will improve," T'lanan vowed with a bowed head.
"All of this I expected. Your training had barely even begun," Vader continued, a note of interest in his voice. "But I sense a change in you. A connection to the Dark Side. One that only grew stronger as you fought. Tell me what has led to this change."
T'lanan smiled that same empty smile. "You and Lady Lynn were very helpful in explaining the Dark Side to me. All the different ways and emotions that could draw on it. Most slaves, I'm sure, could pull on anger or fear. I may have hated Etern for everything he put me through, but rage and hate just don't linger with me too well. So, I had to look for a different darkness, a different kind of fear."
She rose to her feet languidly, her form slouched to the side as she met Vader's gaze, the dark side clinging to her just a little more.
"I found my despair, Sarhoha," T'lanan answered softly. "Despair in the idea that the one choice I made, serving you, would be meaningless. That I would prove useless to you. A pathetic goal to you, I have no doubt, but for someone like me? It is all I have now. And seeing the gap in our power only makes my despair grow, knowing I might never reach a fraction of your power and be discarded as a waste of time."
Vader studied this woman, sensing the darkness around her. It was not burning or cold, not electric or crushing. It was a poisonous cloak, ready to choke the life and light out of herself or her enemies. It was something he understood in his own way. Despair was deeper, darker than mere fear, and his own despair had been his path to the Dark Side. Despair in what we might lose, despair in losing it despite all the sacrifices- or because of them.
The Dark Side faded away from the Twi'lek, and T'lanan's empty smile fell away. "I'm sure I must seem like a broken thing to you, Sarhoha," she said softly. "But my only goal is that, one day, you'll look back and think it was worth your time and effort to train me into something useful to you."
Sidious would have eaten this Twi'lek alive, twisted her into a monster if he had been given her devotion. Vader, however, would turn her into a weapon and grant her the desire to be useful to him.
"Then perhaps it is time I begin your training in earnest, Dihir T'lanan," Vader remarked, his words promising both pain and progress.
T'lanan smiled, and it wasn't as empty this time.
Meanwhile
Firmus Piett felt his facial muscle twitch in exasperation mixed with amusement. It had gotten very obvious that the regathered Death Squadron had a renewed sense of comradeship and almost familial attachment to each other. They were still professionals, still a military unit, but a certain amount of stiffness had left. Jokes and barbs flowed a bit more freely at appropriate times than he recalled.
It was a relief in some ways, as it wasn't dissimilar to how things had been on the Executor during their micro example of a civil war. That said, it still took some getting used to at times.
"Sir, you don't have to lie. If this is just your bastard kid you had during that little civil war on the Executor, you can just say so," a logistic officer said from behind his desk in the renovated hangar.
Times like these, for instance.
"As I said, this is not my child; this is someone Lord Vader had accompanied him and had me escort him here," Piett said while gesturing to Farmile, who was filling out a form. After he had placed a very large knife on the table. "And we weren't even on the Executor for that long. Or do I look like I'm ten years older?"
"Some people just have very good genes," the officer shrugged off. "But tell me what's more believable? That Lord Vader himself plucked up this kid and had you bring him here? Or that you were fighting a civil war long enough to have a ten-year-old kid?"
"The former. Unless you think I'm foolish and suicidal enough to invoke Lord Vader's name in such a matter?" Piett countered.
"That is a fair point," the officer acknowledged. "Granted, Lord Vader is less kill-happy these days. You have to be traitorous or REALLY incompetent to get the choke out treatment. Not that anyone is eager to test that."
Piett took some relief in that knowledge.
"Here you go," Farmile said as he handed in the form and casually took the knife back.
"Thank you," the officer said, taking the datapad and reading it over. "Huh. Alright, Captain Piett? I believe you."
Piett raised an eyebrow in silent questioning.
"The boy's handwriting. It's not bad, per se, but I've only seen these strange changes to Basic letters from new recruits who were from relatively isolated areas of the galaxy," the officer explained, looking at Farmile. "Is this how everyone on your planet writes?"
"I think so? I mean, I slant it a little," Farmile answered with a shrug. "Though I'm just doing the best with what I remember. My mother made sure I knew how to read to figure out if some scavenged foods were safe to eat or not."
"Your mother?" Piett asked with passing curiosity.
"Well, she said she was my mother, but I think she was just keeping me around for spare food," Farmile admitted, far too casually as the adults stared at him. "So, why did I fill out that form?"
"Huh? Oh, right. We keep track of who is part of the Death Squadron. And apparently, Vader decided you are part of it," the officer explained. "We'll probably have you doing some of the jobs around here to help out."
"As long as the people-eating vines are not involved, I'll be happy to help out. But I'm going to be a bit annoyed if the Whitehelms start firing at us again. Vader says they work for him, but we've already had two times where they've tried to kill him since we met," Farmile remarked.
"There's been more than two," the officer said idly before waving to the side. "Just go have a seat over there for now."
Farmile nodded as he walked away from the table.
The logistic officer looked at Piett again. "Alright, what are the odds that kid is Lord Vader in the past?"
Piett stood a bit straighter at that. "It would be improper for us to speculate on such things," he said before leaning in to whisper. "But I'd say there's a good chance. The boy has killed Stormtroopers."
Farmile, meanwhile, was busy looking at something else. Or someone else. Though, also something else?
It was a woman. That wasn't too strange; he had heard female voices on Whitehelms and seen female officers. But this woman was strange to him. Maybe she wasn't human? She had red-orange skin, and instead of hair, she had these long tentacle-things coming out of her head. She was walking around the various desks and officers throughout the large room, helping move and organize things as she went while also passing information.
She must have noticed him staring because she eventually paused while walking near him, returning his curious stare with an expectant one of her own. "May I help you?" she asked politely to the human child.
"Why do your eyebrows look like that?" Farmile asked curiously.
The woman-creature looked completely caught off guard by that. "What?"
"Your eyebrows. They look...wrong? Flat? Like they're painted on?" Farmile clarified, struggling for the right word.
She stared for a moment before giggling as she took a seat next to him. "Well, that's because they are. They're tattoos," she said, dipping her head to let him see more closely. "Twi'lek tend to be completely hairless."
"Oh, you're what a lick-thing is," Farmile said, as if understanding something. "I've never seen a Twi'lick before."
"I'm guessing your homeworld was filled with humans like you?" she asked expectantly.
"Well, humans like me, and humans like them," Farmile remarked, gesturing to the rest of the room.
The Twi'lek blinked as she looked out, seeing only humans. "Oh? Are you not like them?"
Farmile shook his head before reaching up to pull off his hat, revealing his ears. Instead of bog-standard ears, Farmile had three vertical slits on each side of his head, looking almost similar to gills.
"Oh, my. I don't think I've ever seen a human sub-type like this," the Twi'lek said curiously as she looked at the ear slits.
"We were called the Closed, for some reason, and the ones like them were the Open. They had been fighting for so long that no one remembers when we weren't fighting," Farmile admitted, looking at her again before looking back out at the officers. "It's kind of nice, knowing that people can work together with others so different from each other."
She smiled softly at this child. She hadn't noticed at first, or perhaps she just didn't want to notice it, but... his eyes were old. The kind of old that only came with hardship, of having to survive and never being sure what the point of living was anymore. The kind of old she saw in the mirror, in the eyes of the other freed slaves that had chosen to stay in this "Death Squadron" instead of trying to find another life in the galaxy.
She reached out and grabbed his hand. He didn't flinch, but he did look down in surprise before staring up at her, confused by the simple gesture.
"I don't believe we've properly introduced ourselves," she said with a smile. "My name is Tolxe Annur. What's yours?"
"Oh. My name is Drewmar Farmile," he answered with a smile of his own.