Work Text:
As he walked to work, Anakin found himself whistling. The effort hurt his throat, but after two decades on a life-support machine, not to mention having died, it was miraculous to be capable of whistling at all. Having virtually every organ in his body replaced had been exhausting, but it was worth it. It helped that one of Anakin’s housemates used to be bodyguard to a boy who turned out to have a clone-brother who was friends with a family of cloned doctors for whom cloning replacement organs was a mundane procedure, and who had agreed to treat him in return for some bacta cultures to take back to their own world.
They could even give him replacement limbs, they said, but those would take longer to grow because they included so many different types of tissue. They had shown him a vid of a group of brightly-coloured dancers and asked him to guess which one had limb grafts. Anakin had guessed at the dark green or bright red women – not the gold-streaked blue, since the pattern of her gold markings would have been interrupted by surgery – before the surgeon had paused the vid and shown him, in close-up, the faint scars running around the golden yellow dancer’s thighs.
So, having flesh hands and feet again was a possibility to consider for the long term. In the meantime, though, his new prosthetics worked beautifully, and were much more comfortable than the ones he had worn as Darth Vader. So when the man who had made them, Hephaestus, had suggested that he might want to try out the capabilities of his new fingers by spending some time helping in Hephaestus’s workshop, he had agreed at once. After all, he didn’t have any money to pay for his new limbs, or for the rest of his medical treatment, and whoever was in charge of the Rock, it wasn’t in their interests to support him if he couldn’t make himself useful.
Hephaestus had explained that it wasn’t quite like that. The Rock was a refuge for whoever had left their original stories, for as long as they needed to stay until they worked out who they wanted to be next. Most people who had the capability to do anything to help others, did so, and many tried out several jobs before they found one that inspired them. But if Anakin wanted to work with Hephaestus and Erik, they would be glad to have him.
After thinking it over, Anakin had realised that, actually, he did. It had been a long time since he had been able to spend time on making things, or even mending things, rather than destroying. Besides, he fitted in.
One piece of medical treatment he was not interested in, Anakin reflected now, was plastic surgery for the scarring on his face. It wasn’t as though he could ever go back to being the young man he had been a quarter-century earlier, married to a dearly-loved wife and about to become a father, so why pretend? And it would feel disconcerting to go from being the most disfigured of his group of friends to the prettiest. His housemates Severus and Konstantine were so unprepossessing that they made Grand Moff Tarkin look positively cuddly, and his work colleagues Hephaestus and Erik had been born so deformed that their own mothers had rejected them.
The only people at the workshop who could be described as attractive were Hephaestus’s two gold-plated droids, Spark and Wonder, though, as Spark had informed Anakin sharply on his first day of work, ‘droid’ wasn’t exactly the right word.
‘“Droid” is short for “android”, which means “looking like a man,” she had explained. ‘I’m female, so I’m a gynoid, or a “noid” for short, and if you get my pronouns wrong, I’ll be very annoyed indeed!’
Wonder looked more androgynous, and was quietly amused by people’s attempts to guess at what gender, if any, she identified as. She had, in fact, redesigned her own body shape to get rid of the exaggeratedly female curves that Hephaestus had originally designed her with. He had created the Golden Girls millennia ago in the image of his first wife, shortly after divorcing her after he caught her in bed with his brother.
Hephaestus was an Olympian, a member of a species who were mature almost from birth but could live indefinitely, possibly because they were shapeshifters and could therefore renew their physical form whenever they chose. They usually looked humanoid, but this was just a matter of choice; Hephaestus’s uncle Cheiron looked like a hybrid between a human and a beast of burden called a ‘horse’ because his father had been in the form of a horse while fathering him. Considering Olympians’ ability to look like whatever they chose, Anakin wasn’t sure why Hephaestus chose to keep the form he did, a heavy-browed, bearded man whose thickly muscled arms and upper body concluded in twisted legs encased in calipers.
Erik was human, though with his gauntness, pallid skin, noseless face and near-bald head, he could have been a disfigured specimen of any of dozens of humanoid species. Like Anakin, he had lived much of his life wearing a mask, though in Erik’s case this had not been for medical reasons but to cover his deformity, and because, after a childhood of being exhibited as a circus freak, the anonymity of disguise had felt safer. It had taken months for him to find the confidence to take his mask off even in the workshop, where there was no-one to judge him except Hephaestus, his droids, Anakin, any droid patients – and, admittedly, their owners.
Anakin stopped whistling before he was anywhere near the workshop, as he didn’t need Erik complaining that he was out of tune. Erik was a musician and composer of genius, and, like Anakin, was struggling to break the habit of murdering anyone who displeased him. Admittedly, Anakin was capable of Force-choking Erik at a greater distance than Erik was capable of lassoing Anakin, and they were in the afterlife and couldn’t actually die here anyway, but Hephaestus would be disappointed in them for squabbling, and they both liked Hephaestus and didn’t want to disappoint him.
At any rate, Anakin wasn’t the only noise polluter around today. A nasal voice with a soft lilt to it was already intoning: ‘Our love I tried to – kindle; like firelight it – dwindled; now I wonder when this wind’ll – ever stop.’
‘Sir,’ protested a slightly muffled voice, ‘could you stop that, please? My aural circuits were among the few components not to be damaged by the waste compactor.’
Anakin sensed a presence which almost made him think Luke! for a moment, before he knew that it wasn’t. This was a stranger, but human and young, probably around the same age as Anakin’s son, and his mind had the same feel of someone who had lived through tragedy without letting it embitter him or corrupt him: someone who would continue to be kind and friendly and loyal and brave and optimistic even if he was the last human in the galaxy. (Why ‘he’? Well, you couldn’t tell that from the Force, but it made sense to assume that the voice belonged to the presence.)
Droids didn’t have a Force presence, but the droid’s fussy tones reminded Anakin of the protocol droid he had built as a child. The droid who is safe with my son – with my children. My son, my daughter, my son-in-law, my droids. They are better off without me. Focus on the here and now. This place, where I am just an assistant mechanic. Not the Dark Lord, not the Chosen One, not the father Luke wanted me to be. Just a normal, ordinary man with a job to do.
He approached with the aim of asking something ordinary and normal like ‘What is the problem with your droid?’ but then realised that, under the circumstances, that would be a singularly fatuous question. The droid had been crushed into a cube of metal and plastic, with no features recognisable apart from a pair of stumpy legs sticking out. To add insult to injury, he had been painted like a sabacc die: five spots on the top (which also bore rings of caf, as if someone had been using him as a table), and one, three, six and four around the sides.
Anakin felt a wave of fury surge up in him, which he struggled to quell. He had never been quite sure how the ‘releasing emotions into the Force’ thing was supposed to work; it was one of those lessons that most Jedi kids learned when they were about three years old, and which no-one had ever really explained to him because to them it was too obvious to need explaining. But he knew that he didn’t want to turn back to the Dark Side, and that Luke had believed that there was still good in him, and that there were people here who believed it, too: Hephaestus, who came from such a long-lived species that he considered that ‘life’s too long to bear a grudge,’ and who had managed to deal with the hurtful ways that almost everyone in his family – his mother, his stepfather, his wife and his brother – had treated him by playing pranks on them and then forgiving them; and Severus and Konstantine, who had their own anger problems but that hadn’t stopped Severus brewing healing potions for him and Konstantine nursing him back to something approximating to health as devotedly as if he had been Konstantine’s own child…
But that didn’t make cruelty to droids all right, kriff it!
‘What happened?’ he asked, trying to keep his voice as level as possible. He could barely speak above a whisper; his voice sounded like an old man’s, too cracked and raspy to be menacing. Then again, he knew from his own experience that frail old men could be very menacing indeed.
‘We got attacked by Psirens – brain-eating GELFs who can mess with your mind,’ said the human. ‘One of them forced Kryten into the waste-compacter, and he still managed to jump on it and kill it! He’s a smeggin’ hero, man! He deserves the best repair-job you can give him! We’re talkin’ fine-tuned, valeted, and with the voice synthesiser repaired so that his accent actually sounds convincin’!’
‘What accent is it supposed to be?’ Anakin asked.
‘Dunno – he used to have this posh, butler-ish accent, but the original voicebox got smashed when he crashed my bike into a moon a few years back, so I had to get a spare from the stores. It said on the box it’s s’posed to be Canadian, but I reckon it got a bit warped with spendin’ three million years in storage. Mind you, one of his spare heads has a Lancashire accent that’s even worse.’
‘The fault was not in the storage,’ said the droid testily. ‘My manufacturers attempted to save money on creating the Canadian accent by using the Swedish accent slowed down. More to the point, sir, I don’t have time to scrimshank off to the repair shop when we’re supposed to be finding Red Dwarf!’
‘Do me a lemon, Kryten!’ sighed the human. ‘You’ve said yourself, your nanobots have gone missin’, so they can’t repair you; I can’t patch you up when you’re this badly broken…’
The droid shuddered, as far as an eighteen-inch cube of metal can shudder. ‘I think we still have the circuit-boards left over from your last attempt,’ he said.
‘Exactly! I’m a vending machine repairman, not a droid surgeon. And you can’t go on the way you are at the moment.’
‘You could have let me finish the ironing first,’ protested the droid. ‘It truly didn’t hurt, I assure you.’
‘Well, it hurt me, watchin’ you heat up your feet and stamp on my boxer shorts. Come on, when I had space mumps you fussed over me like Florence Nightingdroid. Why’s it any different when it’s you who’s hurt?’
This was starting to feel all too familiar to Anakin. ‘I used to have a master who allowed me only the minimum of maintenance necessary to keep me functional,’ he said gently, kneeling down so that he could speak directly to the mashed droid. ‘When I came here, it took me some time to accept that I was allowed proper medical care, like any sentient, and that I could be healthy and live an almost normal life. From what I have heard, you deserve proper treatment far more than I ever did.’
‘Yeah!’ called Spark, from inside the workshop. ‘The meatbags are talking sense, for once!’
‘Perhaps we should introduce ourselves,’ suggested Anakin. ‘My name is Anakin Skywalker, and I am assistant to Hephaestus son of Hera, who runs this repair shop.’ By now, everyone had emerged to see what was going on, Hephaestus leaning on Wonder for support. ‘These are Hephaestus, and his other assistants, Wonder, Spark, and Erik.’
‘Dave Lister, parents unknown,’ said the dreadlocked man in the badge-encrusted black leathers, and ‘Kryten 2X4B-523P, created by Professor Mamet,’ said the droid, adding, ‘but I don’t normally use the “2X4B” part. I’ve never liked it as a middle name.’
‘Good to meet you,’ said Hephaestus. ‘Ani, can you manage with this one on your own? Erik and I have both got projects we need to finish.’
‘I can manage,’ said Anakin, ‘but it would help if I had some idea of what this droid normally looks like.’
Dave Lister reached into a bundle which he was carrying under one arm and pulled out, not a chip to project a hologram, but a flat image printed on what looked like, of all things, a piece of paper. Anakin wondered how this man, who dressed in a stained old shirt and scuffed leather jacket, had come to own an artefact made of such a rare and valuable material, and to be so casual about it.
It showed Lister himself, along with another human man with a metallic symbol on his forehead (after a moment’s thought, Anakin realised that this was the letter ‘Aitch’ in the Roman alphabet, which corresponded to Herf in Aurebesh), a man who looked human apart from a pair of neat white fangs suggesting that his ancestors were carnivores, and, finally, a droid who must have been Kryten. Undamaged, he was humanoid in shape, and instead of the metallic finish of most droids, his head and hands were coated in flesh-pink plastic. Kryten’s angles were too squared-off for him to be near the Uncanny Valley, but all the same, he could almost have been a scarred, bald man wearing a suit of armour. Like me.
‘And – the paint?’ Anakin asked, gesturing towards the dice-spots.
‘One of my crewmates is a cat,’ explained Kryten, sounding rather embarrassed. ‘The instinct to play with a wounded creature proved too strong to resist.’
‘Yeah, sorry about that,’ said Lister. ‘He’s descended from my cat, Frankenstein,’ (here he took out another picture, showing himself holding a furry creature that looked vaguely like a loth-cat but considerably more cuddly). ‘It’s just, this cat,’ (he indicated the fanged humanoid in the first picture) ‘well, he looks like a yuman, he talks like a yuman, it’s easy to forget he doesn’t think like a yuman.’
There wasn’t an easy answer to that. ‘Do you have a maintenance manual?’ Anakin asked.
‘Yeah, here.’ Lister thrust the bundle towards him, and Anakin realised that it was a kind of book: not a book-disk like the ones Obi-Wan had taught him to read when he was nine, but – a whole actual paper book. Anakin had heard of poets who chose to write on paper out of eccentricity, but who had a workshop manual made of the stuff? Most of its pages, he noticed, were stained with caf, beer, spicy food, or all three.
‘It may be best if I switch you off before proceeding,’ he warned Kryten. ‘Do you have an off-switch?’
‘Yes – it should be – ah yes, here it is, under my temperature-control nipple,’ came the reply from somewhere in the depths of the cube. ‘I’d better press it myself. Initiating shutdown sequence – saving data – shutting down – and, off!’
‘Do you wish to stay, or return when I have finished?’ Anakin asked. ‘The timeline here is unconnected to those in the worlds of the living. No time will pass for you if you go to your own world and I send your droid back to you as soon as he is fully restored.’
Lister considered. ‘Can I stay and help? I mean, no time would pass on Starbug if me and Kryten went back straightaway when he’s better, would it?’
‘Are you sure? It could take many weeks, here.’
‘’sallright. We can work for a bit, then chill out, have a few beers. It’ll be a laugh.’
Anakin considered. He wasn’t good at sharing tasks, or delegating. It was a lot easier to do something yourself and do it right than sit back and wait, and then throttle the bishwag who farkled it up, and then have to find someone else to promote to his job.
In addition, Lister was going to need somewhere to stay, which would probably mean that Anakin had to bring him home with him. He didn’t need Force visions to foresee his housemates’ reactions: Konstantine sizing the newcomer up to decide whether he was a threat, or someone to despise for being a lazy drifter instead of a dedicated, disciplined soldier like Konstantine, or possibly someone he might actually like; and Severus being acerbic at the inconvenience of an unexpected visitor.
(By mutual agreement, Severus generally did most of the cooking. None of them had had much experience, in their past lives, of cooking for themselves; they were used to being part of larger groups, such as boarding schools, military units, the Jedi Temple, or at least working for large households that had a cook. Anakin and Konstantine had both learned, as part of their military training, how to identify edible wildlife, catch and cook it, but only as a last resort when the ration bars ran out. Severus, on the other hand, was a potion-maker, and cooking is really just potion-making without the risk of turning someone into a cat.)
Thinking of his friends reminded him of something Konstantine had told him that someone back in his own world had said: ‘“Let me help,” rhymes with, “I love you.”’ It was one of those sayings that was Jedi-like in its weirdness, and yet Anakin could see what it meant. Of course, the situation wasn’t the same here: Lister wasn’t offering to help because he loved Anakin and wanted to make his job easier. But he clearly did care about Kryten.
‘You have a close attachment to that droid,’ he said.
‘Yeah. He’s a good mate, saved my life more times than I can remember. I want to be able to look after him properly. But – it’s not just for him,’ Lister added. ‘I’m doin’ it for me, too. Y’see – well, there was this bloke from another universe where he knows my other self. The other me’s doin’ really well, he’s married, he’s got two kids – and he’s an engineer. In fact, he built the ship Ace came in, the one that crosses dimensions. So that means I’ve got the brains to do that, it’s just that I’m too lazy to get down and learn stuff. And – I want to. Want to learn stuff, I mean, instead of just being a lazy slob all me life.’
Anakin thought of the pupils he had had, over the years. He remembered fighting Ahsoka, and how he would have killed her if she hadn’t been pulled through a portal into some other dimension. He remembered Galen Marek, a good, brave boy who should never have been forced to be a Sith, and how Galen had died, and the various Marek clones he, Vader, had made after the original boy’s death, and how confused and frustrated they had been at being expected to follow on from their progenitor. He remembered his stupid ambition to recruit Luke to be his apprentice.
‘I am not the best teacher in the universe,’ he said. ‘In fact, I am probably the worst teacher ever.’ Along with being the worst Jedi, worst Sith, worst husband and father… ‘Master Hephaestus would be a much more helpful teacher.’ Olympians in general were gifted teachers; most of the early developments of human civilisation had been skills that the Olympians, an older race, had trained them in. And Hephaestus was one of the best.
‘Anakin, he asked you,’ called Hephaestus, with affection and amusement in his voice. ‘You can do it.’
‘And unless you’ve ever kidnapped a student and tried to force her to marry you by threatening to blow up the building and kill everyone including yourself, her, her boyfriend, and the person who was the nearest thing you had ever had to a friend, you’re not the worst teacher ever,’ added Erik.
‘That is – not as helpful as you imagine,’ muttered Anakin. It wasn’t that he, as a person, had been more insanely violent than Erik or Konstantine, just that he had been in a powerful enough position that his atrocities happened on a larger scale.
‘Look, it’s okay, I know who you are,’ put in Lister. ‘I know, like, you used to be Darth Vader, but you’re not any more, right? Like Kryten used to be a total doormat who wouldn’t believe that he was fit to do anythin’ except housework. But he’s moved on from that. So have you.’
Of course. Lister, like practically everyone else, would have seen vids of him. Not that he was particularly recognisable when he wasn’t clad head-to-foot in black armour, but the name Anakin wasn’t exactly common across the multiverse.
Apart from his youth and shortness, Dave Lister didn’t particularly resemble Luke, with his brown skin and eyes, his podgy cheeks, and his grubby dreadlocks. But at that moment, something in the friendly openness of his face made him look very like Luke.
‘So, are you up for it? Will you teach me?’
Oh well, teaching someone how to be a mechanic probably wouldn’t go as disastrously wrong as teaching them to be a Force-user, whether Jedi or Sith. ‘That would be – an honour,’ Anakin said. ‘Thank you.’