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Chapter Text

“I told him I was going to betray you, and betray Lyra, and he believed me because I was corrupt and full of wickedness… I wanted him to find no good in me and he didn’t. There is none. But I love Lyra. Where did this love come from? I don’t know; it came to me like a thief in the night, and now I love her so much my heart is bursting with it. All I could hope was that my crimes were so monstrous that the love was no bigger than a mustard seed in the shadow of them, and I wished I’d committed even greater ones to hide it more deeply still…”

—The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman

 

Luke’s face was apparently an artist’s nightmare. Sheev hadn’t expected it, but with the number of unsatisfactory family portraits he’d received over the years where the boy’s face was a shapeless mass rather than a pleasant likeness, he was forced to acknowledge it.

That did not mean accept it, of course. Many portrait artists had died for this.

It had got to the point once that he’d considered switching the annual family portrait to holograms instead. But… It was a tradition on Naboo for them to be done in oils. Holograms were cheap, easy, although professionals were still needed to make them look suitably impressive. Oil painting was an expensive rarity.

Nonetheless, it was expensive in patience as well as in credits. As Sheev watched this painter frown over the blob of Luke’s face, scenting panic in the Force like blood in the water, he privately thought that all those decades in politics had actually been training for this. The Sith waited. It was all they had done for years. But the Sith had won, now, and Sheev was tired of waiting.

Even if he recognised that in some cases, it was necessary.

As they walked out of the artist’s studio, still wearing all their velvet finery, Sheev glanced sideways at his grandson. Luke looked deep in thought, his brow puckered, his lips drawn in a tight line. His hands gripped his cane tightly, pulling Sheev’s gaze up the length of his frame, to the stiff back, the trembling fingers, the tense shoulders.

Vader was ahead, holding the automatic door open for the both of them. He had eyes only for his son, of course. Sheev blocked his view of him, stepping in front of Luke to put out a hand and place it on Luke’s atop his cane. Sheev’s own cane felt heavy in his left hand as he did.

“How goes your work with the magnates?” Sheev asked.

Luke glanced up at him, blue eyes cold and still as the undisturbed mountain lake beside the Sheev estate on Naboo, long since cleared of fish and wildlife. Pain pinched his cheeks—constant pain, wrought by his old injury, Sheev knew. But he did not dwell on it.

“Well,” Luke said. “But none of them want to listen to me.”

“Then make them listen to you.”

“I’m trying.” Luke’s tone was not amused.

Sheev wasn’t either. He disliked the feeling in his chest and set it aside, like he always had on his path to greatness. Feelings fade. Power remains. “Try harder. You have enormous resources at your disposal. Use them, and they dare not argue with you.”

It wasn’t that Sheev had any intention of dying. The aim of the Sith was immortality. He was the greatest Sith of all time—he did not delude himself with humility—and knew he was fast on the path of discovering that secret for himself. That Luke was the Imperial Prince, and his nominal heir, therefore meant nothing; if Sheev was indeed around for the rest of eternity, there would be no need for Luke to learn how to deal with the pettiness of politics for himself.

But he needed to learn anyway. Sheev was a Sith. He did not protect anyone, so Luke would have to learn to protect himself.

That started with figuring out how to bend a handful of petty magnates to his will. Once he had accomplished that, and acquired the doonium they needed from their mines, Sheev would introduce Luke to what they would use it for. The Imperial Academy, with its emphasis on military rigours, had taught Luke the traditional methods of Imperial enforcement. The Death Star was the future of it.

Luke was not ready yet. But he would be.

He’d averted his gaze, though. Sheev wondered how much his back was hurting him. He’d been forced to stand for two hours for that portrait, but his shields were blast doors, and no whisper of pain slipped out to stain the Force. If nothing else, Luke was resilient, for a nineteen-year-old.

Sheev put on a grandfatherly sigh to set him at ease. He would get nothing from him if he were this tense. “Try again,” he advised, trying to set his tone kindlier. “How goes your training?”

Luke glanced at his father over Sheev’s shoulder. “Poorly.”

Sheev gritted his teeth. “Try again there, then. A Sith does not relent.”

“No,” Luke agreed. He sidestepped his grandfather and kept walking. Sheev turned to watch him go.

Such disobedience. Sometimes, Sheev doubted Luke’s usefulness at all. Especially with how Vader now watched Sheev, ready to turn to violence if he thought it necessary. It should be exhilarating, having an apprentice so ready to betray him, but there was no finesse to it. It, like everything else in his victory, was boring.

Behind them, Sheev heard the artist curse. No doubt he was painting over Luke’s face, again and again, trying to get the shapes right.

He could live for now. They’d had him for five years, and he was the one who did the best job, unfortunately, even if it came slowly and painfully. But still, Sheev hesitated when he walked back to his throne room, red guards following him like bloody shadows, and paused in front of the previous year’s portrait.

Himself, clad in his usual black robe, seated regally on a throne. Vader, loomed behind him, almost impossible to pick out at first glance against the dark drapery behind them. And Luke, his scarlet jacket a blood smear on black velvet, his hair the burnished gold trim. His face was pale and tight. Every year, his face was pale and tight.

Every year, in every painting, Luke looked unhappier.

Artists were pathetic. By now, they should have Luke’s face burned on the inside of their eyelids, but still this was the best they could do.

“Lord Vader,” Sheev said patiently. “What is this… pet?”

He had wondered at the sudden blossoming of Vader’s presence in the Force, here on Mustafar. He had not anticipated the child.

It looked up at him, a sloppy head of golden hair falling around its eyes, so Sheev wasn’t entirely sure where to look to invoke the maximum effect of intimidating it. Whatever it was, and wherever it was looking exactly, its sticky fingers were entangled in the soft fabric of his dark trousers. He feared there would be a sugar trail left behind later.

Vader was still paralysed in the entrance door. Had he truly not expected that his master would sense this swelling of fate? Had he expected peace for him and this… thing?

“Master,” he said. The vocoder had never sounded so desperate. Sheev wanted to laugh, but then the thing tried to bite his shin, and laughter fled with its tail between its legs. “I can explain.”

“I am counting on it.”

Vader did not explain. He just continued to stare, gormless, as his pet started to chew idly on the edge of Sheev’s robe.

Sheev sighed. “Where did you find it?” he pushed. That was as good a starter question as any.

He made to kick the child away, as hard as possible, but before his foot could make purchase with its soft, stupidly unprotected head, he found it stiffened in midair. Vader’s hand was outstretched.

“Do not,” Vader said, “touch him.”

That was the closest thing to rebellion Sheev had ever heard in him. He was so invigorated by it that he let the gross offence of Vader speaking to him like that pass without comment.

For now.

“Then answer my questions. Where did you find it?”

“With Kenobi.” Vader had finally taken the hint and scurried up to lean down—it wasn’t in a bow, but Sheev took it as a grovel anyway—to pick up the thing and hoist it into his arms. The child laughed and reached out to touch his mask.

His relief at being freed from the sticky, nosy, many-fingered beast meant he almost overlooked what had been said. But after a moment in which he rearranged his robes, it struck him. “Kenobi? He lives?”

“No longer.”

There was that, at least.

“And this is his apprentice, then?” He hadn’t been bowled over by the child’s Force-sensitivity, but that made sense. Children tended to be better at shielding, and they rarely showed their potential unless they were actively using the Force anyway. Sheev’s lips curled back from his teeth in a smile. “So young? I suppose that is what the Jedi are reduced to, now—the child kidnappers they always were.”

“Kidnappers indeed,” Vader thundered.

“And you are to seek revenge even after Kenobi’s death? Torment his would-be apprentice—”

“Luke is my son.”

Sheev pinched his lips together to prevent him from saying something he would have to fry out of Vader’s memory later.

“Oh?” That did explain why the child was so annoying, at least. “Your child survived? How…”

Sheev eyed the boy—Luke—being bounced in his father’s arms. The boy was smiling.

“…wonderful.”

“He will live with me,” Vader announced, like a child who rushed to impose their will before being ordered otherwise. “I am his father. I will raise him.”

Sheev fixed a bland smile to his face. “I would not hear anything to the contrary, Lord Vader.”

Vader looked suspicious. Good. He wasn’t a total fool, then. “I will train him, too.”

Could he push harder on this one? Possibly. He left the door open for later down the line. It may be that the boy ended up as useless as his mother; Sheev would hardly want to waste time with him then.

“We will revisit the topic of his training when he is capable of walking on his own.” He reconsidered. “Even that may be too soon.”

“He will be a prince of the Empire!” This was Vader’s last demand. And his most desperate one, judging by the edge to his vocoded voice. “The Imperial Prince. A title worthy of him. It is him, my son, I have worked so hard for, after all.”

Prince of the Sith Empire, a tiny, squalling babe like this? He was pathetic. He was so soft and squishable. That was hardly the aura of fear and menace they wanted to project.

Then again…

He was, as many journalists, pundits, and vapid courtiers would later cluck and coo, adorable. Sheev could use adorable while he ground the galaxy beneath the boot of the Sith.

“As he deserves,” Sheev agreed.

Vader was staring at him, shocked to his core. Sheev secretly revelled in the confusion he’d sown. Vader had struggled, shifting to their new Sith master-apprentice relationship after so many years of viewing Sheev as a mentor who would never so much as disagree with him. The violence of it had undermined all he knew about their relationship, even as it was the only thing in the galaxy he had left. It was always useful to keep one’s apprentice off-balance. This would confuse him even more.

“Shall we plan a formal introduction for him?” Sheev asked. “Our subjects will adore him.”

Bouncing on Vader’s hip, Luke hiccupped and turned a bright, beaming smile on Sheev. He pointed at him, hand grasping.

Disgusting.

His fake smile pushed across his face with difficulty, like stretching old, dried-out leather. “Almost as much as I do.”

Luke’s lightspear darted across the air, leaving a pink trail in its wake. Sheev slashed his own saber up to counter it before it burnt his knee, and he was surprised at the effort it took. Luke grinned at him a little wildly.

Sheev stepped to the side and tried to attack again, past the plasma blade at the end of the spear. Luke shortened up and blocked it with the body of his cane instead. It was threaded with cortosis, and Sheev’s lightsaber immediately shorted out on impact.

He retreated before Luke could press the advantage, hitting the ignition on his lightsaber furiously to get it up again. Finally it sputtered back to life and he swung—and Luke met him mid-swing with the end of his spear, well out of lightsaber range, and twisted.

The point of the lightsaber stung Sheev’s wrist. He hissed and dropped his saber, letting it fizzle out. If they hadn’t been fighting on training saber settings, that would have taken off his hand.

Luke’s grin widened as the tip of his spear hovered at Sheev’s throat. “Got you, Grandfather.”

Sheev took a moment to look at him.

Luke’s hair was getting longer, falling in his eyes in dark blond fronds, damp with sweat. The training clothes, too, clung to his slim frame—too slim, perhaps, but Sheev dismissed the worry. His stance was bold but careful, and Sheev with a flicker of unease wondered how much these training sessions hurt his back. But his hands were firm on the base and shaft of his cane, practiced and strong, and Sheev knew that if he pushed, it would not be Luke that gave way.

Sheev gently pushed the shaft of Luke’s lightspear down. Luke took the hint and twisted the handle, so it collapsed back into a spear.

“So you did,” he said, unconscious of the smile on his face.

“This child,” Sheev said, kneeling on the carpet with his rich robes dragging in the dust around him, “is demonspawn.”

Luke continued to cry. Sheev didn’t know why he’d ever brought him to Naboo on this diplomatic trip. Certainly, he was a useful tool for laundering his image, but what price had he paid? He was an emperor. He should not have to deal with this.

“Indeed, sir,” Mas Amedda said, peering down into the cradle. Luke continued to kick his tiny feet and wail.

“Do not stop! Keep looking! I have no idea where he could have secreted it.”

Sheev crouched down, his old bones protesting, to peer under the sofa. The Queen of Naboo had given them such nice quarters in the palace for their stay. There was so much exquisite furniture for a baby’s dummy to conceal itself within.

“I will have Vader send the child away,” he decided. “No future apprentice is worth this trouble.” Maul had never cried like this—and Sheev hadn’t even raised him, most of the time.

“Of course, sir.” Mas Amedda carefully lifted several pillows to look underneath them.

“I cannot understand—oh.” Sheev’s gaze alighted on the baby blue dummy lying on the carpet right next to Luke’s cradle. The carpet was a pattern inspired by waterfalls, so it had blended in well. “There.”

He picked it up and wiped it off as best he could. Ah, well. When he stuck it in Luke’s mouth, at least he stopped crying.

Instead, the boy gazed up at him with big blue eyes. He might have been smiling.

“Perhaps he can stay,” Sheev concluded.

Mas Amedda’s voice was utterly flat. “Perhaps, sir.”

“Have you been paying attention in your politics lessons, Luke?” Sheev asked, bending his head to the side slightly so his words were for Luke’s ears alone.

Luke straightened a little at his side, hands tightening on his cane. He really should see about getting Luke his own throne to sit at for Imperial functions like these, Sheev thought, then waved it aside. Later.

“I have,” Luke said, scanning the crowd. “Is there something here I should be noticing?”

Thanks to the dais that separated them from the rest of the hall, no sycophantic courtiers were swarming them just yet. But they were considering it. Anyone with eyes could tell that, and Luke had far more to rely on than just his eyes.

“Who wants something from us?”

A slight smile raised the corners of Luke’s lips. “Matrod feels he deserves more credit for the recent output of his sector. He might come to complain.” He added, “As subtly as possible, of course.”

“Should we give him that credit?”

“It was his daughter that did all the leadership and administrative work.”

Sheev laughed. “Very good. Let’s quietly demote him in a few weeks. If he complains to us here, demote him on the spot.”

Luke nodded, still scanning the crowd. “We need to make it clear that competence is rewarded.”

“Precisely.”

After a moment’s more consideration, Luke said, “Sol is also glancing our way. Possibly because she’s worried we’ll support Cavesta’s claim to the Circarpous system over hers.”

“Should we?”

“No. Cavesta isn’t as effective as she is.”

“Good.” Sheev let himself look out over the collection of peacocks he called his court, and something like pride crept into him. “I would propose a bet with you.”

“Oh?” Luke tilted his head to look at his grandfather, his smile widening.

“I do not think any of them will approach us today,” he said. “They won’t even approach you, when you go out to do the rounds. This function is their gossip gathering event. They will use next week’s gathering to formally make their demands.”

Luke hummed. “I’ll take that bet,” he said. “With confidence.”

“Confidence?”

Luke nodded, then with a flourish of his cane, he strode forward, off the dais, to begin to mingle with the crowd. Good. He’d deduced exactly what Sheev had wanted from him.

Sheev smiled to himself. Luke spoke to Sol animatedly, asking how she was—the moment she decided to voice her concern early was obvious on her face. When Luke turned on his well-studied charm, it was hard to deny him.

And this way, none of this resentment would foster. Luke would turn this on everyone who came. No one who sought to surprise them with well-prepared demands later would be able to resist being caught off guard.

Luke would win the bet, of course.

He always did.

Luke’s body lay in the hospital bed, pale and thin. His eyes, tightly closed, were dark craters in his face. Tubes ran in and out of his body.

In the Force, he could feel Luke, wavering like a candle against the inexorable night.

The head medic entered the room like a stubborn bug. After standing in the entryway for a few minutes, she cleared her throat. “Your Majesty,” she said.

Sheev did not acknowledge her.

“We wanted to ask your permission to operate on him. We have identified the problem, and there is the possibility—”

“The possibility?” Sheev asked dangerously.

She fidgeted. “He could die even with rapid treatment,” she said carefully. “Such are his injuries.” An awkward pause. “What are your orders?”

He knew why she had to ask, of course.

This was not the first time she’d had to operate on someone who she suspected might be the intentional target of his assassinations.

“Do whatever you can,” he said.

She blinked. “Sir?”

“You understood me.” He stood from the chair, gripping his cane, hating how his legs trembled. “I care not for cost. I care not for excuses. Save his life, or yours is forfeit.”

In the past, when he had offered the services of his personal medics to a courtier who’d been the target of an assassination attempt, all he had to do was say that he understood the risks for the doctors to know to let the target die.

He wanted no such doubts, here.

“Save him,” he ordered. “I want him to wake up.”

She nodded, throat bobbing. “Yes, my lord.”

After his accident, Luke was in constant pain. The surgery might have enabled him to walk again, but as the head medic in the palace had informed Sheev personally, all the surgery in the galaxy couldn’t have prevented him the pain he would live in for the rest of his days. That made no difference to the man’s fate. Sheev executed him anyway.

In quiet. Behind locked doors. Luke didn’t need to know about that.

They had suggested painkillers. There were other options too—brain implants, nerve dampening—that could let Luke control how much pain he felt at any given moment. Sheev had said he would consider it.

He wondered what Vader would prefer.

No. He knew what Vader would prefer.

The Sith thrived on pain. Vader knew that more than anyone. While he had been left disabled by his own fatal idiocy against Kenobi, it had left him stronger, with an endless well of his own suffering to draw on. It was part of what made Vader so useful to Sheev. And it was, he knew, exactly why Vader would insist they spare no expense in treating Luke.

Vader was weak. He was Sith because he wanted to inflict suffering on others to prevent his beloved son from suffering. Perhaps, had he found Luke later in life, he would have understood better just how beneficial pain and suffering was to expanding one’s power. He would have embraced the chance to teach Luke what he had learnt, and in doing so made the boy the most powerful Sith in the galaxy.

But he had raised that boy from infancy. Sheev saw it in him: love, pure and unfiltered, untouched by the cruelty the Sith had to teach to make their students strong. He would not hurt Luke. His own failures in training Luke in the dark side had proven that.

He would not make Luke hate him.

Would Sheev?

Luke still lay unconscious from the surgery as he mulled it over. Sheev had ordered that Vader not be told about this. It was a power he usually enjoyed—over life and death; over joy and misery; over his apprentice, and the one thing Vader lived for—but his own pleasure was muted, tonight.

He had said that he would do what he must. And he had—in the worst way, he had. Luke made them both weak. Would Sheev exacerbate that? He had the chance to make them all strong. No painkillers. No technology. Only the Force, and what little relief the dark side could bring.

He’d thought that it would only be one decision. That was all he had foretold, perhaps blinded by his own passions. But he had to keep making them, over and over. It was always the way. Loyalty to the Sith required constant devotion—constant tests. But Sheev had long since killed his Sith Master. He had not been tested in a long time.

Hatred would make Luke strong. It was taught—and if Sheev truly wanted a good future for Luke, he should teach him. Even if it was hatred of his grandfather.

Luke was lucky to be alive as it was. Whatever it was that had saved him—the Force? Luck? That fortunately placed beam, that broke his fall but broke his spine while it did so?—was a miracle. It was a miracle that Sheev was even making this decision in the first place. He should seize it and run. He should make sure that next time, Luke would be able to save himself. Too long had they argued over training, over the dark side, over strength and power. Now was the time to push.

Luke had nearly fallen to his death. It should be so easy to push him again, to watch him fall, in a far more glorious way.

Sheev sat with Luke for several hours one night, watching his eyes move under his eyelids, listening to the beat of his heart on the monitor. Vader sat watching him too—never taking his eyes off his son, but closely watching his master in the Force, nonetheless. He didn’t trust him. He likely suspected that Sheev had something to do with this.

When Sheev left the room, he sought the new head medic, freshly appointed. Luke was to be given the implants and the pain suppression technology—credits were of no issue. Whatever painkillers needed would be procured.

The first time Luke met Mara Jade, Sheev had not intended it. She had come to make her report to him on a mission he had sent her on to test her—her first. At twelve years old, she was an adept poisoner, if not quite able to defeat a trained stormtrooper in combat yet, so he had sent her to rid him of some minor, annoying senator. If she had failed, it would not matter overmuch; if she had succeeded, it would be convenient for him.

Of course, she had succeeded.

When she arrived in his throne room for her debrief, Luke was standing beside his throne, talking to him about his training regimen. He was better with the lightsaber every day, but it was still so heavy, and Djem So just didn’t seem the right form for him—

The moment he spotted Mara, he trailed off.

Sheev noted. “Ah, yes.”

For a moment, he considered if he should ask Luke to step outside. He still kept some business a secret from Luke, for sensitivity reasons. And the knowledge that a child about his age was going around murdering senators might distress him…

But he decided against it. Mara was here for Luke’s security, as much as anything else. He was allowed to appreciate her.

“Luke, this is Mara, one of my Hands-in-training,” he said. He nodded to her as she bowed to him. After a moment’s hesitation, she saw his irritable hand flick, and she bowed to Luke as well.

“Your Highness,” she said, at little bitterly.

Sheev’s hand was on Luke’s shoulder. She was watching that closely. Ah. She was jealous of the affection he held for Luke, then.

As she should be. That would only be useful for him.

Luke was watching her. “It’s nice to meet you,” he said politely, but his gaze was a little more intense than that.

Mara made her report on the successful mission, shooting glances at Luke the whole time. To Sheev’s surprise, the boy didn’t react much to the revelation that a senator had been murdered. He accepted the explanation that he had been a danger to the Empire easily enough.

When Mara left, he asked, “Is she a princess?”

She could be, Sheev thought, judging by Luke’s besotted expression. And that wouldn’t be totally amiss. Once fully trained, she would be a powerful asset to have at Luke’s side, protecting him.

“No,” Sheev said. “She is just a girl.”

Luke didn’t seem to hear it.

“Are you sure that’s what you want to wear to the gala?” Vader asked Luke, glancing sideways at Sheev.

Luke looked up at them both, grinning. He seemed to be drowning in black fabric. “Yes!”

Sheev licked his lips, hesitated. “A little more colour would be becoming,” he suggested. “You would draw more attention. You need to—”

“He is not your political pawn,” Vader warned.

“—stand out,” Sheev finished, ignoring him.

Luke, as it was, did the opposite of stand out. He was struggling to stand up. The cape was far too long for him, let alone the robe.

“I like this,” Luke insisted. “I look like you two!”

Sheev stiffened; he sensed Vader do the same. They looked at each other, each took in each other’s dark garb, the cape and robes, and the utter, unrelenting black.

“I see,” they said in unison. Sheev, at least, tried to keep his tone steady.

Vader did not. Vader swept Luke into his arms in a sudden burst of affection, and they walked away together, no more consultation needed. Sheev followed a little more awkwardly.

Luke did look like him, he mused. He tried to ignore what he felt about that.

Most beings, sentient or otherwise, Force-sensitive or not, flinched when Darth Sidious walked into a room. The same was true of Darth Vader. Even without laying eyes on them, a shiver would run over any being’s arm at their mere presence in the vicinity. That was the power of the dark side. That was the power of the Sith.

The whole galaxy knew to fear them.

Luke, when he caught a metaphorical glimpse of that dark, foreboding presence they carried with them like a shroud, ran after them as fast as possible, shouting for either his father or his grandfather.

He did not flinch at the darkness. He stared into it, wide-eyed with wonder, and waiting for it to extend its hand.

Despite a not-insignificant amount of self-loathing informing him that this was beneath him, and against all his teachings, Sheev always did.

Luke’s love of the dark’s embrace was problematic, sometimes. The Imperial Palace had formerly been the Jedi Temple. And the Jedi Temple had once been built on an old Sith shrine, presumably so the Jedi could study their ancient enemy without any busybody on Coruscant wondering what they were doing. Even the faint echoes of the Jedi’s light had been twisted into darkness by the tragedy Sheev had manufactured here—the shrine was steeped in the stuff.

Even Sheev felt it, on those visits he made when he wanted to revel in his victory. The weight of history bore down on him, reminding him of his responsibility. He was the Sith Master. His was Bane’s legacy, maintained for generations; his victory was the culmination of it all. And he must not let go.

It would have been a good place, in later years, to take Luke to teach him about the Sith. To indoctrinate him into the mysteries—into the long project, the legacy he was a part of—to impress upon him the significance of his power. It would have, if the shrine didn’t seem so intent on killing Luke.

The shrine was not sentient. But its hatred felt personal. And when Luke got too close, when he was looking for them, when he was bored—when he sensed the whiff of darkness and went running toward it looking for his family, Sheev or Vader had to get there first.

He threatens everything, voices hissed to Sheev as he ushered Luke away, one time. Do you not see it? You, with your vaunted foresight! Can you not detect the ruin he will bring to the Empire of the Sith? Strike him down before he destroys all we have built!

After securing Luke in a turbolift back to the surface with a handful of guards, Sheev had looked over his shoulder. The entrance to the shrine he’d constructed, an easy route from his own quarters, beckoned to him. The door was open; the way was cloaked in shadows.

“This is my empire,” he said. “My grandson will not destroy all I have built.”

Despite the horror he felt from them, it was their laughter that unnerved him more. It was a cackle—humourless and dissatisfied, more schadenfreude than actual mirth. The sound followed him all the way up to the surface.

You are blind, they mocked.

“Are you alright?” Luke asked him later, coming to him in his throne room. Sheev sitting in his throne and staring at a map of his empire, an unbecoming worry creasing his brow.

But he smoothed his brow when he saw Luke. Smiled at him. Beckoned, and Luke climbed into his lap to look at the Empire with him.

This is my empire, he thought. And Luke is my heir. I have nothing to fear from him.

It was true, in the end. Sheev had nothing to fear from Luke. He never would.

The Sith, however, were right to tremble.

One hour left.

Sheev sat in his throne and steepled his fingers. He wore no chrono, nor did he allow one in his throne room, but he felt the seconds tick by in his muscles and bones, nonetheless. Beyond the windows of his throne room, in the distance, Coruscant continued to move, heedless of what was about to happen.

It always did. No matter the ups and downs of politics, of the Jedi, of the war, Coruscant carried on. In part, it was what made this such an easy planet to rule, as the capital of the galaxy. So few of its denizens cared who sat in the fabled halls on the sunlit surface. They had work to do—mouths to feed, rent to pay, and the darkness of the deep to ward off with what light, drugs, or entertainment they could. Sunlight was a myth to them, let alone the age-old conflict of Jedi and Sith. Why rebel? Why object? Were the taxes any greater burden than last year?

This, though, he refused to accept their apathy on. What was about to happen would shake the stars.

At least—it would shake his. The constellations he had guided himself by for years would be rearranged. They would glow all the brighter for it, but they would never be the same again.

All would be well, for him. Sheev knew what he was doing. He was the greatest Sith Lord there had ever been.

So why were his hands trembling?

And why was he so afraid?

Fear was a hateful emotion. He did not care for it, and he had felt far too much of it of late. That was the problem. He could not allow this to continue.

And so he waited. The hour turned into half an hour. Twenty minutes. Ten minutes. Five.

His hands did not stop trembling.

Fear leads to anger, he told himself—a mantra that had become so intrinsic a part of him that he had not needed the words for a long, long time. Yet he needed them now. The last piece of scaffolding to hold the weakened parts of his being together, until he had finished repairs.

Fear leads to anger. He took in a deep breath. He was a Lord of the Sith. This fear was unbecoming of him. He raged at the one who had inflicted it upon him.

Anger leads to hate. It did. As he took his anger, fed it through the telescope of certainty, it focused into one searing point. He hated the galaxy for this. He hated himself for allowing it. But, most of all, he hated him.

Hate leads to suffering.

It had better, he told himself. It had better.

And it had better be brief.

The minutes disappeared like sand between his fingers. Before he knew it, it was time, and there was no space left for doubts.

Chapter Text

Luke, like many children, craved a sense of adventure. It occurred to Sheev one day that the mystery and adventure holos the boy so enjoyed might be of use to him. Secret tunnels… hidden rooms… dramatic, magical contents…

The Sith Temple was full of that sort of thing.

The voices of the Sith were already nipping at the corners of his mind. Get him out of here, they hissed. We will kill him—he bodes doom for us all—send him away!

“Just a little farther,” he coaxed, placing a hand on Luke’s back. Vader was on a mission in the Outer Rim, which was why he’d taken the chance, right now, to do this. “You’ll love this room.”

Luke already looked excited. “It feels like you!”

“…yes.” That had been the ongoing issue. Luke kept trying to sneak toward the Sith Temple when he couldn’t find them, because he got confused. “That is the dark side. You will learn it one day.”

This seemed to go right over Luke’s head. His eyes had landed on the door.

The temple had been long buried beneath the Jedi’s own temple, so it had taken a concerted effort from Sheev’s architects to construct access and passage to it, including a functioning turbolift. But they’d not taken away from the majesty of its surviving arched door. The keystone was dark grey, lined with red veins, and carved with sigils even Sheev only distantly recognised. Lights that switched on automatically at their approach rather detracted from the overall gloom, but still those crimson veins in the rocks of the archway and the stone that engulfed them as they stepped through… They seemed to glow.

Retreat! Now! Take the beast and flee!

The beast in question reached out to poke one of the veins. From the clamour in his head, Sheev half-expected them to squirm like worms away from his touch, but it was stone, after all. Luke just shuddered and retreated into Sheev’s hide. He hid his face in his robe.

“I don’t like it,” he whispered.

Sheev hadn’t expected that.

He bent down. “There is hidden treasure here,” he promised. “And all the mysteries of the Sith! You can find magic.”

“I can feel magic,” Luke insisted. “It’s not nice magic.” He looked around. “The temple wants to eat me.”

Sheev blinked. “Temples do not eat children.” Then he wondered at the fact that those words had actually come out of the mouth of the greatest Sith who ever lived.

More importantly, he wondered if it was even true.

We will consume his soul, the voices declared. Make him part of our chorus—yes, yes, that is the only way to avoid our fate…

“You have no power in my realm,” Sheev said.

Luke looked up at him, eyes shining. “Grandpa?”

“I will protect you,” Sheev promised him. He knelt down fully, so he was eye-to-eye with this small child. Luke really did look frail, sniffling and shrinking in on himself. “Do you trust me to protect you?”

Luke said, “I trust you,” his voice wavering with terror. He squared his shoulders. “I can go with you.”

The boy might dream of adventures. But that didn’t mean he wanted to live one just yet.

There was so much more in this temple Sheev could show him. Lost treasures, grimoires, even the skeletons of a few former acolytes. But if Luke was frightened by just the front door, none of that would help.

And the boy trusted him to protect him.

Despite himself, he would.

Sheev smiled. “It’s alright. We can go back. I didn’t know it would be so scary.”

It wasn’t what he had intended. It undercut his plans, in fact. The Sith screamed at him: Weakness! Soft, lovelorn fool! Let us take care of this threat if you are too puny to use your own bare hands—

—and cut off as they left the temple.

Luke skipped back down the corridor, smiling again.

“I’m not gonna hurt you,” Luke said. At least, that was what Sheev assumed he said. The palace gardens were large, and he was watching from a window.

Mara Jade, one of the Force-sensitive children Sheev had plucked from the grips of the Inquisitorius and trained as one of his personal Hands, was sitting meditating in the garden. As Sheev had ordered her to, knowing that Luke would pass through that garden.

Luke was lonely. He went to a school—a prestigious school for the children of the Empire’s elite, at that—but guards trailed him everywhere. No children would play with him, and Sheev and Vader had been assured by a handful of terrified teachers that threats to their parents wouldn’t change that. This wasn’t a permanent solution, hopefully, but it wasn’t a bad one.

Perhaps Mara Jade, an adept in the dark side herself, would push Luke toward using it more, too.

But the two of them were just hitting puberty. They were deeply awkward—he could see it from here. He could also see from here that Luke was watching Mara strangely, with a curious light in his eyes.

Mara said something back. It was probably, “I don’t believe you.”

“I promise.” Those words he was sure of: Luke’s lips formed them, bold and smooth.

Still, Mara didn’t believe him. Of course she didn’t. Sheev had raised her well—promises were things to be broken, not kept. He hadn’t expected that to backfire. He had expected her to extend the same respect she showed him to his grandson.

“Alright.” Luke turned to walked away, the conversation over.

Except it wasn’t over. The two of them stayed sitting in the garden, just within sight of each other. And they kept shooting each other looks when they thought the other wasn’t looking.

Luke’s Sith training was going poorly.

It wasn’t apparent. On the surface, Luke excelled in the Force. He was a quick study, with enormous potential and power at his fingertips, and even injured he moved as swiftly and definitively as destiny itself. He was especially skilled at mind manipulation, though Sheev could see how little he enjoyed it. It was a Jedi skill, the simple mind trick; the Sith had a more extreme version. But the simple mind trick was where one had to start in teaching, and Luke had picked that up quickly.

He was a social butterfly. Of course he had. During his appearances in court, he always knew which buttons to press to get the desired reaction out of a courtier. Sheev decided to put that down to his own political education, but he had to begrudgingly give some credit to Amidala, as little as he enjoyed thinking about her. Her son looked up to her as a saint-like figure. He had modelled a lot of his behaviours on hers, based on research he’d done both on Naboo and off of it. His father’s eternal obsession with the woman and love for comparing Luke to her likely hadn’t helped.

He'd been excellent at mind tricks. The servants who came into the training hall for him to practise on never stood a chance. Their minds were weak anyway, but also they trusted Luke. His reputation was that of a gentleman. Even if he erased their memory afterward, they still walked away trusting him, with holes in their memory and no idea how he had violated them. How, in keeping with the Sith tradition of the technique, he’d advanced to more physical compulsions.

The Sith did not settle for mind muddling and general, conceptual ideas. The Sith were about control. And Luke could seize control of another person’s body with a few soft-spoken words. Mostly he made them do star jumps, but there were weapons in the hall. He could do whatever he wanted.

That skill was awesome and awful. It excited Sheev enormously. Luke hated it.

It was Luke’s idolisation of Amidala that was, perhaps, the problem.

Sheev sat in his study, examining the box some of his attendants had brought to him. He’d noticed it in the lightsabers Luke wielded—small ones, for a thirteen-year-old who hadn’t finished growing, stolen a long time ago from equally young Jedi padawans and corrupted for use by the Sith—and had the sabers deconstructed to get at the truth. It was as he’d feared.

The lightsabers Luke trained with, hand-corrupted by Inquisitors and Vader himself, had gone pink.

The crystals no longer screamed with the dark side the way they once did.

In his hands, they did begin to whimper. Injured parties slowly healing, suddenly thrust back into the fire of the dark side. Luke had been their saviour. Sheev was their abuser, back to hurt them again.

When he held them up to the light, even the cracks that had riddled the more unstable ones seemed to have healed over into scarred ridges.

He would make Luke re-corrupt them, he decided. That would show Luke what the problem was. The dark side was the only way to use the Force; any other way risked weakness, risked a lack of control. Is this how he fought? Healing the crystals so they fought with him, rather than simply bending them to his violent will?

Is that why he excelled at mind manipulation? Because the servants trusted him, and he did not abuse the trust they put in his hands?

It was a mockery of all they were teaching him. Luke was a fool if he thought this could go on for much longer, and a coward for refusing to harness the true power that the dark side could bring him. Avoidance was not an option. Yes—Luke would be forced to re-corrupt these crystals himself. It was a difficult task, usually only performed by a full-fledged Sith Lord with the hatred to spare, but the boy was talented. He would figure it out. He would destroy the crystals he had promised to heal.

And in doing so, he would destroy himself.

It was… traumatic, corrupting a crystal. The creation of Vader’s lightsaber had nearly broken him, Sheev knew. He hardly remembered his first attempt. It had been decades ago, and since then he had such accumulated fury and disdain for the galaxy that it was no large matter to foist it onto some feeble crystal until its will to resist him shattered like glass. But Luke…

Luke was not ready for that step yet.

Yet. He would be one day. But today he was thirteen, and simply struggling in his training. They would have to double down on teaching him how to draw on the dark side, but this particular lesson… this could wait.

Sheev did not want to destroy Luke. The boy was useful to him, after all.

“Do you seriously not understand my point?” Luke demanded. He stood up—thankfully the little meeting room they were in was now empty save for the two of them—and paced, one hand behind his back, one gripping his cane. “You don’t need more Star Destroyers that badly. Gorse is a functioning mining planet as it is, to go in and force more in this way would be—”

“The norm,” Sheev said sternly. Luke paced just like his father did, he observed, even with the change in movements necessitated by his injury. “They are not meeting their quotas, and the Empire needs more doonium urgently. The miners must be reminded of their place in the galaxy.” He hesitated, then added, because that would appeal to Luke: “Their importance in the galaxy.”

“If they’re so important, why don’t we pay them enough to live on?”

Because they were nothing. Because their bodies were the fertiliser that made the dark side grow. And because Sheev delighted in the misery he wrought.

The Moffs and Governors would say, as petty politicians, because they paid them a fair wage already and to do more would bankrupt them. That definitely wouldn’t work on Luke. Luke could sense lies, and also he dealt with slimy politicians on the regular.

“We pay them the worth they generate for the Empire,” Sheev said at last, steepling his fingers on the table and peering up at Luke over them. “When they generate more, we will pay them more.”

Luke stared at him. Right. He could sense lies.

“And their families receive compensation,” Sheev added generously, waving a hand, “if they die in the mines.”

“When,” Luke corrected.

“Mining accidents remain uncommon—”

Luke bent over and slammed a hand on the table. “But death from exhaustion and malnutrition is. Even if they don’t die in the mines, they die of them.”

“Why do you insist on fighting this corner?” Sheev demanded.

“What?”

“You have been arguing with me over this for days. Disrupting meetings with my highest lieutenants. Stubbornly pushing the same lacklustre argument.”

“Lacklustre?”

“The galaxy is bigger than Gorse,” Sheev informed him, flattening his hands on the table. Luke was still standing up, staring at him. “We have other issues.”

“And I’ll fight you on them, too,” Luke promised.

Sheev sighed. “I have no doubt of that. You will learn—”

“Why is this even an issue?” Luke bit out. “You say we need more doonium—that that’s why we have to squeeze Gorse dry. But why? We have enough Star Destroyers. The Rebels have destroyed a few, but their replacements are already almost complete.”

If Luke was throwing a tantrum about the mining, he would not be happy to learn about the Death Star.

“You will understand one day,” Sheev evaded.

“You always say that. I’m eighteen—”

“You are a child.” Sheev’s tone was harsh. Luke drew back, suddenly unsure. He took a breath. “You will understand,” he repeated. “I do not do anything I do not feel is necessary. You know that. And you know I would not cause undue harm.”

Luke swallowed, looking him up and down.

That was when Sheev felt the stab in his heart for the first time. The realisation that he was in trouble. That Luke… had changed.

“I’m not sure I do, Grandfather,” he murmured.

Sheev did truly enjoy his regular sparring sessions with Luke. Once, it would have been rare for him to spar with anyone other than the droids he used to keep his skills from dulling. He never trained one-on-one with Maul, Tyranus, or any of the other apprentices he’d considered, used, or discarded. Even now, he did not allow Vader to witness his fights against Luke. He was sure the boy spoke about them, but it was the principle of the thing. Luke was not his apprentice. Luke was his grandson. It was alright.

That was what he told himself. But he could only speak to himself for so long before his voice went hoarse.

Luke was getting to be a skilled fighter, especially with his lightspear. He cut a striking enough figure in his fine clothes with his polished, cortosis-lined cane as it was. When he planted his feet shoulder-width apart and twisted the handle of his cane to activate the spear end, and it shone before him like a ward, he was mesmerising. Every time, the red of his plasma blade grew lighter.

It was easier to ignore in the beginning. But they kept fighting, and when their blades were locked, it was hard not to notice how Sheev’s glowed the crimson of a forge, while Luke’s was… rosier. Soon, it would be the colour of a flamingo.

Distraction cost victory, in battle. Every time Sheev let his thoughts dwell on this, Luke knocked aside his lightsaber and laid the point of his spear against his neck, close enough for the heat to raise blisters.

And he would say, “I win.”

Sheev, like all Sith, hated losing.

Luke’s childish crush on Mara did fade with time and familiarity. From the start, Mara made it clear she didn’t much care for him—to Sheev’s disappointment, certainly, but he wouldn’t waste such a useful operative by forcing her to interact with his precious grandson. And Luke didn’t impose his own cares on her. The both of them were busy; the both of them led separate, if adjacent lives, full of teaching and trials.

But Sheev knew that Luke’s twinkle of attraction never fully winked out.

As they grew older, they tolerated each other more. Sparring wasn’t ideal. Sheev occasionally tested them against each other, and neither wanted to lose. Even when the lightsabers had been swiped out of their hands and they were grappling hand-to-hand, the locks and throws brought them close, elbows in each other’s faces, knees in chests. When the victor was called, they would stand, faces sweaty and flushed, panting—and not looking at each other.

A handful of times, Sheev expected Luke to say something. But he never did. Mara so obviously did not want it.

Romantic entanglements were difficult for both an Imperial Prince and an Emperor’s Hand. Mara never pursued it, as far as Sheev knew. She was so focused on serving him that in her, he felt like he wielded a laser. She wanted to make him love and appreciate her as he did Luke. It wouldn’t happen, but it made her useful.

Luke had some attempts. There were others in the court. Vader was furious when Luke developed a friendship with Princess Leia Organa, but that was never anything but platonic. Tarkin, in his endless attempts to curry favour, tried to introduce him to his own granddaughter when they were both teenagers. She and Luke did get along well, but nothing came of it. They were excellent friends.

Nothing came of it, except that for the months she and Luke stepped out together, Mara’s eyes seemed to follow Luke around more than usual. And when the girl moved back to Eriadu to attend a traditional finishing school there, Mara actually deigned to speak to Luke.

Their sparring grew friendlier, but they were still tense. They did not seek each other out, as far as Sheev observed. And still, when Sheev touched Luke, and praised him, and called him my boy, Mara snarled and scowled. He came to realise with amusement that he may be the barrier between them.

That would not change. Coddling Luke served his interests—naturally, there was nothing more to it—while coddling Mara did not. He was content with the situation, even if the pair disliked it. He consigned the mere idea of anything happening between them to a feckless oblivion.

Unfortunately, that meant he missed what was really happening until it all came at once.

Sheev glared at the boy in front of him. Not even hit puberty, and already so headstrong. So bold. “Luke,” he warned. “Get out.”

“No,” Luke said.

“Luke—”

Luke’s fists balled up. “Leave him alone!”

Vader looked up from his kneeling position at that—he hadn’t dared before. Good. At least he knew his place.

Sheev glared at Luke. “This is between me and your father. Luke, you should be in bed.”

Where were his guards? Where was Luke’s nurse? As much freedom as they allowed Luke to have, he shouldn’t be allow to interfere with the master-apprentice… discussions.

“You’re going to hurt him,” Luke said. “I won’t let you.”

“I am not going to hurt him,” Sheev said. “I—” He looked down at Vader. Vader looked up at him. “I am going to help him.” It sounded weak even to him.

But it was true! Sith punishments for failure were designed to give the apprentice a memory to draw on—of pain, of fury, of anger, of fear, of everything they would seek to avoid. It was a lesson. And it would only bring Vader more power, in the long run.

If it satisfied the master’s taste for blood in the meantime, that was only an additional delight.

“Rise, Vader,” he snapped. “Explain to your offspring, if he will not listen to me.”

Vader said. Vader crouched beside Luke, and talked to him, and eventually—when the nurse arrived—convinced him to return to bed. Luke listened to his father.

He hadn’t listened to his grandfather.

Why?

It had not occurred to Sheev that children could learn to disobey, as they grew older. Maul never had. Maul had been the perfect tool, until he’d failed on Naboo.

Luke left, casting a backward glance at Sheev—a backward glare. It unsettled him, and he sent Vader away without punishing him, despite his egregious failure on— where had it been? What had he done?

“Tighten your shields,” Sheev ordered. “And ensure he does not grow to think he can question us again.”

Vader hesitated. “He is a child, master,” he said. “That is all he does. Every day.”

“What?”

“Question,” Vader said.

It was a muffled argument, but Sheev heard it anyway. He was visiting Luke’s quarters and took a moment to shield his presence. It may help to listen in.

“—are you always like this?”

“You do not understand what is necessary.”

“I understand that you’re different when you’re in his presence. When he’s watching you.”

Sheev raised his eyebrows. It did not take much to guess what Luke was referring to.

“I cannot disappoint him. Nor can you. I understand that you have your… reservations… but I will tolerate them for now. He will not. You must overcome your difficulties, not rely too much on your cane. You must not seem sentimental. And under no circumstances can you betray your true intentions. You do not understand that—you think he is a soft, grandfatherly figure—but you cannot seem weak in front of him.”

Luke was silent for a beat. “I know he’s not,” he said.

Sheev frowned.

“But it makes no difference,” Luke continued, “when you don’t allow weakness from me either. I don’t like the change that’s come over you these last few months, Father. You’re… crueller.” He hesitated. “You hurt me, when we spar.”

“Your enemies will do worse.”

“I didn’t know you were my enemy.”

“I am not. Nor is the dark side—”

Luke scoffed. “You think I’m so childish, don’t you?”

Vader evidently struggled for words, at that. “You are a child,” he finished on.

“I’m nineteen. You were married at my age. But you think that my reluctance to use the dark side is some sort of natural revulsion, an instinct I can’t suppress. You think it’s me being too young to understand.”

“You do not understand.”

“I understand better than you do!” Luke snapped. “And I make my own choices. I see what it does to you—to him, too, though he’d never admit it. Is it so wrong I choose not to let that happen to me?”

“You choose weakness.”

“And you choose horror!”

Luke sounded out of breath now, breathing heavily. Sheev could imagine him: fists clenched, eyes glaring, alight with incandescent rage. But not drawing on that rage for power.

He never did.

“I know that he is not some kind, grandfatherly figure, Father. And I know you’re not a Jedi. But why do you have to get even worse in his presence?”

“He is my master,” Vader intoned.

“He’s a monster,” Luke retorted. “And when he’s around—so are you.”

Vader’s response came slowly, measured and heartbroken. Sheev listened even harder, ignoring his own flame of pain and fury at the words.

Was this what his grandson thought of him? Was this what Luke was retreating into?

Was this what they had all become?

Of course it was. Of course they all hated each other. They were Sith.

Vader seemed to understand that too. “Welcome, my son,” he said, “to the dark side.”

One day, after he eased himself out of the medbay and back into the rhythms of everyday life, Luke start to seek out Mara.

Sheev noticed it only slowly. The first time was certainly a surprise. He was wandering around the Hand’s training halls with his cane in hand. He nodded when he passed Sheev in the corridor but did not greet him, instead moving right on. When he finally stopped, it was outside Mara’s personal quarters, where he held his cane in both hands awkwardly and took a deep breath.

Then he raised his hand to knock, only to be interrupted by, “Come in, Highness.”

Mara had sensed him, of course. And she never said Highness without a little disdain, even though Sheev was fairly sure the two of them were on good terms by now.

Luke took another awkward breath, then stepped inside, the door opening to let him. He looked like a man about to go to his death.

But later that afternoon, he was smiling to himself. It was the first such expression Sheev had seen on him in months.

After that, they seemed to move together around the palace, heads bent, Mara slowing her pace so he could keep up with her without hurting himself. It was while they were together that he changed his cane from the medbay-issued one to a lightsaber-cane, and Mara was the first person Sheev saw fight him with it. Luke didn’t move with grace or ease, but he moved and fought. That was more than his father had convinced him to do.

The more Sheev looked, the more noticeable it became. They were together all the time. Unsettled by not understanding, Sheev tried to demand answers from her. She was perfectly polite, but her answer was not helpful.

“He asked me for help,” she said blandly, averting her gaze to the floor in the appropriate deference. “I said I would help him, master.”

“Does he have no one else he can turn to?” Sheev didn’t intend for the question to sound so bitter. He wondered if she would notice. If she would relay it back to Luke.

She was supposed to be his spy.

“I didn’t ask,” she said. She probably hadn’t. She was smart enough not to ask questions she didn’t want to know the answers to.

After a meaningful pause, she asked, “Should I stop?”

She was still looking at the floor, but Sheev felt she was staring into his eyes with a boldness that frightened him.

“No,” he said, of course. “Anything that helps him, I wholeheartedly endorse.”

Let her relay that back to him, as well.

Whatever messages she may or may not have shared, the two remained inseparable. Training. Wandering. Talking. She was at Luke’s physiotherapy appointments with him. Luke started to look at her with something far deeper and more abiding than gratitude, and Sheev felt disquieted by the depths of emotions that were welling up around the palace. It had been a long time since he’d had to swim.

But it seemed to help. Luke, despite his pain, kept smiling. So Sheev would let it go unchallenged.

For now.

It almost seemed ridiculous to formally carry out the test. But Sheev insisted—just to be sure. Luke was, when he touched it, a supernova in the Force. A live wire that shot through right to the heart of anybody nearby. But he wasn’t sure he could trust that.

Sheev refused to examine that more closely. Why would he not trust the Force? He had trusted his sense in the Force for as long as he had been alive. When he reached out to Luke in the Force, and young Luke reached back, alight with joy and jubilation, what other feeling could send static through his chest and set his heart fluttering than the Sith Lord’s eager recognition of a well of enormous, untapped power?

But he suspected, somehow, that that feeling was not the Force.

So he had to test Luke. Just to be sure.

In the background, Vader hovered.

“That’s an acorn,” Luke said surely, sitting nicely on the sofa.

 Sheev nodded and flicked to the next image on the datapad in his hands. He’d checked behind him; they were in Luke and Vader’s quarters, and no mirror or window or polished surface could possibly be reflecting the image. Vader favoured warm, soft surfaces in their quarters. Less for Luke to bang his head on.

“A— a conker,” Luke said. “No, a nut. Chestnut?”

Was that what that was? All Sheev saw was a round, brown pip. He had never cared much for nature.

Another image, this one of a more distinct, bristling shape. Sheev thought that he’d seen those on the ground a lot around his family’s estate as a child, but he hadn’t cared what they were then, either.

“Pinecone!” Luke crowed.

Why were all these images nature based? Sheev flicked a few ahead, until they were going through ships. Here too, Luke called out the exact model and make. The mind and interests of the young.

Vader stirred after the fourteenth image. “Is this still necessary?”

“A few more,” Sheev insisted.

“Candlewick flower from Alderaan,” Luke said gravely. Sheev barely glanced at the screen. It was a flower, sure. All he knew about candlewicks was the yearly show the Organas put on in Aldera and invited senators to come and see—he couldn’t be expected to recognise one that wasn’t glowing.

“Enough,” Vader said. “Are you satisfied that he has the Force? You know as well as I the basicness of that test.”

Sheev switched off the datapad. “I do,” he said. He smiled at Luke. “Congratulations, my boy. We can be sure of your power.”

Luke grinned and jumped to his feet. He did have power, Sheev told himself. He did have power—so he needed to be manipulated. Sheev needed to cultivate a relationship with him. He had to rely on his grandfather; he had to trust him totally.

So it was alright that Sheev bent down to give Luke a tight hug and smiled against his cheek. It was all in service of the Sith.

“Get up,” Vader said, his lightsaber hovering above Luke’s head.

Luke stared up at him, face outlined in pain. His lip trembled. His legs were shaking. The enormous pain he was in was obvious to them all.

Luke glanced sideways, to where Sheev was watching, but didn’t appeal to him. Good. Sheev said nothing to help.

“Father.” Luke appealed to Vader instead, his voice tight. “I can’t—”

“You can. You have to.”

Tears glistened on Luke’s cheeks, now. “It hurts,” he whispered. His cane-lightsaber had fallen in the fight, metres away from him. It should be easy for him to summon it to hand, but pain was hard to focus through, sometimes.

Which was why Luke had to make it his focus.

“They almost killed you, Luke,” Vader said.

“In a speeder,” Luke spat. “I don’t see you forcing me to take intensive piloting lessons. Why should I fight? Do you think if you beat me up enough it’ll make it so it never happened?”

Vader stilled at that. “You need to work on your premonition. Fighting assists with that. It means your predictions for what will happen next, and your reflexes work together as one.”

“It means you can do something you think might have a chance of helping,” Luke said, “without caring if it actually does.”

“I care—” But Vader cut himself off, glancing sideways at Sheev. He didn’t finish that thought.

“I need to go back to the medbay,” Luke said. He finally lifted himself to his feet, more with the Force than with his own muscles. He groped for his cane with the Force but didn’t quite get it; taking pity on him, Sheev sent it flying into his hand himself.

Luke gave him a look, but he said nothing. Just leaned on his cane and hobbled out.

“We are not finished,” Vader thundered—but Sheev lifted a hand.

“Let him go.”

Vader glanced at him, and Sheev sensed pure hatred for a moment. Then Luke left, the doors to the training room sliding shut behind him, and they were alone.

“He is injured,” Sheev said. “It is better not to exacerbate it.”

“Were you involved?”

Sheev hesitated. Pretending not to know what he was talking about would infuriate Vader, make him more suspicious. But knowing immediately would too.

But he was the Sith Master. It was his job to always know what was on his apprentice’s mind.

“No,” he lied.

Vader didn’t seem satisfied.

“You are being far too careful,” Sheev and Vader chorused. They looked at each other, glowered, then looked away again.

Sheev tried again: “Other pilots should get out of your way.”

It was no use. Vader said that at the same time as him as well.

Luke looked at them both over his shoulder. “That’s really creepy.”

“Keep your eyes on the road,” they said together.

Sheev sighed and just kept quiet. Let Vader dig himself the next hole—and dig he did. The man was supposed to be a Sith Lord, but the way he fretted was honestly pathetic.

“You have the potential to be the greatest pilot in the galaxy,” he intoned. “The Force is your ally. Fly as fast as you feel necessary. Just make sure that if you crash, your performance justifies it.”

“No pressure,” Luke muttered.

“You do not have to be the greatest pilot in the galaxy,” Sheev told him. “You simply have to excel.”

That didn’t seem to help, either.

They flew a little farther. The red guards seated in the back behind Sheev and Vader seemed unaccustomed to this sort of turbulence; despite their stoic facades, Sheev could sense their nausea, and it amused him. Luke probably could as well, because he kept glancing back at them and slowing the speeder down minutely after he did. Then a few minutes would pass, and his natural young recklessness would take the controls again, and they would be soaring at more appropriate speeds through Coruscant.

Luke was fourteen. Human children weren’t allowed to fly themselves on Coruscant until age eighteen. The law restricting children’s movement was too useful to revoke. At the end of the day, teenagers were the Empire’s newest recruits, and he didn’t want them dying en masse in preventable speeder crashes, plus it prevented rebellious teens in a brief flirtation with the Rebellion from spreading that particular infection too far or fast. But part of Sheev still sneered at the law. On Naboo, children could fly as young as ten. He himself had been a talented racer—his handful of vehicular manslaughter charges notwithstanding—and if a pilot was too stupid to stay alive, that was simply an efficient form of natural selection.

But no, he could not change the law. Still: Sheev was sure they would make an exception for the prince. He would make sure of it.

That had given him an idea, though.

“If you wish to train your Force-enhanced reflexes and speed, racing is an excellent forum to do so,” he said. “You would enjoy it. Your father—”

“No,” Vader growled.

Sheev glanced sideways at him. He hadn’t expected that. “Do you disagree with its educational potential, Lord Vader? You were forged in that fire.”

And burned, he supposed. But not nearly as badly as he had been later.

“No,” Vader repeated.

But Luke’s ears had pricked up. “Racing? I can race?”

“You cannot.”

“I raced regularly on Naboo at your age,” Sheev continued. “Before my training, of course. Without knowing it, it honed my awareness of the Force and my own body. You will find it similar to lightsaber combat in that regard.”

“Lightsaber combat can be engaged in with training lightsabers,” Vader said.

Sheev raised his eyebrows. Luke’s face radiated disappointment at his father’s approval. “If safety is your concern,” he said, “there are always simulators.”

Vader just looked at him. There was a reason that they’d had Luke train minimally on simulators before throwing him into this real life training session for flying. The Force didn’t react the same way when danger was just pixels in your awareness. While you yourself believed the threat was real, your sixth sense knew it wasn’t. For those inexperienced in both piloting and the Force, it was confusing, not knowing whether to trust your instincts or your senses, and it slowed your impulses.

You still moved far more quickly than the usual, Force-blind pilot. But it was subpar for a Force-sensitive.

“No simulators for now,” Vader said. “No racing.”

Luke glanced over his shoulder. “Are there… beginner races?”

“Look ahead of you.”

Luke looked back at the flightpath. Sheev smiled. It was always useful to drive a wedge between Luke and Vader. Vader was so often trying to drive one between Luke and Sheev; this evened the odds.

“Avoid that billboard on your left,” Vader said.

“Pretty sure that’s on my right—”

“Your other left, then.”

Coruscant flew by as Vader continued to give instructions, slowly growing less terse. Despite their squabble, everyone in the speeder could see how much Luke was enjoying flight. And that his favourite parts were when they went fast—faster than he’d ever been before on his own power—and in the tighter, more hairpin sections of the flight as well.

Sheev watched carefully. He picked his moment after a particularly tight, but exhilarating, turn through the industrial district, with its abandoned billboards and lack of traffic. Luke could’ve taken the route Vader gave him slowly, to give him time to approach and react. He hadn’t, of course. He’d barrelled at it as fast as he could go.

“Where I grew up, they can be obnoxiously safe,” Sheev said. “The races on Naboo may be a good training ground.”

Vader glared at him. “They are not safe. Racing is never safe.”

“You were racing at nine years old, Lord Vader.” Strange, how the galaxy worked. Had young Anakin Skywalker’s mother felt the same way about racing? Even worse, Sheev would wager. She’d been weak—without the Force. She’d had no concept of what her son was capable of.

“And I would not have my son do the same.”

But Vader should know better.

“Very well,” Sheev conceded. “As you wish.”

But it was a few short weeks before the Imperial Family was taking its regular holiday to the Lake Country of Naboo, where Sheev’s grandfatherly relationship with Luke was the only thing that laundered his image and thus had to be pursued at all costs. And while Luke was there, he dominated the Theed racing circuits.

Under a pseudonym, of course. But they all knew it was him.

“Why did you suggest that my son take up this infernal sport?” Vader demanded when he walked in on Sheev watching it live on the holonet.

“Do you worry about him?”

Vader didn’t answer that, but Sheev knew he did. The cycle of life. Horrible.

“Why?” Vader repeated.

“Why did you allow him to sneak out?”

Because there was no way that Vader hadn’t noticed Luke’s escapades. Vader had weighed the options—and let his son go. It was a maturity that surprised Sheev.

Vader wasn’t going to answer, so Sheev did. “Because,” he said gently, “we both knew he would adore it.”

His apprentice just looked at him. He didn’t believe that was Sheev’s motive at all—more likely, he thought it was an intentional ploy to pit Luke and his father against each other, and he had partly allowed Luke to race to prevent that from happening. Sheev could hardly blame him. He barely believed it himself.

But that was why, in that speeder with the boy, the words had sprung to his lips. He remembered flying. It had been a sense of escape—of freedom. From his father. From his home. From even the consequences of his own actions, though his father’s fury at those dead pedestrians had shown him how fleeting such freedoms had been. But even with the years of Sith training, politics, and stalwart control separating the Emperor he was from that wild, reckless boy, he remembered the joy.

Luke should race. It would bring him joy.

The realisation disquieted him.

Sheev tried to smother his frustration. It didn’t work; Luke sensed it. He could see tears welling up in those blue eyes of his.

“Why did you stop?” he asked. His tone had a slight bite to it.

Luke started sobbing.

Sheev sighed and reached out. Luke grabbed him immediately and crawled into his lap, bawling against his black robe. Sheev patted his back.

“There, there. I know it is hard.” It was not hard. It was as natural as breathing. “You need to hold onto that anger. You need to use it.”

“But I can’t be”—Luke hiccupped—“angry at you, Grandpa.”

Sheev blinked. “You do not have to be.”

“You’re the one that tripped me.”

He had. He had done that. “You were the one that fell over.”

Luke gave him a considering look, then shook his head. That had not been convincing, then.

Sheev held him a little tighter. “You just need to be angry,” he soothed. “Do not cry because I scolded you. Be angry at me. Use your anger to lift the cubes and throw them at me.”

Not that Sheev particularly wanted to be on the end of a small child’s temper tantrum, but at least it would be progress.

Luke hiccupped again. “But you’re my grandpa.”

Sheev stared.

“Would you throw cubes at your father?” he asked.

Luke looked horrified. “No!”

Perhaps Vader had not been wrong, Sheev reflected, when he insisted that Luke was not prepared for dark side training. They had taught him respect for his elders a little too thoroughly.

“Then use your pain,” he suggested. “Your knee is bruising.” It was indeed a nasty bruise climbing over his fair skin. “Draw on it. Feel the dark side close in. Use it!”

“I tried that.”

Sheev gritted his teeth. “And?”

“It’s scary.”

“Really?” Sheev coughed. “That is—do you not want to be brave?” Luke liked adventure stories. Maybe an appeal to courage…

Luke buried his head so deep into his shoulder Sheev almost didn’t realise how emphatically he was shaking it.

“Right,” Sheev said, staring at the wall. He hated it when Vader was right, but maybe…

Just maybe…

They would have to do this later.

“Something is wrong with him,” Sheev observed to Vader as soon as Luke left the throne room.

Vader glanced up at him. Hate boiled within. Sheev knew that already.

“What, master?” he gritted out.

“Do not pretend you have not noticed it. He no longer engages with the Empire as a prince should.”

“He fulfils all his duties.”

“Without enthusiasm. Without charm. It is not his injury—he received that years ago. This is something more recent.”

“It has been present for a long time.”

Vader was being intentionally difficult.

“Do you have any insights, Lord Vader?” Sheev drawled. “Or is this the limits of your usefulness?”

“He hates you,” Vader said immediately. He said it with glee. “Luke has never wanted to be a prince. Or a Sith. You push him and you make him hate you.”

Sheev froze on his throne. The whispers of the Sith in the temple came back to him, chiding him. What he said next was important.

“That is the way of the Sith,” he said. “Do you not hate me?”

“I am no better than Luke,” Vader said. It was a strange declaration. “Luke does not want to be here. He wants change. You are a fool not to see it.”

“I would be a fool to bow to it. Luke is still a child. His tantrum—”

Sheev broke himself off. Vader was watching him. He seemed to be enjoying this.

“You are no better,” he agreed. “Than Luke. Or than me. Do you truly think your son does not hate you too?”

Vader stiffened. Sheev pressed: “Do you delight in thoughts of my overthrow? Do you foresee your problems solved with me dead? Would you put Luke on the throne or yourself? You cannot truly think that would change anything. Luke hates you as much as he does me.”

It was a lie. A bitter one—and it was disgusting to say. Disgusting to recognise.

But it wasn’t wholly a lie.

“I ask again: do you have any useful insights, Lord Vader?”

Vader said nothing.

Sheev glared at him, eyes glittering. “Then I will take care of the problem,” he promised. “In a permanent way.”

And this time, he thought with disconcerting aversion, it might actually work.

Chapter Text

Sheev awoke in the night to the steady rasp of a respirator over his bed. It was the Force, accelerating around him, that brought his hand up to halt the lightsaber driving down at him. The blade warped and spasmed, blindingly bright, inches from his face.

It was so like Vader to not even give him the dignity of a good death. He could have aimed for his neck and been just as deadly. Instead, he sought to carve up his face.

Sheev rolled to the side, kicking up the covers of his bed as he did to disguise where, exactly, he was. Vader’s roar when he realised his attempt had failed was too much for his vocoder to express, and it shorted out with the fury of it. But by now Sheev was on his feet, his own lightsaber in hand.

He didn’t light it. Not yet.

“Assassination in my sleep?” he mocked. “That is not your style, Lord Vader.”

Vader didn’t rise to his bait. He slashed out, his motion wide and graceless. Sheev stepped back before it sank into his chest. His nightgown smouldered slightly, a few threads on his chest caught in the heat.

Before Vader could recover, Sheev stepped forward and jabbed his saber at Vader’s armour, his weak points—the chest, the joints, the groin. Vader blocked each blow and snarled, lashing out right back. Sheev had to retreat, until he was away from the bed and into the centre of his bedroom.

It was pitch dark in the room; it was the middle of the night. Vader had night vision in his mask, and Sheev refused to give him that advantage, so he waved his hand and the curtains on his broad windows flew open with a squeal. Coruscant was never dark. The city lights streamed in, revealing the lay of the land. His large bedroom. The four-poster bed with the carvings on the wood. The ensuite refresher just behind his bed, and the thick carpet under his feet. His bare toes sank into it, steadying himself.

Vader stood tall. He loomed among it all like a statue. And though Sheev could not see his eyes behind the mask, the Coruscanti lights gave his eye plates a malicious gleam.

“You are desperate,” Sheev realised, disguising his own shock with disdain. “You are truly desperate to sink this low.”

“I will not allow you to harm my son!”

Strange words. Not new ones, but—“What makes you think I will?” Sheev slowly circled away from Vader. He could defeat him. Probably. But he didn’t like to fight fair when there was any doubt involved. “He is my beloved grandson.”

“I traced the assassin who failed to kill him. You ordered it.” Vader raised his lightsaber. “I will not allow you another chance!”

Sheev blocked his next few blows, thinking hard. This was problematic. He thought he’d buried that evidence deep. Vader was going to kill him.

A quick survey in the Force revealed that all his red guards were gone. Vader had slaughtered them first. There was no one coming to help him.

“You’re mistaken,” he said evenly. Vader, despite all his power, still could not tell when he was being lied to. “I would never do that. Luke is too important to me—to my plans.”

He had to add that last part. Vader would never believe sentiment. Not now.

His response was another attack. Sheev backed away farther, heart racing. Panic set in.

“Luke loves me,” he said. “Why would I waste that, you fool?”

“You are the fool!” Vader thundered. “Luke has not loved you for a long time. When you are dead, I will tell him all I have learned. He will hate you as you deserve.”

With a shout, Sheev unleashed his lightning on him. The anger that coursed through him was nothing like he’d ever felt. Vader flew back, not expecting it, and hit the wall.

Luke didn’t know, yet. So it wasn’t too late.

He ran forward with a roar of his own and, striking down, took off Vader’s right hand at the wrist. The wires sparked and hissed. His lightsaber rolled away. Sheev doubled his effort on the lightning, until he heard Vader’s vocoder fritz and give out, until the flicker of lights in his eye plates betrayed the thousand warnings he was receiving, until his life support was on edge.

He would kill him. He would kill him before he took Luke away—

But how would Luke react to his father’s death?

Sheev stopped. The lightning fizzled out.

What would he tell him? Vader was right that Luke distrusted him more and more. What would he think of this?

Sheev summoned a comm to his hand from his bedside table. “Medic. My quarters. Now.”

Vader would stay loyal. An attack dog who’d been kicked too hard. He knew how to pull his strings, and he would find a way to keep him in line. Even if he would always yank at his lead. Even if one day he would kill the hand that fed him.

He needed time. Time to solve this. Time to decide how he wanted this to go.

“Be swift,” he reiterated. “Or it will be one of you who dies.”

The holocams were rolling. Sheev made sure to take Luke’s hand and angle them both so the nearest one, branded as Imperial News, the network he owned himself, got a stellar shot of them. This part of Coruscant could only be described as hippy, with colourful banners streaming wherever the eye landed, flower petals drifting upon their heads from where the plants themselves spilled out of flowerboxes far above them, and something that was meant to be music pounded through the duracrete at their feet. It was all very overwhelming for a young boy, but Luke was running around in excitement for now.

He would tire later, and throw a tantrum, but they would make sure to turn the holocams off before that happened.

The stalls that lined the two side of the footpath over the Coruscanti airways were equally overwhelmed, barely supporting the weight of the goods they held. Trinkets, all of it—dangling decorations, scarves, jewellery, sweet soaps small enough as to be useless, and good luck charms. As a much, much younger senator, Sheev had occasionally frequented markets like these. The stalls claiming to be spiritual, which peddled advice for meditation, soothing tinctures, and enchanted amulets, were largely nonsense. Either fools or scammers—or both. Sheev had seen even the open-minded Jedi walk past them with a wrinkled nose.

But sometimes—sometimes—they got their hands on something of true power. A Sith artefact, or Jedi emblem, imbued with some echo of its creator’s strength. Sheev had always known he must be the one to acquire it before a Jedi could find it. He’d built up a curated image of himself as an art and artefact collector so that the Jedi did not suspect a strong interest in the Force from him.

There was nothing here today. Sheev had had the market swept in advance of their visit—while valuable, artefacts could be dangerous, and the last thing he needed was Luke getting hurt while on holocam. Still, the boy made a beeline for those occult stands, staring wide-eyed at crystal balls, silks, and rings that supposedly helped your sleep. Sheev tamped down a pulse of irritation.

He was on holocam. He couldn’t say anything too harsh, anything that would offend the stall-keeper—a Zabrak woman with enough piercings and tattoos that Sheev thought she might be Dathomirian at first glance. But he did not want Luke wasting his time here.

“See something you like?” the stall owner asked Luke, her wheedling sales tone softening into something a little more genuine. Luke looked up at her, blushed, then looked at the many twinkling trinkets on her table.

Shiny things. That was it. Children liked shiny things.

Luke pointed hesitantly to a box of crystals. Before the stall owner could react, Sheev leaned over to answer him first.

“What is it about them you like, Luke?” he coaxed.

Luke looked up at him, then the lady. “Pretty,” he squeaked out. “And”—he squinted at the sign—“magic.”

The stall owner smiled knowingly. “They are. Sleep with them under your pillow, and they absorb your stress. So you sleep peacefully and have a great day when you wake up.”

Kyber crystals did do that—to an extent. Kyber crystals absorbed all the world around them, especially the emotions of those who they had a connection with. But these weren’t kyber crystals. Sheev would be surprised if they weren’t just stained and polished glass.

But Luke’s eyes widened. He looked up at Sheev. “Grandpa,” he said, his tone urgent with want.

Sheev was about to say no—being involved with the rearing of a child meant that was one of the foremost words in his vocabulary—before he remembered the holocams rolling behind them. Luke had already drawn a crowd, various people awing at the sight of him, their own personal holocams lifted. He had his own little cult following already, the boy, thanks to the efforts of Sheev’s PR team.

They needed to buy something at this market. Otherwise, what use was this whole stunt? They could’ve just walked along a balcony and had the same effect.

But he still gave Luke a hard look. Luke got the point. “Please?” he tried.

Sheev let his face break out in a grin. His warm, grandfatherly smile wasn’t as winning as it had once been, before his scars, but Luke had never known him to smile otherwise. It still worked fine on him. His reaction made it work on everyone else.

The stall owner was already sifting through the crystals. They clinked together—definitely glass, by that sound. “What’s your favourite colour?”

“What’s your favourite colour, Grandpa?” Luke asked.

Laughter and more coos. Sheev, blindsided, blinked. He needed to say something regal. Something that fit with the image of the Empire—and, even if those watching the stream wouldn’t appreciate the significance, with the image of the Sith. Black was no good; there were no black crystals in the box. Red was better. The colour of his lightsaber. Of blood. Of the scarlet banners that added what little splash of colour came to Imperial design.

“Blue,” he said.

It had been, a long time ago. When the seas and skies of Naboo were the only freedom he’d known. Then purple—for the prestige that accompanied it on his homeworld, and the implicit connection to power. Slowly, his outfits had shifted darker and redder. The Sith, perhaps. But also just because he no longer needed purple to show off, and he liked to cut a dark, striking figure. Blue sat in the background too easily for him to endorse it.

Only sometimes, though, he thought, looking down into Luke’s eyes. Only sometimes.

When he looked up again, there was an ultramarine shard of glass in the stall owner’s hand.

Hating to give credits to these peddlers, Sheev gestured for an attendant to bring payment. He consoled himself with the positives. It was good that Luke was showing an interest in magic, as he’d breathed so reverently. That would keep him engaged in his training, and perhaps one day he’d be interested enough to assist Sheev with his own research into Sith artefacts.

And the want welling in him at the sight of the pretty crystal was to be encouraged as well. Sith wanted, and what they wanted, they took. Abnegation was only practised by the Jedi.

But the stall owner shook her head. “For you,” she told Luke, pinching the end of the crystal and holding it out to him, “for free.”

Luke’s smile was shy. He took the crystal and immediately buried himself against Sheev’s side. Everyone laughed. Without needing prompting, he said, “Thank you.”

“Are you sure I can’t induce you to take…” Sheev asked the stall owner, but she shook her head. Then hesitated, narrowing her eyes at him. She was likely one of those loudmouthed intellectuals who said they disapproved of the Empire but rarely did anything about it. Talking to him wouldn’t be good for her image in the circles she ran in, bowing to him even less. But she inclined her head. The red guards behind him probably encouraged that.

His smile widened. If Luke came to assume that all he wanted was due to him for free, and there was no requirement for fair exchange, all the better for a Sith.

“Very well,” he said. To Luke: “Is there anything else you wish to examine? We can move on.”

Luke shook his head, pulling back. “For you,” he said—and held out the crystal.

Sheev blinked. It seemed none of the many onlookers knew how to react either. He raised a hand to his chest. “Me?”

Luke nodded earnestly. “You work hard. The Empire is busy. You’re always stressed. I can sense it.” What Luke was sensing was the dark side, Sheev suspected. But he couldn’t explain that in front of everyone. “It’s for you.”

Finally, Sheev inclined his head and accepted the gift. “Thank you,” he held. With an effort that he put on for show more than necessity, he knelt down and opened his arms wide. Luke threw himself at him in a hug. “You are always so thoughtful.”

More cooing. Over Luke’s shoulder, Sheev smiled. It was always so easy, charming the crowd.

Especially when Luke was here.

“It isn’t good enough, Lord Vader.”

Sheev hadn’t given him permission to, but Vader rose from his kneeling position anyway to better look up at his master. They glared at each other.

“I know how to get through to my own son,” Vader bit out, his vocoder spitting static at certain points.

“Then why does he flinch from using the dark side?” Sheev demanded. “Why, when he has lived his whole life in it, embraced by it, cohabits perfectly happily with us in the Force, does he refuse to engage with it himself? We both understand the effort it takes in a place such as this”—he gestured to the palace at a whole—“to use anything else. The two of us have worked to make this the centre of our empire, and the centre of our power. So why does Luke not use that?”

Vader said nothing for several rotations of his respirator. “He is stubborn,” he said at last.

“We both know that intimately, Vader.”

“He does not want to.”

Vader’s hands were balled into fists. He looked up at Sheev, on his royal dais, and he looked so small.

“He dislikes pain. In everyone—not just himself. He cannot understand that it is necessary.”

“Then draw on his anger instead. His fear that people will get hurt—”

“He fights it,” Vader parried. “He has anger. We have both sensed it. And while he has little to fear, it is no stranger to him, either. But hatred is a less familiar beast.”

“Hatred is taught. In fact, it is your job to teach him.”

“How? We cannot make him hate us…”

They both paused, staring at each other. It was true, what Vader alluded to. The Sith training technique was effective in one consistent way: to teach someone hatred, you had to direct it. And even if that target was someone else—for young Anakin, the Jedi, the Tuskens, the Separatists and slavers; for young Sheev, his own family, and the inferior beings of the galaxy—the ability to hate was a flexible skill. It always bent backwards, until it was focused on the teacher.

That was the way of the Sith. The apprentice must kill the master, in the end.

“The way you hate me,” Sheev finished for him.

“I will not do to him what you did to me.”

They were enormous words; it must have taken Vader—poor, terrified Anakin—enormous courage to say them. What did it mean that his passion brought them forth now?

The forging of Darth Vader had indeed been brutal. Over a decade of poisonous whispers, of feeding his natural fears and dislikes. Neither of them had flinched from that with Luke, but the truth was that Luke had fewer of them. Anakin Skywalker had been a slave; Luke Skywalker was a prince. There was no danger in his life; no assassination attempt had ever penetrated the shield that was his father’s obsession with protecting him. No courtier would dare despise or insult him—he was too close to power for them to risk it. Some had been subtler, certainly, and as a confused child it had upset him. But that well was already poisoned, the residue long since settled at its base. Luke knew who he disliked at court, and he knew they were not important enough to worry about.

The Rebels, then? He had never met them. Never so much as heard of them, other than the large names… He was too young and naïve. He thought he was invincible.

How, then, did they twist him?

And why did he fight their attempts?

“It could save his life one day,” Sheev said, to keep the conversation going while he pondered.

“It would kill him.”

That too was true.

Once he had created Darth Vader, Sheev had poured all the cruelty into him that he could. His training had been violent and demeaning. His suit was designed to perpetuate the lesson. Every time Vader breathed, he remembered his master’s power over him; he remembered the lessons of the Sith. His life had been misery already; Sheev just gave him the physical pain to accompany his emotional pain at all he had lost. All he had failed to protect.

In Vader, Sheev had created a crown jewel in the treasury of the Sith.

Luke had the potential to be one as well. If only Vader would raise his hand to strike.

“I will not do it,” Vader repeated.

And, Sheev realised with horror, neither would he.

What difference was there? Luke was only six or seven years younger than his father had been when he’d brutalised him in that way. He was even better suited to take it, in fact, not pre-emptively undermined by his own foolish injuries. The result would be glorious. A Sith Prince to defend the Empire, bloody blade in hand, more power in his fingertip than in the entire starfleet. A few scars was a small price to pay for such a wonder.

A few scars, and the inevitably of Luke’s hatred.

Sheev thought of that: thought of Luke turning to him, the affection beaten from his body, with one familiar thing burning in his golden eyes. He thought of the scars that would litter his face. He thought of how that would upend their lives—the life that, right now, Sheev had found himself enjoying.

“If you do not,” Sheev said, “then I will.”

Sheev was a very good liar. Vader stiffened. Good—Sheev’s mind was still racing in dismay.

There would be another way to teach Luke hatred, surely. There were so many enemies to point him out. So much they could achieve by pitting him against them. He was sure there had to be another way—

But the fact that the Emperor Sheev Palpatine, Master of the Sith, needed another way was disgusting.

Why did he cringe from doing what was necessary? What threat was this?

A threat, he realised. That was all that it was: a threat. To him. To his empire. To the Sith themselves.

“I will give you a month to improve his training,” Sheev said. “After that…”

He squared his shoulders. His own hatred, a faithful dog at his side, reared its head inside his chest and sniffed the air. It growled—and for the first time, it growled in Luke’s direction.

Sheev steepled his fingers. “I will do what must be done.”

The aim of the Sith had always been to live forever.

Sheev had reams of notes on the subject. In the Sith Temple below his palace, he had his own laboratory, in which he experimented with tinctures and combed through texts so ancient they were written on flimsi. When they started to decommission the Inquisitors, when a Hand no longer served him well enough, he did not waste the Force-sensitives. It took trial and error to find what promised eternity.

Every subject died, but he did not care. On days when he had spent hours there, obsession overtaking him, the only thing that he cared about enough to break through that spell of intent was a tap on their bond from Luke, asking where he was.

He was still so young. So many years ahead of him—but not infinity. Never infinity.

If he found the secret, Sheev should take him too. Vader, as well. Vader was a useful tool, Luke even more so. The three of them could rule the Empire forever, with politics, force, and charm. In fact, he realised one day with disgust, it grew harder to picture eternity without them. Without Luke, at least.

Or rather, he could picture it perfectly. That was the problem.

The Sith stand alone, the spirits in the Sith Temple warned him. You have a weak heart, others spat.

The apprentice will kill the master. That is the way.

He will kill you. He will destroy all you have built. He will be the end of the Sith.

“The Sith will have no end,” Sheev muttered to himself in response, scanning the last paragraph. He could sense Luke wandering above, and he needed to return before the child tried to come down here looking for him again—as he was wont to do. The temple wouldn’t like that. “And neither will we.”

His research was a study of time—a measuring of precious centuries, years, minutes, seconds. One day, they would pass over him without impact. He would live untouched by time, engrossed in the full power of the dark side.

But when he went upstairs to see Luke wandering in his pyjamas, the boy ran at him to hug him. Sheev used the Force to pick him up and throw him, Luke shrieking with delight. And while Sheev had the heart of a Human, he had the head of a Sith, and he could not fathom fully the realisation he came to:

That no seconds were more precious than these.

The Senate gala was a yearly event, grand and luxurious. Sheev floated around on his cane, a red guard following to carry a tray with his drink, soaking up the atmosphere. Such misery, here. He had plans to dissolve the Senate in favour of his own total control, certainly, but he had to appreciate the utter cesspit it was—and had been for years, now. Greed coloured the actions of all. Greed and, among the more righteous, desperation.

They mingled and argued and smiled over blood red glasses of wine. Their dresses sparkled with the wealth of their suffering worlds. And every step, every barb of the tongue, every tensed muscle fed the rumbling machine of the dark side that fogged the air. Sheev breathed it in.

At these galas, he never had to fake his smiles.

Luke was here somewhere, he knew. Having already manipulated and intimidated the senators he needed to pay personal attention to, he scanned the crowd for him, spotting a bright head in a rich velvet coat by a pillar on the other side of the room. He moved toward him—it was always good to hear Luke’s opinion of events, to drill him on how to use these to their full advantage. Every day was an opportunity to teach. And a day like this, ripe for the dark side, more than most.

He did not anticipate Luke to be deep in conversation with Senator Leia Organa.

The boy leaned against the pillar and against his cane, managing to make it look natural and not like it was to save his back more pain. His attention, though, was riveted on whatever Organa was saying to him in a forcibly light tone. There were others in the circle, and it was with something far too close to dismay that Sheev recognised them: Senator Mothma, the constant thorn; Senator Jebel, a superior scowl wrinkling his nose; Senator Naberrie, Luke’s cousin, who was perhaps the person Luke’s age he was closest to. Sheev had never encouraged Luke’s fraternisation with Amidala’s family, but Vader had not let him stop it.

Was it her who had led Luke to this strange group?

Unless he was gathering information. Sheev relaxed at the thought. Yes—Luke was too intelligent, if he were to start sympathising, to meet with them in the open like that. More likely, he had let his cousin lead him here, and he was now listening to glean whatever he could about the rebellious senators’ plans. Divide and conquer was always an admirable strategy, and if they showed weakness, Luke could report back.

Sheev’s approach would ruin that, of course. But if that was indeed what Luke was doing, he would have gleaned enough already. He was a smart boy. And if it wasn’t…

Well. It always helped to remind people of the reality of things.

Luke clearly sensed him before the others noticed him. His shoulders stiffened, causing pain to flick across his face at the sense. Before Senator Organa finished speaking, he inclined his head to Sheev. “Grandfather.”

All the senators in the circle froze and whirled to face them. Sheev smiled genuinely—at Luke’s deference, and at their abject terror.

“Simply doing the rounds,” he said jovially. “Though I am glad you’re not neglecting your host duties either, Luke.” It was a subtle rebuke. Luke had been here for far too long, when his job as the prince was to mingle. To speak to as many people as possible.

A muscle twitched in Luke’s jaw.

Senator Naberrie turned to smile at him, dipping into a perfunctory curtsey. “Your Majesty,” she intoned, “you honour us with this celebration.”

She did not have her aunt’s or her cousin’s wit, unfortunately. “The honour is mine, my dear,” he assured her. “You have all more than earned this celebration with your service to the Empire.”

None of them liked that. His smile widened.

Senator Organa was staring at him, face hard as granite. Sheev put a hand on Luke’s arm. “Don’t let me interrupt you,” he said to them. “Please, continue.”

But Luke flinched away under his touch.

It was done subtly. He reached out a hand to Organa. “Leia was just telling me that she’s only recently learnt these new dances and asked me to test her,” he said, taking the chance to shake off his grandfather’s hand and step toward her. Unspoken words seemed to pass between them, because she nodded and took his proffered hand.

“Yes,” she said. “We were just going to dance.”

Luke had been so distracted trying to hide his flinch that he’d slipped up and called her Leia.

Sheev watched them go—watched them dance. They continued their conversation there, under the rhythms of the music. It might have been harmless. He doubted it.

He glanced down at his fingers and wondered why it felt like they burned.

It had been a long time since Sheev had had cause to be around babies. Children, even—not counting the Queen of Naboo, of course. Despite his galaxies of knowledge about infinitely useful topics such as Sith alchemy, trade and tax laws of the Republic, the history of certain clothing designs, art dealers and the art world, and, most importantly, how to manipulate people, he did not know how to hold a baby.

And now Vader was hovering at his shoulder. And Mas Amedda was standing, stock still beside him, radiating disdain. And there was a holocam in his face.

Sheev lifted Luke like he was presenting a particularly tall trophy. “Behold,” he said, weaker than he’d intended. “My grandson.”

Luke made a face as he shifted. At least one of the camera operators gasped.

Right. Not that way, then.

Sheev shifted his grip to Luke’s buttocks and lifted him up against his chest, so Luke was staring wide-eyed over his shoulder at Vader. Vader made an anxious noise. Luke farted. The smell sank into Sheev’s robes, and he worried something else might follow.

“One more moment, please,” he asked—he did not beg—the interviewer, whose carefully blank face blatantly belied her horror.

He pawed at Luke’s head and lowered him again, so he was horizontal. There were a few more gasps, and Vader definitely reached out at one point to either snatch the boy away or catch him when he inevitably fell, but he did not reach out far enough for the holocams to pick him up. Luke fell back into this grip with a happy squeal, staring up at Sheev with his blue eyes. He felt very fragile. Sheev brought his arms in to hold him a little more securely, right against his chest.

The interviewer breathed a small sigh of relief.

“Now,” she said with a winning smile, “we can begin. We’re coming to you live today with His Imperial Majesty, Emperor Palpatine himself! Alongside Lord Vader, and his absolutely adorable son—”

Luke was still watching Sheev, fascinated. Sheev watched him back. Unconsciously, he began to sway, and Luke gave a little coo when he did. He laughed. Sheev did not share his laugh, but he did watch him more intently.

The tiny twitch of the muscles of his face. His small, trembling noises. Those clear, expansive eyes…

“Your Majesty?” the interviewer was saying. It sounded like she’d repeated the question several times already. “How do you feel about this new addition to the Imperial family?”

Sheev didn’t feel the need to answer that.

“Do not touch that,” Vader said without looking up.

They were seated in the small living room that attached to the throne room, each studying their own matter. Sheev glanced up from Mas Amedda’s report on the new Naboo senator—and smirked when he saw Luke scowl and draw back his small fingers from the lightsaber at Vader’s waist.

“I just wanted to look!” he whined. “It’s harmless!”

“Nothing about a lightsaber is harmless.”

Luke pouted. “But—”

“Your father is correct,” Sheev said mildly, returning his gaze to the datapad. He sensed more than saw Vader glance at him, surprised at the support.

“I just want to see it!”

Sheev raised his eyebrows and locked gazes with Luke. “Your father said that once. Before he lost his limbs.”

Technically, it was true. He remembered young Anakin complaining that Kenobi hadn’t let him train with a lightsaber yet. That had been chronologically prior to Mustafar.

Luke went pale. “What?” he whispered.

Vader just nodded gravely rather than break the spell.

“He was very foolish when he lost his limbs,” Sheev continued. “He underestimated the lightsaber”—less true, and Vader was starting to glower at him for bringing it up, but Luke was still transfixed—“and he still pays the price today.” He shook his head. “Do not play with a lightsaber, Luke. You shall regret it.”

Luke stopped reaching for Vader’s saber and backed away. The crackle of Vader’s vocoder may have been a laugh.

“What about you?” Luke asked.

“Hm?”

“Was it a lightsaber that made you look ugly?”

Sheev’s gaze stayed, unseeing, on what he was meant to be reading. “Pardon me?”

Luke seemed to have realised he’d been a bit rude. He shuffled his feet and averted his gaze as he said. “Well… other people don’t look like you… Even the really old ones like Tuckin.”

“Tarkin,” Sheev corrected.

“Yeah. He’s ugly, but he doesn’t do it as well as you. No one does.”

Was that supposed to be a compliment? Sheev wasn’t sure. Luke had cried the first time he saw a normal looking Human being, having only been cared for by Sheev, Vader, and Sith acolytes like Vaneé, and droids before…

“Your grandfather,” Vader said, “was playing with lightning, rather than a lightsaber.”

Luke’s eyes went wide. “There was a storm?”

“You could say that.” Vader looked sideways at Sheev. He could feel his smiling under that mask.

“The ability to produce lightning is a very useful one,” Sheev attempted. He might as well take the chance to proselytise. “When you are older, I can teach you—”

“No!” Luke said hurriedly. Then: “Thank you.” He shuddered. “I don’t wanna be ugly.”

Sheev stared at Vader. That was definitely a laugh.

“All things come with risks, my boy,” he tried with a smile. “You can do nothing truly great without risking yourself.”

Luke considered this. “So I can play with the lightsaber?”

“No—!”

Vader knelt before him, and Sheev could feel the fury radiating off of him. He didn’t know what it was about—not yet—but he disliked it. Not in the least because…

“Where is Luke?” he asked. His unsettled feeling doubled.

Vader spat, “Gone.”

He still moved stiffly from their recent… disagreement. Sheev could see it in the way he knelt, the slow, stuttering struggle of the vocoder. It didn’t matter. Sheev wouldn’t show him mercy for that.

“Gone?”

“He sent a message.”

So gone meant that he had left. And left intentionally.

Where? And why?

“Show me,” he demanded.

Vader hesitated. “He did not send it to you,” he said. “He sent it to me.”

Sheev narrowed his eyes. “Show me, or—”

“He said that he is disillusioned with the Empire,” Vader continued before he could finish. “That he no longer believes in it at all. And he no longer believes in you. He told me I should have left earlier. That I should join him.”

Despite the stupid, soft pettiness of it all, Sheev thought he felt his heart stop in his chest.

“Has he defected to the Rebellion?” he asked, deadly quiet.

But Vader did not answer. Of course he did not. He would stand between Sheev and Luke until the death of the galaxy.

“Do you understand what humiliation this means?” Sheev hissed. “If the Imperial Prince himself defected—what does that mean for the rest of the Empire?” And Luke was such a popular figure. They’d created him as one. He was the role model for millions of young cadets across the galaxy. At events, he remembered their names and thanked them for their dedication to Imperial service. He was the better side of the Empire, everyone agreed.

Luke’s death would’ve been bad enough for Imperial PR—but his defection?

Even the better side of the Empire had given up on the rest.

But—and this only stoked what rage he did have further—his fury was not the first passion in his chest. At first, he hurt.

Luke had left.

Luke had rejected him.

Then he hardened his heart. He could feel the voices of the Sith in the temple beneath his feet crowing about his weakness, his ill-judgement. His jaw clenched.

“Find him,” he ordered.

“I will not,” Vader said.

“I was not speaking to you!” Sheev turned to his red guards. “You—find him. Track him down and drag him back here.”

Vader stepped forward, hand going to his lightsaber. “You will not hurt him,” he warned.

“One more step,” Sheev said, “and I will send you back to the medbay. You were only recently released.” He grinned, his teeth bared like an animal. “What good will you be to Luke then?”

Vader hesitated. Then he backed away.

At least the father could still be cowed. At least someone in this family—lineage, he berated himself, lineage—understood the power of the Sith.

He turned his thoughts to Luke. They had a Force bond—fainter than he’d like, and grown weaker over years of distance, but there—and he seized it now.

I will find you, he snarled. Did you think you could escape? I will find you, boy. And then—

And then what?

And then what?

People got hurt. It was what happened. For some reason, despite the enormous potential of some individuals—and the mediocrity of others, admittedly—it was stuffed into a sack of flesh as soft and useless compared to the Force as a sheath would be for a lightsaber. It was a sheath that could be beaten and forged into a blade in its own right, true. Physical training was as vital for the Sith as it was for the Jedi. But its inherent vulnerability couldn’t be denied.

Sheev stared at Luke. Luke stared back, his young eyes filling with tears.

He tipped back his head and wailed.

The cut was small, a part of Sheev observed. More a graze than anything else—he’d tripped in the garden, and the gravel had bit hungrily into his skin. He could still see it embedded, grey flecks among the increasingly red mess of his pale skin. The pain he sensed from Luke, who was unconsciously broadcasting it as loudly as his wailing, in a built-in survival technique that sort to get the child help as swiftly as possible, was minimal in the grand scheme of Sheev’s life. A graze was nothing.

But Luke’s life was not yet grand, and this pain was all-consuming for him. His knee burned like a star.

Sheev found he could not move.

“Use it,” he muttered. Luke didn’t even deign to respond to that advice; he wouldn’t know what it meant, anyway. He was too young. “Do not feel it. Use it.”

It was the best way he knew of ignoring pain. Pain did not have to be felt, when it could be deflected to others. It granted power—power to avoid it.

But this pain was no great power. It could flatten no army, the way Vader could, or flatten a kneeling supplicant with electricity, the way Sheev could. All this pain could do for Luke was hurt.

An attendant ran out to scoop him up, murmuring soothing words. Luke was carried away, his cries fading, leaving Sheev alone in the Palace gardens. A few drops of his blood still darkened the path.

Sheev shook his head. Luke was too young to teach, just yet—but he would have to learn, one day. That was not how to react to pain. One could never assume that someone would come to help. No one ever had for Sheev.

He had to save himself. He had to stop himself from feeling it—and from the risk of feeling it, ever again.

Luke would have to learn. If only to make sure he never screamed like that within Sheev’s earshot, ever again.

When the time came, he had to do nothing. That was the beauty of assassination: you ordered and paid someone to do it, and they took it from there. In many cases, it had been a point of frustration for Sheev. He liked to kill his enemies himself. He liked to see in their eyes that they knew who had beaten them. If it hadn’t been an unnecessary risk of exposure, he would have paid the assassins extra to deliver a message before the target died, so he could have as close to that experience as possible.

You paid the assassin. The assassin did the job. That was how it worked.

Except it wasn’t, because Sheev had still had to smile at Luke as he passed through the palace all day like a ghost. He wished he’d been able to walk right through him and only felt a chill. The boy had been so bubbly. So eager to see him. He’d smiled so much.

That was why he had to die.

Luke was a weakness. Sheev knew that. He weakened the Sith at both ends—master and apprentice—and refused to fill the power vacuum he created. Sheev still doubted the Sith spirits’ dramatics, in their claims that he would be the downfall of the Sith tradition itself, but he was certainly a problem. And Sheev had to rid himself of problems.

Sheev was not supposed to love anyone. He was Sith. And he would make sure he did not.

He did not torture himself by trying to watch Luke’s departure that afternoon. The boy was going to the military academy for some talk, some parade. To meet friends, possibly, or simply as part of his duties. Sheev had intentionally tried not to find out. All he knew was that the boy would go alone in a speeder, with only one red guard, who was expendable. The assassin would shoot from a neighbouring building, land an explosive charge on the speeder, and blow everyone in it to pieces. There would be a delay on the charge, of course, and the assassin would attempt to shoot Luke in the head at first. A swift death. Then, if that did not work, fire would finish the job.

Sheev sat on his throne, staring out at his empty throne room. He allowed no one in to bother him. All he could do was track the moving blip of Luke’s Force signature with the attention of a predatory bird.

He was the first to know when it faltered.

Pain shattered the Force. There was a sensation of falling—Sheev gripped the arms of his throne—and the light almost went out.

Almost.

The worst moment of Sheev’s life was when he sensed that frail, bleeding light out, alone, in the galaxy. On the edge of death. In pain. But not yet gone.

The assassin had failed. And the pain Luke was in wrenched at his chest.

What had he done?

Luke was still alive. Luke was hurt.

What the hell was Sheev supposed to do now?

Chapter Text

Vader was still in the medbay after his attempt to murder Sheev. Luke had visited him—Sheev could hardly have stopped him without drawing suspicion—and returned sombre. Vader was awake after his dip in the bacta, Sheev knew, so what had they spoken of? What had Vader told Luke about how Vader received those injuries?

If he told Luke anything, he would tell him the whole truth. Vader was not a good enough liar to dole it out piecemeal.

Did Luke know that Sheev was the one who had nearly killed his father? He must. No one else would have that power.

But did Luke know why they had had that fight? Did Luke know that Sheev had nearly killed him?

Sheev knocked on the door to Luke’s bedroom. Luke definitely knew it was him. They could sense each other in the Force like two powerful smells that mingled unpleasantly. But there was a long hesitation before—

“Alright. Come in.”

Sheev came in, leaning on his cane. Luke was seated on the sofa of his living quarters, staring out the window at the sky. In the distance, speeders zoomed past. His gaze tracked them idly, like a tooka who wasn’t really paying attention.

“Did you see your father?” he asked.

“Why did he try to kill you?”

Luke turned to face him directly as he asked the question, not giving Sheev the chance to avoid eye contact.

Sheev had to laugh—at the boldness, and at Vader’s stupidity. “He told you it happened but not the cause?”

“He didn’t tell me anything. He pretended to be asleep the whole time. I think he thinks he failed. And apparently he did, if you’re still alive. You’ve confirmed that’s what he tried to do.”

He had, hadn’t he? He was losing track. He was on the back foot.

“How did you deduce—”

“You’re the only one who knows how to spit karking lightning,” Luke spat. “Answer my question. Why did he try to kill you?”

Sheev could avoid the question. He could refuse to answer it. But Luke knew too much, now. How much longer could they evade the topic? Would they be able to bury it? Vader was an attack dog, but Luke was a dog in his own way, too. He never stopped digging.

It was a gamble. But the best way to manipulate him was… Sheev needed to—he wanted to—

“Because I tried to kill you,” he said.

Luke’s face froze in a controlled mask of dislike. He tilted his head slightly, away from Sheev; that was the only concession he gave. “What?” was all he could say.

“I was the one who ordered you assassinated. Your father finally found conclusive evidence.”

Luke was breathing hard. His hand flexed on his cane. He glanced down at it, and his expression hardened.

Sheev expected him to implode. Vader always did. Luke was emotional, foolish, driven—his father’s son in many ways.

But not all.

His breathing accelerated, heavy and rasping. His every muscle froze. But he did not break Sheev’s gaze.

“Why?”

That was the most obvious question to ask. It was the one Sheev could not answer. He flailed, groping around for words. He was fluent in multiple languages, but he could not handle this.

“You were a weakness,” he said. “The Sith do not tolerate weakness.”

“Get out.”

Sheev raised one of his eyebrows. “I beg your pardon?”

“Get out. Get out of my room. Get out of my life.”

Sheev said stiffly, “I am your grandfather.”

“If you don’t want to be,” Luke snarled, “you don’t have to.”

It was a humiliating indignation that seized him, then. Sheev glared at his grandson. “How dare you say that?”

“You tried to kill me!”

“I have not tried to kill you since!”

Luke stared at him. “Is that the best you can do?”

It was too much. The horrible emotions swirling in him, staring that boy down. The hunted, haunted look in Luke’s eyes. Sheev turned and left.

He did not flee. Sith did not flee.

But Luke did. It was a mere few hours before Sheev’s guards reported him gone.

“Get used to the feel of the lightsaber in your hand again,” Vader said, walking with his hand tucked behind his back around the training room floor. Sheev sat and watched intently as Luke ran through the kata, wincing as he did.

Vader noticed. Of course he noticed. Vader had been on edge ever since Luke’s accident, watching for the slightest threats to his son and his wellbeing. As if that could make up for the fact he hadn’t saved him from the fall itself.

“That hurts.”

“I’m fine,” Luke said.

“You are not.” Vader stepped up to take Luke’s hand in his, adjust it on the lightsaber, and arranged his stance so it strained his back less. “How does that feel?”

“Better,” Luke admitted.

“Do not overexert yourself. You will do more damage.”

Luke’s jaw clenched. “I know that, Father.”

“Use the Force to bolster your movements.”

“I know.”

“Your priority is healing—”

“I know!” Luke swung his lightsaber. It went right through the rack of wooden training sabers on the wall. They sizzled and fell to the floor with a clatter, neatly bisected.

Vader stared at them. Sheev stared as well.

“Excellent idea,” he said.

Father and son both looked at him as he stood up.

“Practice your movements and your control of the Force,” Sheev ordered. He lifted one of the wooden sticks with the Force, brought it toward him, and drew his own saber to slash it in half. “Then return it—with control—to the stack.” There was no proper stack to return it to, but Sheev sent it to rest gently on top of two other pieces. “It will get you accustomed to the coordination again.”

He tilted his head. “And it will be more interesting than katas.”

Luke scoffed. “Why?”

With a sweep of the Force, Sheev brushed all the sticks on the floor into a spin, clattering toward his legs. “Because it is something you have not already done a thousand times.”

“He does not need a challenge, master—” Vader began, but Sheev waved him off.

“I know you don’t want to be coddled, Luke,” he said to him. “So I will not. Complete this task. Occasionally, I will knock over your pile, and you will have to stack again. Are we agreed?”

Luke looked him over. He was still in pain; that still clouded most of his thoughts. But he gave Sheev a grin. “Alright.”

After some reluctance, even Vader joined the challenge. Within an hour, Sheev needed him: Luke had got too good at stacking them himself.

But by then, Luke and Vader were both looking at his lightsaber. It wasn’t working, they agreed.

Sheev watched them bend their heads together. For once, he didn’t feel the stab that meant he was excluded from their family bond. They were working on something, the two of them. Something to make life a little easier for Luke, even beyond the progress he’d made here.

He couldn’t be unhappy about that.

Sheev did not cry. Sith did not cry. But he had become an expert at summoning tears to his eyes at the correct moment, to truly sell his performances of sorrow and sympathy. It was the basic skill for a politician to have.

“Why did my mama die?” Luke asked him, clutching the front of his robe. Gently cradling him on his knee, Sheev considered his answer.

He was pleased that Amidala was dead. She was useless to him as an opponent, endlessly useful as an Imperial martyr. And her death left her husband and son in his clutches, unfettered by the chains of her insipid morality.

“The Jedi killed her,” he said gently. It was always good to foster a hatred of Jedi young.

Luke’s eyes widened, filling with tears. Sheev allowed his own to do the same.

Sheev continued, “We do not know how, exactly. She was injured and about to give birth when your father last saw her. The Jedi Kenobi stole her away, denied her the medical care we would have given her, and waited for you to be born. Once you were, he stole you and fled, leaving her for dead. We do not know if he simply let her die in childbirth in an unsanitary, uncivilised Outer Rim medbay or if he did it with his lightsaber. Your father rescued you and killed Kenobi a few days later.”

Luke looked traumatised. Sheev felt a twinge in his chest, but this was good. Implant the horror of the Jedi in the boy when he was still young.

“She died because of me?” he whispered.

“No!” His voice was louder and harsher than he’d intended. “She died because of Kenobi,” he said. “She would have been glad that you lived.” Now for the grand finale. He caught his breath, let tears spill over his cheeks in great floods, and said, “She would be so proud of you.”

Luke touched the tears on his cheek with a gentle finger. Then he leaned forward to hug him, cheek to cheek, so their tears mingled, fake and sincere alike.

“I miss her,” he said—a patently ridiculous thing, but Sheev did not object.

“I do too,” he lied.

Vader had sensed Luke’s injury at the same time that Sheev did. Medics swiftly came swarming to the rescue. Standing silently in the medbay of the palace, listening to what the chief paramedic was reporting, Sheev registered the story of the failed assassination in discrete, digestible steps.

The red guard had noticed the lurking assassin shoot the blast charge onto the speeder.

The guard had intercepted the shot meant for Luke’s head with his own chest and shot them in return before he died.

Luke, even as the speeder disintegrated in flames beneath him, had leapt away from the worst of the blast. He fell onto a duracrete landing pad below.

His spine had snapped like a twig, along with most of his bones. Burns ravaged his body. He was still breathing—but barely.

The paramedics had got to him soon enough for that.

Vader entered the room to see him, to consult on what they were doing. Sheev took a seat to wait with dignity for his return. He was the Emperor—grandson or not, he must not harass the stuff with panicked questions. He was meant to harass the staff with smoothly veiled threats.

Yet through the glass of the door, he could see Luke. His face was pale and bloody. His eyes were closed.

He could have died. He might still.

He was supposed to be dead.

There was heat on Sheev’s cheeks. He reached up to touch them—they were wet and sticky. Putting his finger on his tongue confirmed it: it was salty.

Tears.

Unbidden, unwanted tears.

He had not cried except as part of an act since he was a child.

His eyes roamed the room, piercing anyone who might look his way. Who might even have noticed that their great Emperor was crying. None met his gaze. Good.

He stood and strode for the exit. He must control himself. He must control himself. Vader would ask questions, later. They would all ask questions. He would have to spin a believable lie. But until then—

Until then, he would retreat to his quarters to… to plan.

His assassin had failed.

Luke was meant to be dead.

Sheev had not expected disappointment to feel so much like relief.

After Luke’s injury, he and Mara were definitely growing closer. Sheev knew that Luke could not sleep well after the assassination attempt. Every night, both he and Vader were woken by the tornadoes in the Force his distress caused. But one night, it stopped—and after a few days of quiet, Sheev spotted Luke padding toward Mara’s quarters in the middle of the night.

He knew that nothing was happening except sleep. He knew, because he monitored the bond he had with both of them, and both were slack with dreams.

That, almost, was even more baffling to him than the alternative would have been.

“Do not harm him.”

Vader had barged into Sheev’s office with neither invitation nor welcome. Sheev raised his gaze coolly from the latest report he had been perusing.

It was from a squad commander sent to recover Luke, after the boy had run away. No luck yet.

Vader clearly knew it. “He is a boy.”

“He is an adult and a prince. He knew what he was doing.”

“Do not harm him for this,” Vader said again. He wasn’t begging, but he might as well have been. “He will still be loyal, once he grows up. Once he has learnt the truth of the galaxy.”

“When will that be, Vader?”

“Do not touch him!” This sounded braver, this time, but Sheev only scoffed.

Vader was a coward, when it came to things like this.

“Spare me your poor, ungraceful attempts at implication,” he said. “And spare me your pleading for forgiveness. We both know that Luke has been on a dangerous, rebellious path for too long. I will tolerate it no longer. Once he is returned, I will take full measures.”

“Do not…”

Sheev raised his eyebrows. “Finish your request, Lord Vader, or I cannot grant it.”

The hatred he sensed from Vader nearly bowled him over.

“Do not kill him,” Vader said. “Do not try to kill him again.”

“It would save me a great deal of trouble!” Sheev snapped. “To say that the Imperial Prince was kidnapped and murdered by Rebels… he disappeared and never came back… When my men find him, that would be the most politically salient order for me to give!”

“I will kill you.”

Sheev just looked over Vader’s armour with scorn. “You have already tried.”

“Spare my son.” Vader knelt, then. Pathetic. “I will—”

“You will do whatever I wish you to do,” Sheev informed him. “And I will do what I wish.” He looked back at the report.

“I do not want him dead,” he added as an afterthought. He could almost hear Vader’s ears prick up at that. “One of my most promising Hands is with him.”

Vader deflated. “Jade.”

“To lose them both would be a blow. She would likely fight to protect him.” She loved him, he knew. How inconvenient. Was that why she had dropped everything to flee at his side? “And I still have use of a prince.”

“I…” Vader bowed his head. “You—”

“Get out of my office.”

Vader rose to his feet and left. Sheev blew out a breath.

He should have Luke executed. He knew that. His fingers were already reaching to type the orders.

He looked out of the window, a frown on his face.

“They’re staring,” Luke complained. The leaves of the Imperial Palace’s gardens rustled around them, and it was true: in the distance, far away enough for plausible deniability, there were a few lunching courtiers casting them curious glances as they walked.

“Then let them.” Sheev moved onward, his gait radiating gravitas, even as he barely spared the uncouth courtiers a glance. “You are worth staring at.”

Luke glared and hobbled after him, leaning heavily on his new cane. He’d picked it out himself, and it was made to his measurements, to be as perfect as possible. The handle was elegant and comfortable under his hand, the shaft of the cane gleaming. But Luke was clearly still getting used to it.

“Keep walking,” Sheev said. He tried to make his tone as warm as possible. “You will grow accustomed to it.”

“How long have you been using a cane?”

“Years, now.” He honestly couldn’t remember. At one point his bones started hurting. Good for the dark side and all that, but horribly distracting when he was trying to manipulate some poor fool.

Luke glanced at Sheev’s cane, black and plain. It was meant to be boring, just like his robes were. It indicated that he was done performing for the masses. But Luke had to ask, apparently, “Don’t you want to decorate it a bit?”

They rounded a pebble path that took them beside one of the gurgling fountains, and they both stopped to look at the spout of the water. It came out of the mouth of a stone fish, whose eyes were wide and bulging. Artistic, certainly. It also looked vaguely like the fish was drowning.

Sheev was taken aback. “Decorate it? Do you wish to decorate yours?”

Luke glanced down at his. “Yeah.”

“It was made to be perfect.”

“I could make it better.”

Sheev watched him thoughtfully. He gave Luke a small smile. “Show me.”

“See?”

Sheev stared at Luke’s cane. It was different, certainly. He’d had it lightly carved with swirling patterns that led the eye naturally to its base, the patterns filled in with thin filigree of a dark, familiar metal. The handle looked more comfortably smoothed down, jutting out at a right angle from the cane itself for his hand to rest on. The first chunk of the cane was thicker than the rest, holding more elaborate carvings, but at a glance Sheev couldn’t tell why, save for the handsome shape of it.

“A minor improvement,” he said. “But it is nice.”

Luke grinned.

His hands shifted. His left came up to grip the part of it that was thicker than the rest, while his right shifted the handle clockwise, then gripped the cane about halfway down its length.

The beam of a lightsaber shot out the top of the cane.

The plasma blade was the same length as a usual saber, but with the long, long hilt of the cane. Luke held it in front of him, stance wide, the muscles in his back shifting to accommodate.

“A lightspear,” Sheev said. He ignored what he always ignored: the fact that Luke’s lightsaber blade was not red anymore. By now, it was a very fetching pink. “Is that easier for you to fight with?”

“It hurts less.”

It was mostly true. Sheev could sense Luke was still using the Force to support himself and his back somewhat, to draw on and cancel out the pain. But he was impressed all the same.

“You are aware this will require a new duelling style.”

“I’ve fought with lightspears before.”

“You’ve always been talented,” Sheev agreed. He stood from his throne and approached so he was on the same level as Luke. “I imagine you will adapt to this soon enough. What will you do if your opponent attempts to cut through your staff?”

Luke spun the cane in his hands. “The metal filigree is cortosis,” he said.

Sheev grinned. “I see. And what if your enemy shoots at you? It is more difficult to defend against a blaster with a lightspear than a lightsaber.”

Luke drew his lightspear up and deactivated it, then reached behind him. From his belt, he drew his other lightsaber—the shorter one he trained with when dual-wielding. He flipped it in his hands a few times and lit it, weaving a small but expert web of defence.

“I can have both,” he said.

His lightsaber was a darker pink than his lightspear, yes. More rose coloured, while his lightspear barely blushed. But they were both still pink.

“May they defend you well,” Sheev said gallantly, ignoring all his other problems.

During the hunt for Luke and Mara, Sheev ordered that Vader hand over the message Luke had sent him. It was short and blunt—not the loving, intimate confession Sheev had been led to believe it was. That just made it worse. The fact that Luke had denied him even this in his flight cut to the quick.

Dear Father,

You know my issues with the Empire. You know my issues with you and Grandfather. We have argued many times, and I accept now that neither of you will listen to me as things are. You side with him too often. I accept that I can do nothing to help the causes I care about from my current position, for the simple reason that neither of you will let me.

Mara and I have left.

I do not know if I will see you again. Grandfather, I do not intend to. He told me that he tried to have me killed, so I do not harbour hope for him. I love you, of course. I do not know if that is enough. But if you think it is, come and join us. I’m sure that with sufficient effort, you could find me no matter where in the galaxy I might hide.

Your son,

Luke

It was not a kind message. That surprised him too. But Vader had not run to Luke, as Luke had offered. He’d stayed with Sheev.

He was a coward.

Luke had abandoned them both. Sheev should not feel this hurt—his anger should eclipse it, drown it out, prevent it from sapping him the way it did. He had abandoned many apprentices before. Being abandoned in return should invoke the rage and hatred that Maul had always held for him; the indignity and horror that Dooku had looked at him with in his final moments. But the hurt reigned supreme.

At least, he knew, Vader had not received much better treatment.

That, he would have to accept as collateral.

Something had changed since Luke’s injury. It had been a slow change, but it drew Sheev’s attention eventually. Despite the setback, despite the misery it all caused him, Luke had become the perfect Imperial prince.

No matter what pain he felt, he composed himself correctly. He laughed where needed. He showed appropriate concern when consulted on trivial matters and promised to follow up. Often, later, he would. A waste of his time, but useful for Sheev, if he maintained the illusion that the Empire cared.

He moved in exalted circles. And he moved with grace.

One day, he would make a fine emperor.

The thought disquieted Sheev for some time before he deduced why. For Luke to be emperor, Sheev would have to die. That was not the intent of the Sith Empire. He was to reign forever.

His acceptance—even excitement—for the concept that Luke might one day take his place was not merely undermining. It was sacrilegious.

But that wasn’t the only problem.

Luke was the perfect prince. He smiled when needed to. But he never smiled otherwise. His automaton actions were no doubt driven by passion—as all he did was—but whatever passion they carried, Sheev could not find it.

The more he performed, the more he retreated. It was flawless. It was exactly the sort of behaviour Sheev would have done himself at his age, to dazzle his peers and rise to the top.

But Sheev found he missed him.

That was the most distressing of all.

Sheev should have had them put in separate cells, after they were recaptured. When he checked the security camera footage, Luke and Mara were curled up, wrapped in each other’s embrace. Comfort gleaned from a mutual damnation.

Luke had always been like that. Sappy. Touchy. But Sheev had raised Mara never to tolerate so much as a gentle hand on her shoulder. It could always be used to strangle you.

Love had made her weak.

“What are you wearing?”

Luke whirled around at the sound of Sheev’s voice, looking sheepish. He’d been admiring himself in the mirror of his bedroom, posing in a green velvet blazer, a smart black tunic underneath it. Gold embroidery decorated both, tying the ensemble together.

He flushed. “Pooja sent it to me,” he said. “They all pitched in—a late birthday gift. Ryoo says it’s the fashion on Naboo.”

“Well, it is always important to stay fashionable on Naboo.” Sheev stepped forward and took the front of Luke’s blazer, undoing and redoing the buttons—he’d done them wonky. The blazer itself looked odd on Luke, almost too stocky for the scrawny teenager he was, but it wasn’t an unpleasant image.

“I really like it,” Luke said, turning back to the mirror. “I was thinking of asking Ryoo for more recommendations.”

Sheev’s mind whirled through the political implications of this. They had always been oriented toward Naboo, as a family—Vader’s insistence aside, it was good to make the Emperor seem relatable and rooted in his own culture, even as he benevolently governed over all the others. But their clothing, largely black and red in unspoken accordance with Sith and Imperial colours, had not indicated as much.

If Luke suddenly dressed like he would for Theed, he would look like a peacock at a funeral.

The political implications, however, had not been his first thought. Ugh.

“Why?” Sheev asked, unable to stop himself.

Luke blinked at him in the mirror. “Don’t you like it, Grandfather?”

“It is extraordinary,” he assured him. “But it is quite the change.” His tone grew subtler. “I had thought you were happy with your previous clothes. The black ones.”

“I was. But they’re just like yours and Father’s.”

Which was precisely why Sheev and Vader had liked to see him wearing them. “Is that a bad thing?”

Luke looked apologetic. “I want to do my own thing,” he said. “My mother’s wardrobe was very nice, maybe Ryoo will help me come up with something based on that…”

Teenagers, Sheev thought, disgusted at his own disappointment.

No rebellion was too small.

Sheev disliked how often he visited Luke in the medbay after his… accident. The experience itself was unpleasant. It always made him feel uncomfortable—guilty? He had never felt guilt in his life—and derailed his thoughts for the rest of the day.

Yet, he couldn’t stay away. He had to return to see Luke, even if the boy was in a medically induced coma. Even if he would not see or hear him. He had to look upon the face of the boy he had ordered killed. And looking at that face made him— made him—

He could still do it.

It would be easier, in fact. He was on the edge of death as it was. He could order the chief medic to allow him to pass, then once Luke was dead, kill her for failing him, so Vader would never learn the truth. This was what he thought, as he looked down at Luke’s face, and the sight made him…

He pushed a blanket over Luke’s chest. It was an old one; he’d had it as a child. The wool was soft and the scent comforting. Sheev told himself he did not know why he still had it in his own quarters, after all these years.

But he tucked it around Luke’s shoulders, and it seemed to him that some of the tension in that unconscious figure eased.

It made him smile.

Luke always made him smile.

Sheev took his hand. He frowned, but the smile fought its way back when he thought of Luke. He should talk to him. Tell him something.

“I…”

He paused.

“I remember when you were a baby,” he said, affection nearly breaking his voice in two. “I hardly knew how to hold you… Now look at you.”

Luke did not look. He couldn’t. But Sheev looked at him, and he wondered what magic had been worked on his own heart, for it to move in these strange ways. But more than anything else he wondered what he had done, and how he could have possibly done it.

“You’re all grown up,” he said. “I…”

No.

He wouldn’t say that.

He couldn’t say that.

But he thought it.

And even as his own revulsion caught up to him… the thought made him smile.

Luke woke eventually. And there was a long time when Luke was still in the medbay, recovering, that he could not eat solid food. Sheev hesitated upon hearing this—and upon hearing Luke complain about the nutritional paste that had been his fare for the last week. But there wasn’t anything to be done about that. The doctors insisted that it would be dangerous for him to eat anything solid; Sheev did not want to endanger him.

Again, perhaps the assassination could still be made successful if he died eating a solid food… But again, the thought died as quickly as it was born.

Instead, he sent someone to speak to the doctors. Solid foods could not be negotiated on. But flavour…?

There were some forms of affection that Sheev could bend himself to offer. Manipulation was a core trait of the Sith, after all. Hadn’t Plaguies done it to him?

“I’m not sure that place wants me there,” Luke observed. He’d stopped walking entirely, leaning heavily on his cane, and was watching the door up ahead with apprehension. Sheev had had the entrance to the Sith Temple recovered and built into an ordinary door, but it still lurked in the Force like an infected wound.

It was a bizarre thing to say, nonetheless. “You are not sure it wants you there?”

Luke raised his eyebrows. “This is where you wanted to bring me, Grandfather? The Sith Temple?”

“You knew it was there already?”

“You brought me here enough times as a child. And I can sense it, all the time. It doesn’t like me very much.” He pursed his lips, tilted his head, then let out a short laugh. “But its insults aren’t very good.”

Sheev had to snort. “No. None of the comments these spirits make are particularly… innovative. Quite inane.”

He turned back toward the entrance to the temple. It did look quite mundane, with the normal-looking door he’d had installed there. He knew a few Palace staff who’d got lost had stumbled in there and never returned. But he couldn’t have imagined their ghosts added any new life to the droning chorus.

Luke laughed out loud, then. “Just watch me,” he said to the door.

The temperature dropped. Sheev sensed it too. Luke laughed again.

“Typical. Throwing a tantrum.”

Ice crept along the walls. Sheev wondered what it had said to Luke.

“I don’t particularly want to see inside it, Grandfather,” Luke said. “What’s in there—trophies? Holocrons? I don’t need to memorialise whoever’s speaking to me now any more than their rantings already do.”

Sheev even shared a laugh at that. Luke was right, of course. The past Sith were irritating. Drunk on their own perceived grandeur.

The future of the Sith was right here.

“Very well,” he said, over-graciously, drawing another laugh from his grandson. “We shall return upstairs.”

The temple spoke to him directly for the first time today: Bring him here! We want him! We need to deal with him!

That just made Sheev enjoy leading Luke away more. They were annoying.

It was a tense few days before the red guards tracked Luke down. In that time, Sheev realised someone else was missing: Mara Jade, his most loyal hand. He ground his teeth together when he finally received notification that they were being brought in.

“Do not inform Vader,” he ordered. “Put cuffs on the both of them to block the Force.”

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

His hand came up to pass over his face, entirely unbidden. When he realised what he was doing, he dropped it with disgust.

His throne room stretched, endless, around him. Every footstep echoed grandly. That was intentional in the design. It intimidated. It sprawled. It reminded his visitors of his grandeur.

And it emphasised, in the complete and total silence that descended once the red guard who’d served as messenger retreated, how alone he was.

When Luke was a boy, he’d sat on the arm of Sheev’s throne, chattering away to him. Sheev had cancelled meetings for him. He’d been content to sit with him, side by side, and watch their empire twinkle beyond the vast transparisteel windows.

Luke was no longer a boy. Now, he was a man—and a rebellious one at that. One who no longer accepted his grandfather’s orders.

Sheev narrowed his eyes.

He had other work to attend to. He hoped that would take his mind off the issue of the two Rebels in his cells, awaiting his verdict, but of course nothing would. Had Luke truly thought he could escape his grasp? Had Luke truly run away?

What false hopes had he and Mara been peddling to each other to even think this might work?

And still, Sheev’s chest stung at the knowledge that Luke had sent his father a message explaining everything… but not him.

As if Vader was any better than him. Sheev was superior, in every way. He had coddled Luke when Vader was angry with him. He had plied him with treats and attention when he wanted. And he had taught him to be strong. Sheev was the greatest Sith that had ever lived, and he had deigned to give Luke not only a minute, but years of his time. Vader was a pathetic, indecisive child who knew nothing but servitude.

But Luke loved Vader. And it seemed he did not love Sheev.

“Bring him here,” he barked at last, startling the red guards from their posts. “Bring my grandson here now. We must speak.”

He steepled his fingers, sitting on his throne, haunted by the warmth of a hug pressed into his side that had not been there for many, many years.

“Alone.”

Chapter Text

Sheev ignored Luke’s presence in the cells for as long as he could, but his thoughts kept wandering to him. It was hideous. He was meant to be better than this, but here he was, brought low by the betrayal of an uppity brat.

His red guards had handed him Luke’s cane, when they reported back to him. Sheev had ordered they provide him with a different cane, should he need to walk anywhere—if he was to try to sway him back onto Imperial terms, humiliating him would not help matters—but naturally allowing the boy access to a lightspear while in captivity would be a poor choice. Now, Sheev sat in the living room of his own quarters and stared at the cane.

He ran his fingers along it, the cortosis filigree cool under his fingers. It was so full of Luke’s intent, his thoughts. Sheev put it down and strode away.

But he couldn’t ignore it for long. A moment later—he had no memory of how the moment had arrived—he had opened a drawer, and pulled out… doodles. Old sketches of Luke’s. The Force had been moving through his memory, it seemed, because even as a child apparently Luke was drawing lightspears and wondering how to adapt the standard lightsaber into one. There were other sketches there too—of a whip, of two, vibroblade-length sabers, of a blaster…

He shoved the sheets of flimsi back into the drawer. They had clearly once been tacked on the wall. He had no idea why he still had them.

That was a lie. He had so many old drawings of Luke’s. So many holos. So much memorabilia.

Why had he grown to be such a collector? Vader had been struck with the curse too, he knew, but Sheev should have been immune. Luke was not his brat. It should not be his burden to bear, this bizarre sense of accomplishment when he saw the man he had become. Nor this horrible fear at the realisation that he was not the man Sheev had wanted.

When Maul had failed him, Sheev had let him die. As he had with Dooku. Luke, in running, had failed him.

But he thought of those sketches, and he smiled.

He looked at Luke’s precious cane, his lightspear, and smiled.

Creative as ever.

Determined as ever.

This was something none of them could run from.

The noise of the party wrapped around the three of them, clapping over their ears like cymbals. Sheev glanced down as they walked in, aware of a tiny fist in his robes.

Luke was gripping his father on his other side too, like a monkey trying not to fall out of a tree. His face was white as a sheet.

He stage-whispered, “Are you sure this is safe?”

“The party?” Sheev asked, laughing to let him know that there was no fear here.

“I will protect you,” Vader intoned, totally undermining the effect.

“You are safe,” Sheev added, glaring at Vader. “There are a great many people, but they will be nice to you.”

“You do not have to talk to anyone you do not want to,” Vader said.

“Right.” Luke did, actually, that was the point of bringing him here, but Sheev needed to get him in the door first. With gritted teeth, he smiled. “This is perfectly safe. We are both here with you.”

Luke looked up at him. “You’ll keep me safe?” he whispered.

“Yes.”

“Both of you?” He looked up at his father.

Vader placed a hand on his shoulder and squeezed. “Of course.”

“Always?”

They both hesitated. They exchanged a look.

“Always,” they said as one.

Luke relaxed as they made their promise. Then, and only then, did he let them guide him into the turbulent heart of the Empire.

“Silence!”

Luke glared at him, cheeks flushed. “No!” he said. “You won’t listen to me—”

“It is hard to listen to your impertinent squawks,” Sheev informed him, but that just made Luke angrier. He was so useless. Full of passion, unable to touch any of it, only able to flap his mouth and cause issues.

Luke scoffed. “You’d rather label my words meaningless than actually engage with their meaning? That suggests you know I’m right.”

“It suggests that I am tired of you never knowing when you are beaten. You parrot weak, pathetic arguments constantly and when I explain to you why—”

“You never provide a satisfactory answer!”

Their arguments were too frequent, now. The headstrong currents of the teenage years, perhaps. Or the ghost of Amidala rearing her head. Either way, Sheev despised it.

“No one is ever truly satisfied, Luke.”

But Luke had calmed himself down again. Sheev could see it in his face: he was ready for another round.

“Why do you need a Death Star, Grandfather?” he hissed. “Explain it to me again.”

“I have explained it to you many times.” Curse Tarkin for telling Luke about it in an attempt to gain the boy’s ear and confidence. Curse Luke for never letting anything go. “You are young. If you still do not understand, be silent until you do.”

“I will never understand,” Luke promised him.

Sheev hated the ring of truth in his words.

When Luke reached his sixteenth birthday, the present he treasured most was the gift from his father.

This was unusual. Vader was not one who had been trained in the art of giving suitable gifts. Sheev knew how to make his thoughtful and meaningful, while Vader’s were just explicitly doting but not entirely resonant. He had apparently learnt how to fix this problem by now, however.

For Luke’s sixteenth birthday, he gave him a piece of wood on a string.

Sheev watched Luke cradle it, a faint awe on his face. Whatever he sensed from the item, it was clearly a powerful sensation. It looked vaguely familiar, but he couldn’t place it.

“I carved it for your mother when first I met her,” Vader informed him. “It was recently recovered for me. She would be delighted for you to have it.”

That was where he’d seen it before, Sheev realised. It had been at Amidala’s funeral. Had Vader robbed her tomb?

It didn’t matter. Luke looked like he’d been handed a galaxy. He hugged his father as tightly as he could without hurting his back and closed his eyes.

“Thank you,” he breathed.

Why did that chunk of wood mean so much to him?

Sheev had never seen the appeal of heirlooms. He enjoyed art, certainly. If one inherited something from one’s family—and indeed, he had inherited everything once he had killed his family—and it was either tasteful or useful, that was a cause for excitement. But this snippet was neither. It was only the sentiment Luke stuck it with that gave it its power.

Why would one feel that connection with those who had come before them? Sheev had hated his father. And his master, with whom he’d spent far more time… Well, he had kept the experiments Plagueis had so obsessively held onto. But those were useful.

Nobody had ever given Sheev any sentiment worth remembering.

At least… not many had.

“Do you like it?” he asked. Luke’s joyful tears were the only response.

The red guards brought Luke to his throne room in binders. They weren’t binders that cut him off with the Force—that cruelty had not yet been called for—but they were ones with a sufficiently tricky mechanism that it took time and focus for even Force-sensitives to break. And for once in his life, Luke was too busy holding his head high to fiddle around.

Sheev watched him from atop his throne, affecting the same casual stance and expression he always wore when a prisoner was dragged before him. The guards forced Luke to kneel. Luke didn’t fight too hard, but he didn’t bow too low, either.

“Leave us,” Sheev commanded. The guards did.

Sheev shook his head. “Explain yourself.”

Luke shrugged, a bitter twist to his mouth. “I don’t know what you want me to tell you.”

“The truth,” Sheev’s fingers started to tap rhythmically on the arm of his chair, “would be a start.”

“I know you’ve seen the message I left my father.”

“So that was it?” Sheev’s mouth curled into a mocking smile. “You simply cannot stand us anymore? You have more noble causes to which to dedicate yourself?”

“I won’t stay here. I won’t stay in a palace that worships evil.” Luke looked him up and down. “With a cult that worships pain. The galaxy deserves better than this. I deserve better than this—and so does Mara. What is this all for, Grandfather? Power?” His voice rose, until it echoed off the ceiling. “What’s the point?”

“Mara,” Sheev repeated. “Did you have to ruin my favourite agent alongside yourself?”

“Favourite? You never showed her that. It took so long for her to stop hating me for the fact you seemed to love me, and it took even longer for her to realise that your behaviour was not her fault. She deserves more than anyone freedom from Sith corruption.” He shook his head. “Do you understand love?”

“Of course.” It made people weak. It meant he could manipulate them.

Luke shook his head. “You don’t know anything.”

“I certainly know more than you, boy.”

Luke looked up at him. Then he got to his feet.

He stood there, hands still cuffed in front of him, feet spread wide and strong. His shoulders were set. He stared up at Sheev, and for a moment he could have rivalled the greatest generals for gravitas.

“I mean it,” he said, “when I say that I will not stay here. One way, or another. I will not be party to the Empire. I will never join it. Do you understand me?”

“If I could understand you, we would not be here.”

“I will not stay,” Luke repeated. “But I love you. And I believe that you love me. It’s a karking stupid belief. Mara has told me that. My father has told me that. But I think you’re a sad old man who’s spent so long choosing hatred that he doesn’t realise there’s anything elsse. And I think when you said that you haven’t tried to kill me in years, that’s the best admission of affection I could have expected from you.

“So I have some demands of you. I think you can do them, if you choose to. But if you don’t…” Luke trailed off. He looked infinitely sad. “There’ll be nothing else to talk about.”

Sheev tried to inject amusement, and not deadly terror, into his voice. “And what demands are these?”

“I know you can’t build anything. All the Sith can do is destroy. Everything significant you have ever created has been on the backs of others’ suffering. You cannot heal without inflicting pain. You had to rot the Republic to make this shell we live in today. And even this building,” he waved his hands around, “is the ghost of a once great Jedi Temple.”

“Get to your point.”

“So this should be a simple ask, Grandfather.” Luke’s tone flattened. “Burn it all down.”

Sheev laughed. “I beg your pardon?”

“The Empire. Make it a trading community, or a commonwealth—I don’t know. Diminish it. Destroy it. And destroy that starsforsaken Sith Temple below our feet. The Sith have been eating their young for as long as they’ve existed. Your philosophy will self-destruct. You hated your master. My father hates you. But I won’t train ever again. There are no more children to feed to the fire of this vanity!”

Luke stared at Sheev, a fire in his eyes. And Sheev found himself at a loss for words.

“You were captured in your attempt to abandon us,” he said. “You are hardly in the position to be making demands.”

“I’m making them anyway.”

His lips pulled back from his teeth, and then further, into something that was half-smile, half-snarl. “Let me know your decision.”

He turned and walked out of the throne room without being dismissed. But Sheev didn’t try to stop him.

Tarkin was in the middle of presenting his plans for restructuring the governance of the Arkanis sector when Luke raced in, small enough to duck cleanly under his elbow, and leapt into Sheev’s lap.

Sheev was, thankfully, not quite as old as the lightning scars left to him by Windu made him out to be, and absorbed the small boy’s jump with the Force (and the questionable strength of his knees). He caught him, and Luke immediately ducked under his arm and wrapped a scrap of his robes around him.

Tarkin was staring. Sheev said, “Continue.”

But Tarkin had spotted an opportunity. “I had brought a gift for His Highness, as I said earlier,” he pushed, eyes fixed on Luke. Ever since Luke had joined the court, Tarkin had seen him as a chance for further advancement, to ingratiate himself as a potential adviser for the new heir once he grew old enough to need one. Luke had never had any interest in him, but Tarkin was still trying. “I am assured by my son that his daughter loves the newest line of models from the Imperial Toy Company, and I have what my aide calls the special edition run of deathtroopers as a gift for him—”

Luke’s head was under Sheev’s arm. He wasn’t sleeping, but he wanted people to think he was.

“Luke has fallen asleep,” Sheev said. “But as I said earlier, I will deliver your gift to him when he is in the mood to appreciate it.” Luke probably would like the model toys. But he still wouldn’t like Tarkin.

Sheev fixed Tarkin with a look. “Continue,” he repeated, tone dangerous.

Tarkin continued. Once he was done, and Sheev had waved through his suggestions, he and his attendants filed out of the room, leaving it empty save for Sheev, Luke, and the guards. Luke finally poked his head out, then.

“Thanks, Grandpa,” he said, yawning for real by now. Sheev didn’t know why Luke liked cuddling him in that specific way—perhaps he found the scent of his robes relaxing? He refused to acknowledged the melting sensation in his chest at the thought—but he did not complain. Having him right there, in his arms, made him easier to control.

Theoretically.

Luke hopped up to sit on the arm of his throne, slouched against Sheev’s shoulder. “Dad wants me to do my homework.”

Sheev wasn’t entirely sure what homework a child as small as he could have, but he put on a sympathetic expression anyway. “I’m sure that is very arduous. If you stay here, he can’t force you to do anything.”

Luke grinned and leaned against his should. “I love you, Grandpa.”

Sheev said nothing. He put an arm around Luke, and he thought of Tarkin’s gift. Never before had he considered toys as a method of bribery, or ingratiating oneself with a child. Or making the child happy.

Perhaps he should look into it.

Vader was still injured and limping when he came to see Sheev. The damage their fight had done to him was made more obvious by the strain Luke’s flight had put on him, and he looked more pathetic than ever when he joined Sheev on the balcony beside his throne room.

Sheev could not draw pleasure from it. He felt pathetic himself. It was disgusting.

“You have heard his demands,” Vader said. It was not a question.

Sheev looked disdainfully over Vader’s weak and trembling form, then back out over the balcony’s view. The sun was setting over Coruscant. It was beautiful, according to all the artists and poets who had ever beheld it. All Sheev had ever seen when he saw the crimson clouds was blood.

But that wasn’t true, was it?

That was the curse Luke had forced on him. The ability to see through another’s eyes—not to manipulate, but just to understand. He thought of that useless crystal Luke had made him buy in the market, so many years ago. He thought of the fact that he still kept it. Not under his pillow, as he was meant to. But he kept it, all the same.

Sheev wondered, now, what it was that Luke saw looking at the sunset. It would be different to what he saw when he had been younger. Sheev did not understand his grandson as well as he once did.

“I cannot accede to them. You must realise that. This Empire is forever.”

Vader, unexpectedly, agreed with him. “It is the only way to maintain peace in the galaxy.”

Of course Vader would think that, in hindsight. It was Sheev who had taught him that.

“This is the pinnacle of the Sith. We are the greatest of our line. And we have waited thousands of years for this victory. I cannot scupper it for a child!”

“The Empire is forever,” Vader repeated. “Will we be?”

Sheev cut him an irritated glance. “What?”

“Will you live forever? Will Luke?”

“That is the prize of all Sith,” he snapped. “Eternal life.”

“Luke will not be a Sith. It hurts him.” Vader said it matter-of-factly. No fury. No protective vigour. He knew his son, it seemed.

Had he spoken to him? Where had this contemplative nonsense come from? Vader was a blunt instrument. Hammers did not philosophise

“It hurts me,” Vader added. He gestured to his broken body. “Being Sith is meant to hurt.”

“It brings power.”

“The power does not prevent the hurt.” A beat. “Has it hurt you, master?”

Sheev rounded on Vader so fiercely he was sure his eyes blazed. But Vader, for once in his measly life, did not flinch.

“Why do you do it?” he demanded, fearless and frustrating. “What are the Sith for?”

“Power!”

“What is power for? I have burned my life and my loves for the Sith, for this empire,” Vader continued, “so tell me why!”

“I built this empire for—” But he stopped.

Revenge. He’d wanted the Jedi dead.

Influence. He hated kowtowing to lesser beings than himself.

Prestige. He was the greatest Sith that ever lived. Everyone else should recognise that.

Every reason he uttered to himself was so inane.

So… pointless.

“To bring peace,” he bit out, “to the galaxy.”

“I cannot speak for the rest of the galaxy,” Vader said. “But Luke is not at peace.”

Sheev let out a breath.

“No,” he said. “He is not.”

There was a campfire in the garden. Not that Sheev had ever been camping—he had far better things to do with his time—but apparently Luke and Mara were willingly spending time with each other and had lit one. He only caught it in passing. A glimpse of their faces lit by orange light, an echo of distant laughter, before he and his guards walked farther into the palace. He wanted to intrude, but he didn’t want to be seen to intrude.

Still, it had been so long since he and Luke had spoken truthfully.

He wanted to know what he was telling Mara.

It was their laughter that kept him away. They were enjoying themselves—enjoying each other’s company. And that seemed too fragile—too terrifying—to breach.

“Do you love him?” Sheev asked Mara one day.

It was an unrelated question. She was knelt before him, reporting on the sabotage of a Rebel cell she’d carried out as seamless as ever. But his thoughts wandered during the monotony of the routine, and he thought it best to ask her when her guard was down.

Her back tensed, but she was too disciplined to look up. “Luke?” she asked. It was a valid clarifying question—he encouraged her to ask those, to ensure precision in her assignments—but in trying to buy herself time, she’d made another slip.

She corrected it too late. “His Highness?”

Sheev smiled thinly. He nodded.

Her shoulders rose and fell—the only thing that betrayed her suddenly rapid breathing. She scrambled for words. “We are… close.”

“Do you love him?” he repeated.

“You have taught me not to love. It is a weakness that wielders of the dark side should not touch.”

Another evasion, but not a lie. And it was sufficient to distract him. He had taught her that. That was what she should say and do.

So why did his heart sink?

Because love was easy to manipulate, he told himself. Because love was blind.

But he suspected Mara might see Luke even more clearly than he did, these days.

“Would you let anything hurt him?” he asked instead.

Her answer—a rapid, emphatic, “No!”—was good enough for him.

“Do you love her?” he asked Luke later, when they were discussing the latest bill that had been posed to the Senate. It was one that would heavily tax Naboo again, and Luke was concerned about what had happened the last time, and he was so caught up in that worry that he was surprised by the question.

But Luke did not try to equivocate. “Yes,” he said, and he stared at Sheev like he expected him to object.

When Sheev said nothing, Luke added, “I love her more than myself.”

Luke had distrusted him, recently. Sheev wondered why he would confide this, when he no longer confided anything else.

Did he expect him not to understand?

Sheev just nodded. “I am glad,” was all he said.

“What do you have to add?” Sheev snarled.

Mara Jade hadn’t knelt when she was shown to his throne room, just as Luke hadn’t. Instead, she just stood and looked up at him on his dais, her arms crossed in front of her because of the binders but still somehow portraying more defiance in her frame than he’d ever seen in her.

She must know that the immunity Luke enjoyed did not extend to her. She must know that she was a tool, to be used and discarded if broken—nothing more.

“Nothing,” she said.

Of course she did. That may well have been why she did it.

Sheev raised an eyebrow. “Nothing to add to the vitriol Luke spews?”

She was silent.

“Then explain yourself instead. Your actions are your own, whether you love him,” he said the words with disgust and disdain, “or not. Why did you leave? Why did you betray me?”

“You don’t care,” she said.

Fury gripped him by the throat like the jaws of some ferocious beast. It flooded out of him, through his fingertips, until Mara was writhing on the floor, the skin around her wrists burnt from the binders. But she just lay there, twitching, until it passed, even though the pain must have been enormous. She did not use it to bolster her own power. She did not resist it. It flowed over and through her, then it was gone.

Sheev lowered his hand.

She pushed herself to her feet. “You do not care what I think,” she said. “You have never cared what I think—only what I can do for you. I do not know what Luke sees in you, and I do not care to look.”

“What made you think like this?” he snapped. “What turned you to this treason?”

“You have never listened to me,” she said. “And I have nothing to say to you.”

He wanted to throw her across the room again. If she would not speak, he wanted to make her scream. But she narrowed her eyes, and he was reminded of just how much pain Mara Jade could endure.

He was reminded of how much pain he had already made her endure.

Never had he paid more attention to her than needed. Her tutors did that for him—their occasional chats were just to make sure she was loyal. Until Luke showed an interest in her, Sheev had had little interest of his own. Even when he had, Sheev had indulged it out of that despicable softness he had for the boy, not for any personal reason for her or himself.

Perhaps that was the issue. Only had he paid attention to her when she interacted with Luke. Luke was the important thing—and that in itself an unpleasant thought. Her story could not intrigue him less.

Why would she tell it? Even now, he only asked to learn how he himself could have manipulated her better. Even now, he did not care about her.

That would not change.

“Take her away,” he ordered. “If she will not speak, I will not listen.”

But he watched her go and wondered what role she had played. What he had missed, in his own palace, simply because he had not cared.

After Vader left him, the storms rolled in. Sheev retreated from his balcony but still watched Coruscant, as the planned storm flashed and crackled above them. The clouds were letting off steam. The lightning seemed to fill him with an electricity he’d been lacking.

What were the Sith for?

What was power for?

It had always been something to be gained for its own sake. So all would respect him. So all would bow to his will. But why did that matter?

It had mattered in itself, once, he knew. So perhaps the more apt question would be: what had changed?

But Sheev was not a fool. He knew what had changed. And he knew what he had spent all of Luke’s life trying to deny to himself, only causing them all pain along the way. Pain that wasn’t even productive. Pain that just… hurt.

He loved Luke.

It was demeaning. Pathetic! The Sith of old would spit on him, glower, turn their backs. They would gossip among themselves what a failure he was—him! The jewel of the Sith, the one who had finally accomplished their plan and achieved all they had built. They would scorn his weakness.

But that was all they could do. They were dead.

They were dead, and he was alive.

Luke was alive too. For now.

He blew out a breath. It fogged up the glass, hiding the stormy night. Lightning forked behind the fog, until the glass glowed white. Then it faded—as all things do, in time.

Luke had been a child, once. A tiny baby, who laughed when he saw Sheev and demanded to be held. He had been a rambunctious little boy with more enthusiasm than sense. And he had been a good, loving grandson, before everything fell apart.

The storm dissipated. He hardly noticed it go. Time passed so quickly, but there was a smile on his face.

Awful. Terrible. Weak.

What an old fool he was.

“Dad says I have to go to a school.” Luke’s small nose crinkled at the thought.

Sheev patted the sofa beside him, and Luke hopped and crawled up to sit there. “Do you not want to?” he asked, as kindly as he could. Isolating the boy could be useful—

Luke mumbled something.

“What was that?”

“I don’t know any other kids,” he said in a rush.

Sheev hesitated. “That… is why you are being sent to school, as I understand it.”

And because the boy was a terrible distraction. They needed him out of the palace, so he could stop waylaying Vader and Sheev at crucial times. The school was the best on Coruscant, attended by the highest echelons of the Imperial elite, and they would be well-prepared to teach Luke everything he’d need to know as a future leader of the galaxy. And they would be well-prepared to keep him from running off to distract his very important father.

“It’s scary,” Luke insisted.

“Does your father know your reservations?” Sheev asked.

“He says I have to go anyway.”

This was a chance to separate them, to drive a wedge between them. If Sheev became the person who would give Luke what he wanted, then Vader would have to play catch up—

“You do have to go anyway,” he said. “You need to learn.”

“I don’t want to learn. I want to stay here with you.”

Horrible, these heart palpitations. He should really get them looked at.

“You cannot do that,” he said bluntly. “But I will still be here when you return. You can tell me about what happened. It will not be as bad as you think.”

Luke blinked. “You promise?”

“Of course.”

“You’ll be here? Still? I can come straight back to talk?”

“I’ll be here forever, Luke,” Sheev said. It was the ultimate aim of the Sith, of course.

But he didn’t think the Sith had meant it for this.

He sent for Luke once he made his decision, and even ordered that the red guards return his cane to him when they fetched him. Then he stood on the balcony of his throne room and waited.

The sun was just starting to rise. The skyline was crimson.

Luke’s distinctive three-step gait echoed behind him, bouncing and echoing in the harsh acoustics of the throne room. Sheev turned to beckon him out here; Luke narrowed his eyes, but he limped out to meet him, wasting no time in leaning against the balcony railing. He clutched his cane with an intensity borne of relief.

“You’ve decided, then?” Luke asked bluntly.

Sheev looked out over the skyline. It hadn’t changed—not since that very first time he set foot on Coruscant as the new senator. The spires still sparkled, while the unfortunate denizens of the undercity toiled beneath them.

“Ask me again, Luke,” he said. “Ask me anything. What do you want?”

Luke bit his lip. “I want you to be good,” he said. Then: “I want to be proud of you.”

He sucked in a breath. His frail, unused heart stumbled. For a moment, he struggled to breathe.

What weakness. What tenderness.

What joy.

“I will try,” he promised.

The voices clamoured their pain. They wailed and wailed. Sheev’s skull throbbed from their shrill protestations. It did not matter.

Vader threw the barrel. Its lid cracked off; the barrel rolled down the hallway, belching gasoline across the stone floor. The fire already raging in the lower levels would reach here soon. It would all go up in flames.

So would the Palace. If Sheev had to destroy the Sith Temple, he would destroy the remains of the Jedi Temple too. But everyone had been evacuated.

Luke had insisted.

Vader was enjoying this, Sheev could tell. The last dying screams of the Sith spirits cursed him, called him Chosen One, foolish one. He had destroyed the Sith. He, his son, and his master.

Their… family.

All the Sith knew how to do was destroy. Perhaps Luke had been right. The only thing a Sith Empire would be able to do in the long run was burn itself down.

But if he wanted to keep what precious love he had ever learned, he would have to burn it down himself.

You cretin! they howled. Traitor to us all! Harbinger of our success, harbinger of our doom, what have you done? What weakness you have festered! What an end to our millennia of work!

What an end to it all indeed. An end that matched the journey, with flames, and screams, and pain. And with regret still gnawing at his chest. He was Sith. He was destroying that which had made him.

The apprentice always killed the master. That was what they had taught him. Sheev had always been a good student.

But he was ready to learn something new.

The next year, the annual family portrait was a holo. Sheev did not compromise on quality, of course—he still employed the most expensive and acclaimed holophotographer from Naboo, just as he had with the oil paintings. When the press squawked their questions, he waved a hand and spun tales about a more galactic view. Less provincial. More modern. Whatever got them to shut up.

It was still hard work, of course. But Luke did not have to sit in an uncomfortable chair for days on end, aggravating old injuries. The photographer took several holos of them all in various places around the palace. In the throne room. In the gardens. Even in their personal living rooms.

Sheev’s favourite was of the latter. Luke was sat next to him on the sofa, his father towering behind them both, with his cane held loosely between his knees. Sheev’s hand was on his knee; Vader’s on his shoulder. Another time, that might have indicated that he was about to bolt. But Luke sank into the touch gratefully and affectionately. When he smiled broadly at the holocam, it was the same smile he had just flashed at his grandfather, after Sheev murmured a sly observation about the photographer’s nerves.

Immediately after, Luke had thanked the photographer and gone to find Mara. Sheev had let him go so that he and Vader could choose the holos they would use.

They had chosen, of course, the one where Luke wore the broadest smile.