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Sometimes, floating in the blackness of space, Leia thinks about the things she’d like to ask Ekkreth. She can’t do this often - there is the rebellion to think on, and then her shared training with Luke and then, chasing the heels of both, comes her grief for her parents and all of Alderaan. But sometimes, when she has a moment, she thinks of Ekkreth.
The first question is obvious. What made you turn? Had Vader always been loyal and something had changed his mind? Had he always hated it and one thing finally pushed him over the edge, pushed him to chose? Had he simply changed his mind on a whim? Ekkreth did not strike Leia as a fickle man.
What made you turn? Leia wants to ask. When you don’t even believe in democracy, what made you decide to help us?
The next question is harder. Harder to say, harder to find the words for. What do you mean, sometimes? What don’t you tell me? Why did you say my name like that? What is that language? Where does Depur and Ekkreth come from? Is Ekkreth your original name? Is it something else?
It didn’t happen often but sometimes… he would say her name like it wasn’t Alderanian, like it didn’t mean beloved. He said it as though it made her dangerous. He uses the word Depur but its not a word in any language she knows. She doesn’t understand this, the weight he puts on her name, where Depur comes from, where Ekkreth comes from. She can’t imagine Vader would use his own name for a codename, not knowing how eager Palpatine was to find and kill him. But the name has the same sounds as some of the words he has said. The same as the words he said to her when they faced Tarkin.
She doesn’t know what connects it all, but there has to be something. She wants to know what .
The third question is hardest of all, the third question she sometimes never wants to ask aloud.
My mother, she imagines asking, holding out her sketched picture. Did you know her? Did you kill her? What was she like?
She dreads this question even as she knows she must one day ask it if only she is given the chance. Did you kill her? she knows she would have to ask. If he killed the Jedi and her mother was a Jedi then he almost certainly did. What can she do if he tells her that he did know her, did kill her?
You are a second father to me, she remembers saying. Would this hold true if he did kill her birth mother? If she knew it for absolute certainty?
And even if he did not kill her, it would have happened before Vader became Ekkreth. It would have happened when he was still utterly complicit in the death of the Jedi. She doesn’t entirely know what to do with that certainty, that no matter what, Ekkreth must have had a hand in her birth mother’s death.
Sometimes she is glad she has so little time to think on these questions. Other days she wishes she could simply ask them.
But Ekkreth isn’t there. Ekkreth hunts them, playing the part of the Emperor’s loyal dog. Leia knows: she may never be able to ask Ekkreth when he became Vader, nor why, nor who he was before that. She may never be able to ask him anything ever again.
But she can hope.