Beyond - Legends Saga Certain Dark Things | Kessel Run Challenge 2023

The ghost of Padmé brilliant. Vader with all his pains after Mustafar of being inside the suit being tortured by her. Great response to the challenge

 

Ha! It never gets old, does it? I hope you're feeling better.

Sorry for falling behind on reviewing again, I got lost in a rabbit hole of fanfic research.

To The Seduction: this was a masterful display of the seductive, corruptive power of the dark side, with that creepy "for the greater good" vibe. You do it all to help people, the downtrodden, the disenfranchised, the slaves of Tatooine... and little by little you find youself killing children as a necessary evil, and you just keep going. And I have to say that, this being the third time you write a "you" story in this thread alone, you're almost making me want to try the 2nd-person POV. Also, the economy of words required by the double-drabble format made this all the more powerful and to the point.

Resolute: Oh that final twist, inserting Padmé into the events of ANH not only as an observer but as an active participant! Your Vader characterisation here is top-notch (not that it would be the first time) with all the little details of what it means to be in the armour. And maybe it's just me, but I find that there are enough elements saying that this is not, actually, Padmé in the first part of the vignette (the fact that her laugh is different, that her smile reminds him of Sidious) that it makes me wonder if he isn't actually convincing himself that it is mid-way through the story, while it's all just a construct of his addled brain. Don't tell me what you intended, I love the layers within layers of ambiguity!

 

Most excellent work - their intimacy past and present chills me - I have as much trouble recalling their happy times as Vader himself.

*shivers*

The physical details sound so plausible, so sickening.

It's a tough choice, but on the other hand, no choice at all: betray a friend, or save one's daughter? I know which I'd choose.

 

Delightful turn of Padme to the Dark Side. Sounded true to her, too. Very much so. Padme's Dark smile would be so much more... satisfying, if you ask me.

 

@earlybird-obi-wan

I figure if anyone gets the right to yell at Vader for the events of RotS, it ought to be Padmé's ghost.

@Chyntuck

Stomach virus getting passed back and forth now!

Sometimes I write in second person by default and go back and change it to third later; English verb tenses are weird, amirite, and I just find the second person POV tenses easier to work with. Thank you!

Gah, I love my Vader; he's terrible. And as requested, I will not tell you if Padmé is Padmé. But I also take a perverse pleasure in allowing possibly-Padmé to finally get a chance to yell at her estranged husband over the events of RotS.

@Findswoman

Thank you! I'm glad you liked my take on the prompt; I had so many different ideas on where to go with it, and I eventually settled on this one, with that specific idea of challenging the idea of who was the protagonist/antagonist in mind. Ghosts wouldn't be able to physically interact with the world - but Padmé knows how to hit him where it hurts most, and what bargains to best employ.

@pronker

Same. The real Sophie's Choice would be choosing between Luke and Leia. I wonder if I could find a way to put her in that position.

@Vek Talis

I do enjoy my dark Skywalkers.

 

Title: Nothing Lower
Author(s): still me
Timeframe: pre-TPM
Characters: Shmi Skywalker, Anakin Skywalker
Genre: angst

• Write a story between 100 and 1,000 words from the perspective of a child. (For our purposes, a child is anyone 12 years old or younger – or whatever the developmental equivalent for your non-human characters happens to be.)
• Word limit = 100-1,000 words

Notes: No child murder in this one, but some pretty graphic depictions of violence and trauma associated with slavery.

TW: violence, slavery, implied sexual assault

---

His mother had told him once, "They think the lowest of the low are slaves and droids - but there's nothing lower than a slaver. A slave can be freed, but a slaver will always be a slaver. Never forget that, Ani."

Anakin would never forget. He was seven, but he knew it: knew it like he knew the suns would rise, like how to flinch and cower instinctively avoid a beating, like how learning as much as he could as fast as he possibly could about engine mechanics was going to keep Watto from selling him away from his mother.

And Anakin was only seven, but he knew the shuddering-anticipating-hungering feeling of a slaver in the heat-shimmer of the air the way he knew the calluses on his mother’s hands. That desire to watch something grovel, prostrate itself, kiss the boot that kicked it, and Anakin knew shame so thick he thought it could kill him and then wished it would - and knew that there was nothing lower than a slaver.

Though Watto was considered by the other slaves to be a kind enough owner - and the other human slave women sometimes whispered amongst themselves in words that Anakin couldn't quite understand that Shmi was lucky that the Toydarian would never subject her to the "lustful whims" of their human or near-human masters - he wasn't so kind as to fail to remind them exactly who was their master.

Anakin remembered it only in the haziest of fogs, his memories of the incident clouded and colored by fever, but once a few years ago after Watto had first bought them from Gardulla, Shmi had ... said something. Anakin had only been five or six at the time - he had never been clear exactly when his lifeday was - and he had been sick, and Shmi had refused to do some task for their new master while caring for him.

So Watto took them to the slave market, and put them in line for the auction block.

He remembered this through a haze of fevered terror, the feeling of nakedness, exposure, being wrenched from his mother's arms only for Shmi to claw him back so ferociously that the auctioneer decided they would be sold together. His mouth forced open so they could examine his teeth - he had recently lost one of his front ones, and he remembered the disappointed tsk from the merchandiser, remembered the incomprehensible feeling of wanting to explain himself, that it was just a baby tooth and not poor dental hygiene. He remembered having rough fingers grasping his cheeks to turn his face back and forth, the gutterally grunted conclusion: boy slave. Sickly and small. Hardly fit for use.

(Though the merchandiser didn't know this, Anakin had never been able to be a kitchen slave; he had always been afraid of fire, for as long as he could remember, and he had never been able to explain why.)

(And a few years later, in the shining halls of the Temple: how would he ever rearrange that series of words hardly fit for use into something that could ever resemble personhood? The math just didn't work out.)

Anakin remembered, too, through the same terrified haze, the merchandiser's excitement over Shmi. A human woman in her prime breeding years though perhaps over her bedding ones - who had carried her own child to term and partially raised that child on her own? She would be valuable as a nursemaid, for house labor, for a gentle job as a nanny or governess for some wealthy baron in the Hutt Empire to care for children. She'd be a far more successful as a nanny than another slave without that prior experience. A scout from a wealthier employ would no doubt offer far more than the pittance that slaves fetched in the wastes of Mos Espa - and all the more valuable and capable surely if they could just separate her from the sickly child -

Shmi bit him and was beaten for her trouble.

Watto had reclaimed them when they were next in the line to be sold, but not before the incident had been permanently seared into Anakin's memory. And that, he knew, was what the Toydarian had intended: that the threat lurked always under his commands, the knowledge that no matter how valuable Anakin made himself no matter how many schematics he memorized and how many engines he rebuilt - Watto owned him and owned his mother and at any any point he could take them back to the auction block.

But that couldn't be the end of it, and when they returned from the auction house Shmi had been beaten bloody again and then tied to a post and left in the sun for two days without food or water. It had nearly killed her, but she’d done it to stay with him, and Anakin would remember even decades later staring at the mottled wounds stung with sand-grit over her legs and back, his hands sticky with his mother's old blood, hands hovering over skin so sunburned it was red like blood and blistered with fat pockets of fluid - and knowing, with painful, intimate certainty, that it was neither the first time his hands were wet with his mother's blood, and it wouldn't be the last.

And Anakin had learned that day that though there was nothing lower than a slaver, a master came close.

End.

 

A vivid description of how Anakin sees his life as a slave and what a slaver is. The lowest of all. And a master. What Smi experienced at the Tusken was horrible.

 

A terrible thing to impart to anyone, that they aren't good enough, no matter what. Shmi became a lioness and did herself proud in raising her child alone.

 

This is the worst. We get it a lot because there are so many kids in this family if we pool them together (we're a proper big fat Greek family and we all live in the same building, cousin #1 on the first floor, #2 on the second floor, you get the picture) and whenever one of them gets any bug at all it quickly becomes a never-ending cycle. And gut and stomach bugs... ugh. THE WORST. I hope you feel better soon!

Why am I not surprised?

So. I have a lot of thoughts about slavery, both in fiction and in the real world, because in my line of work we get to talk to people who were/are victims of modern-day forms of slavery, which happens a lot more often than you'd expect. I completely agree with Shmi here that "there's nothing lower than a slaver". We're really talking about the dregs of humankind here (or sentientkind, in the case of the GFFA), and another aspect that was horribly realistic in your story was the description of slavers as being on a power trip, with the "desire to watch something grovel, prostrate itself, kiss the boot that kicked it" I realise that this isn't an actual comment on your story, but slavery is a serious issue that I believe must either be portrayed realistically or not portrayed at all, so thank you.

Now to the story itself! You said in the challenge thread that you wanted to write a story about smol Anakin that shows why Vader Is Like That (if I remember your wording correctly) and oh boy did that come through in spades here! This particular event of little Anakin's life explains a whole lot, and in particular the intensity of his attachment to Shmi – because not only is she his mum, but he had to watch her suffer in this terrible way so that she could keep him. No wonder he experienced anger and rage and everything that can possibly ensue, and my sense is that the Jedi Order wasn't even equipped to deal with this situation, because they operated primarily within the sheltered confines of the Republic and that "freeing the slaves" (with everything it entails, and they clearly have no idea) isn't part of their mandate.

And then:

I thought that this was a fantastic ending because 'master' is such a loaded word when you go from Smol Ani here to Big Bad Vader later. It refers to Watto, and then to Obi-Wan, and then to Sidious, and oh my the absolute mess in his head. When you look at his life through this lens, he only escaped servitude in the form of slavery to end up again in servitude in the form of mystical bondage through the dark side precisely because of the trauma left by his original enslavement.

as always!

 

I hardly even know what to say regarding this prompt response; it's brilliant and incisive and disturbing, all of it. But you know what clicked with me from the first word? I hear Nemik reading this. So yeah, I think you got the whole political manifesto feel down pat

An evil Nemik. ...which...would actually make a great fanfic...

aaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhh

This is viscerally painful, all of it

Somehow it's both very difficult and very easy to imagine Padmé being cold and bitter here, well done

Ouch. That's a kick in the teeth, every word, but "that's what most people you strangle call you, isn't it?" That just about takes my breath away

Just *chef kiss* all around here

Ouch again, "beloved" hits almost as hard as "that's what most people you strangle call you, isn't it?" Almost

You remember that line from Into the Storm, about the one shirt Luke puts on in the Palace having cost more than Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru would make in a year? I am here for all the reflections of Luke and Anakin about the contrasts between their lives on Tatooine and afterward like this

OH MY GOD IT'S ANOTHER ELLI LINE THAT WILL HAUNT ME FOR DECADES. "WELCOME TO YOUR FOREVER, BELOVED" IS NOW TATTOOED ON MY BRAIN

Aaaaahhhhhhhh they're both so precise with the blows inflicted - and you know what? I don't write Luke and Mara fighting very often, but when they do, this is exactly how I imagine them doing it, too: precise and vicious. That's an interesting comparison

ELLI. DON'T YOU DARE.

...you're totally going to do it, aren't you

And you know what hit me here? Vader may not have been a slaver, but he certainly displayed exactly the same sort of brutal disregard for the lives of others, and I don't think he could have avoided that comparison forever no matter how hard he might have tried

I really like this because yeah, in some ways they were definitely better off with Watto than they would have been elsewhere, but let's not pretend that it wasn't just like you wrote it

YUP

And this one sentence sums up a lot of his later problems so concisely. I'm not going to blame the Jedi entirely here - there's blame enough to go all around in this situation - but they certainly didn't seem to either understand or make an effort to understand the immense and lasting trauma that someone like Anakin was dealing with, especially in comparison to his peers at the Temple who'd never known anything but that life and the serenity that went with it. And frankly, it didn't seem like Padmé did, either. But guess who did

It's just all so good, Elli, such glorious angst, I love it all

 

EDIT: More later, but I accidentally hit post before finishing my replies.

This is either some underpaid intern in the Imperial propaganda office. Fic is daily office life and shenanigans, or ...

... a dark AU where Luke or Leia (I like this for Leia) leads a rebellion against the Empire with exactly this sort of for the greater good / the ends justify the means interpretation of the Sith Code.

I only have a crack mode or angst mode.

GABRI, wouldn't this dysfunctional ghostly "I hate you / don't bother hating me, I hate myself more" marriage dynamic work beautifully in the Inheritance AU where I dump all my worst ideas?

 

Certainty~

Oh, just dark and evil and...chilling. Love it!

The Dark Path~

The dark pulls you in and doesn't let go. Worse than falling is freely walking towards the dark. Wonderful fic!

Lucky~

Hilarious! Luke is so incredibly bored.

Heretic~
Amazing action! Loved the fight between them and oh, Luke...nothing he could have said to her has the impact of teeling her that Vader never cared. That was a brutal truth for Lumiya to hear. Well done!

The Seduction~
I must say, you capture the "voice" of the dark side so well, with all the justifications and excuses necessary for the doling out of pain and suffering the dark ultimately brings to those who embrace it. So good!

Resolute~

Still so afraid of being alone.

Oh, Padme. Why?!?!

Nothing Lower~

What a horrible fear to have come by so young-the fear that he and his mother could be separated no matter how valuable Watto, or any other master, saw Anakin as at the time.

Wonderful stories! Looking forward to more!

 

@earlybird-obi-wan

Thank you! I sometimes wonder if Lucas meant to imply all the terrible things that are historically substantiated with the slavery plotline on Tatooine and sometimes wonder if I'm completely overanalyzing.

@pronker

Thank you! Slavery really messed this boy's head up. :-(

@Chyntuck

I ALSO have so many thoughts about slavery. Not because I work in a field at all related, but because I read entirely too much and have too vivid of an imagination and have both read about and further imagined all sorts of terrible and historically substantiated things written about through the centuries about slavery - and I wonder if Lucas really meant to saddle Anakin with ALL THIS BAGGAGE or if I'm severely overthinking it, because they don't really ever revisit this plotline in the PT or bring it to a satisfying conclusion. And I rant a lot about Dark Empire being a continuous thorn in my side for the past two decades, but the concept of slavery on Tatooine and the fact that the problem of slavery on Tatooine was apparently never solved is in contention as the next biggest thorn in my side.

I have so many sad Vader canons, this is just scratching the surface. They say that the GFFA is too big, and you really have to choose a focus, like choosing a major in college - and my two majors are apparently "Luke Skywalker's goth phase during Dark Empire" and "sad Vader headcanons." But I just ... I just headcanon Anakin's slave days as being really, really bad. And also think that Shmi's strength and ferocity as a mother were underplayed in TPM; she's an important SW heroine, even though she's not featured as one of the main ones.

My poor murder cyborg, I love him so much.

@Findswoman

This poor child! He's just a boy! And I feel like I've expounded at some length about this before, but - we all know what's going to happen to him. And George did a pretty good job setting up the reasons for it happening (trauma, the answer is trauma; no one actively chooses the psychic hate energy of the universe as their chosen power source until they're thoroughly broken) but there's still so much under explored territory.


@Gabri_Jade

*shines up the glass on the 'sad Vader headcanon' degree*

I apparently really enjoy writing "your ex gets to yell at you now, Skywalker," dialogue. But - lots of people deserve the opportunity to yell at Vader, and Padme definitely deserves to jump the line at least once.

Yes, I also love this. And it feels weird to use this emoji when reflecting about, I dunno, the economic disparity between Coruscant and Tatooine or between Naboo and the slave hovels, but here we are.

Perfect gif is perfect.

GABRI, slavery was historically terrible, and I read a lot about it a few years ago when that specific portion of American history was my then-special interest, and naturally my brain immediately copy-pasted a lot of the historically substantiated terribleness onto Tatooine when I picked up Star Wars again. And I have no idea if I'm overthinking it or if George ever meant to imply all this awfulness, but here we are: this is how you get a terrible murder cyborg.

Anakin's life is a giant billboard about the value of culturally competent therapy.


@JediMaster_Jen

Thank you! More is coming up.

 

Title: [Untitled, but it's late and I'm sleepy, I'll title it later]
Author(s): still me
Timeframe: post-RotJ AU
Characters: Luke Skywalker, Shira Brie
Genre: romance

Notes: This is the mushiest GD thing I’ve ever written, it’s Luke/Lumiya - and excuse me, I’m going to go off and puke now.

---

She shouldn’t have let her guard down in the first place, and the only reason she did was because she won.

Skywalker, disarmed and pinned down, tapped the ground with an open palm to surrender, and she quickly disengaged her lightwhip, allowing him to gain his feet and allowing a self satisfied smile to twist her lips.

He grinned back in response, not at all chagrined to have lost to a student. But of course he would, Shira thought with only a faint trace of annoyance - he was always so damn nice. Sometimes - or often, actually - it was grating; but today it was welcome, sending a welcome trickle of warmth up her spine, because -

Because she won. It was a practice duel, and Skywalker was a novice to the dual wielding lightsaber form of Jar'Kai, and her victory had no greater meaning - through victory my chains are broken whispered across her consciousness in a faint reprimand that she brushed quickly aside - but she won, and the thrill of victory rushed through her veins to accompany her pounding heartbeat and panting, exerted breath.

"You duel like Vader," she remarked in a moment of unguarded candor as she stepped away, still smirking - and then froze, remembering suddenly just who she was talking to. Her smirk evaporated.

Skywalker didn't respond right away. He hadn’t gotten up, was still sitting in the grass; he had procured a waterskin from somewhere to take a generous gulp. He raised a forearm to his mouth to wipe away a droplet, then gestured with it towards her and raised an eyebrow in a wordless invitation. With his other hand, he gently patted the ground next to him.

After a moment’s hesitation, Shira sat down, too, in the spot he had indicated, reaching out a hand to accept the waterskin and taking a quick swig of her own. “Thanks,” she said shortly, still regretting her slip.

And still, he said nothing, and Shira turned away, looking instead down towards grass and forcing herself out of her self-recriminating thoughts.

Looking down, she noticed that her cybernetic fingers had been digging subconsciously into the grass, tunneling down into the soft earth, and she forced herself to relax. Her fingers and arms, though strong, lacked many of the discrete pressure sensors that either biological or more advanced prosthetics would have, and after all these long years she sometimes still caught herself clenching her fists too tight or failing to notice when she’d dug nervous fingers into the dirt.

She looked up from her contemplation of her metallic fingers and instead away into the distance, grounding herself and allowing her breath and heart rate to return to a steadier rhythm. Skywalker’s preferred dueling ground was far from his temple, and the path back was overgrown with rich, green undergrowth only passable by swoop bike or flying overhead entirely.

Shira could just make out the temple in the distance: situated on the lowest point of a rigid spine of craggy spinal blue-gray mountains that seemed to dominate the planet’s skyline and giving the impression that the temple was completely alone in the world; it was surrounded by long, sloped fields of springy, tough mountain grass, wandered by herds of herbivores with tangled, complex horns astride their heads and six powerful legs. These would hem and haw when their swoop bikes drew too close, snorting and bucking and running in all their hundreds.

It was the dry season in this hemisphere of Yavin, though that meant little on the mostly jungle planet. The humidity was still intense, and not for the first time she was vaguely thankful at having abandoned her fitted black clothing in favor of the loose light-colored tunic and simple pants favored by the other denizens of the planet. It had initially felt odd, but the rough-woven, loose-fitting clothing now felt right; if she allowed herself the maudlin thought, she might even have named the feeling like home.

Home was an ephemeral concept, but the word had never before conjured tall grass or craggy mountains or six-legged herbivores. It was fire and brimstone and the caldera of a volcano and the corona of a star, the creak of leather and the shift of metal, the gasp of a respirator and the brush of an armorweave cloak and the faint clicking of gears.

“Vader was a Djem So master,” Luke said suddenly, as if sensing her thoughts. “So I’m not sure how I can duel like Vader if I’m practicing Jar’Kai.”

Shira shook her head, dismissing her ruminations and turning back to him. He’d retrieved his two lightsaber hilts from the grass, and was looking at them thoughtfully. “But that’s exactly what I mean. You duel like Vader, because you duel like a Djem So practitioner using Jar’Kai.”

Luke’s lips quirked. “You’ve seen Vader practicing Jar’Kai?”

She rolled her eyes. “He practiced everything. But Jar’Kai is one of the most effective forms against a lightwhip, and even Djem So masters find themselves having to adapt to new techniques against new weapons. It’s just common sense.”

Shira reached out a hand, miming a high strike. “Djem So is the way of the krayt dragon. And a dragon crawls. So in Djem So, you stay low to the ground - you channel the Force not as the wind as in Ataru nor as the water as in Soresu but as the energy of the planet beneath you; you are the ground, the stone. The plates of the planet, the magma beneath it; explosive power, from the earth. Djem So is about strength, but Jar’Kai is about speed, and when a novice to Jar’Kai takes up a second blade, he focuses too much on that second blade on not on the Force -”

Skywalker was barely containing a smile, and she cut herself off mid-sentence. “What?” she demanded. “What’s so krffing funny?”

“Are you aware,” he asked with mock solemnity, “that when you lecture about lightsaber forms, your voice drops about an octave?”

Shira could only gape at him, and his hidden smile bloomed into a blinding grin, devolving further as he started to laugh. A true, hearty laugh that bent him over at the waist, his eyes almost filling with tears, his fists helplessly pummeling against the ground. And she tried not to notice how laughing seemingly - deaged him. The sober Jedi once again becoming a young, handsome flyboy at light speed.

She really liked the sound of his laugh altogether too much.

His fit of laughter eventually quieted, and he reached up a hand to wipe a tear from his eye.

“I spent a lot of time with him, Skywalker,” she said stiffly.

“Please, Shira, call me Luke.”

“I’ll try to remember, Skywalker.”

That earned her another laugh. “I’m sorry. Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything. I didn’t know him well, and I don’t know what he was like as a Master -”

Fire and brimstone, and the caldera of a volcano, and the corona of a star, she thought.

And aloud, she said, “Drop it, Skywalker.”

He had the grace to oblige, but Shira found herself too wrung-out to even consider expanding on that. She laid down, propping her hands under her head, so her knuckles rested in the cool-wet grass and her face was bared to the sky above, watching the clouds as they drifted across the sky and studiously not thinking of anything or anyone else. After a moment, Luke laid down beside her.

“He wasn’t Vader, in the end. He was Anakin,” the Jedi said at last.

“I know. I’ve heard the story.”

“I’m so glad you’re here, Shira,” he said, and - and it was so earnest. So simple and honest, and the Force rang with the truth of it, his simple happiness in his simple statement, but also all that he didn’t say - that she was seeking a path away from the Dark, too, that Vader’s apprentice would follow Vader’s example, that in spite of or because of their past history she had chosen to seek him.

She closed her eyes and inhaled, clearing her mind. “I know.”

End.

 

I like this heaps.

And not just for the more-than-one-biome planet, but because I remember Shira from the comics and this fic's image of her rings true.

 

Luke and Shira. That sure is different from Luke and Mara.

 

@pronker

Thanks! It felt really squicky to write it.

@earlybird-obi-wan

And yet not too different! They have a lot of narrative parallels. And apparently this boy's type is green eyed redheads raised by Sith.

@Findswoman

It feels so squicky, her character design is basically "sexy lady Vader," I have so many thoughts and feelings about how the 70s writers put Luke in such an awkward Freudian relationship by essentially Vader-izing his ex. But also - Shira would have seen a side of Vader that Luke never did, and vice versa. I'm not crazy about 'shipping them together outside a KR challenge, but I think there's a lot of territory to explore

 

Title: The Talk
Author(s): still me
Timeframe: post-RotJ AU
Characters: Han Solo, cat!Vader
Genre: humor

Notes: I had a ridiculous headcanon I had to type out. Takes place within my cat!Vader 'verse, in the Skywalker Chronicles, in which Vader is for some reason reincarnated as Luke's weird angry cat with superpowers.

---

Okay - listen here, Your Lord Crankiness. The Kid already gave me the lowdown and told me allllll about your little misunderstanding.

So I’m here today to talk to you about sex.

That’s right! Making the beast with two backs. Shaking the sheets. Dancing the Phaphian jig. Taking horizontal refreshment.

You know what I’m talking about.

The Kid didn’t want to have this conversation from this end with his dad - even though you’re a cat for some reason - and personally, I don’t blame him, because he’s done enough for this kriffing galaxy and this might just be the bridge too far and -

What?

Of course I know you’re his dad. Darth Vader the cat. Darth Cat. Cat Vader. Your evil fluffy lordship. Fluff face. We all know. We kinda have a don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy with Leia, but I’ve got a betting pool going on with some of the other guys about how long before she’ll finally admit it - Lando’s holding the pot. But would you believe it, it’s a pretty short list on who actually actually knows so far, considering how kriffing terrible you are at being a damn cat.

I don’t know if you know this, but cats don’t make breakfast or drive speeders or order online groceries. And you’re absolutely welcome for those particular pearls of wisdom, by the way.

Believe it or not - still not quite the weirdest thing I’ve seen with your family.

Laugh it up, fluffball. Don't think I've forgiven you for the whole torture thing yet either; I’m just here doing the Kid a favor.

But if you were wondering, Artoo figured it out first. And Goldenrod still doesn’t believe him. Surely you’ve heard them arguing about it? I have no idea how Leia hasn’t by now. Or maybe she has and she’s ignoring it because frankly I think the legal implications would make even her brain melt. Cognitive dissonance is bliss.

And Luke has no idea about the pool, by the way - don’t tell him. I dunno how you tell him things, being a cat, and I can only assume that you're doing some Force stuff, but don't tell him.

So like I was saying - sex. Procreation.

It’s where babies come from, Lord Furface. And Luke said that you were laboring under the misapprehension that babies come from "blessings granted by the will of the Force," but let me tell you - it's a little less spiritual than that. A little more physical, a little more profane, if you know what I'm saying. Leia and I have been trying for a while now.

What?

Yes, trying. Not just "believing very hard in the will of the Force," or whatever mumbo jumbo they told you in Sithy sex ed. Or Jedi sex ed. I don't know when you converted or whatever, but it seems like whoever was in charge at the time didn't do a good job explaining the facts of life, Your Fussiness.

Dear Force I hope His Imperial Wrinkliness wasn't the one to give you the talk.

But we're getting sidetracked.

When a man and a woman - well that’s not completely accurate, but that’s what we’ll start with, okay? It’s complicated - when a man and a woman love each other very much -

Wait a second though. You're - you’re a parent. Did you and the mom, did you never - ?

Oh you did. Um. That's good I guess. I might have to bleach my mental eyeballs at some point in the near future, but that’s good. Means I don't have to explain the mechanics. But then how - ?

You never realized that they were correlated.

How the - ?

Your mother told you that you were conceived through the will of the Force. Without a father. Right.

So. Well. I don’t know how to tell you this, but -

You know what, nevermind, that is beyond my pay grade. And I’m getting paid zilch for this, so I guess everything is technically beyond my pay grade, but the point stands.

So to summarize: you do the sex, and sometimes that leads to babies. Ta-da!

Any questions?

End.

 

LOL this really makes my day after waking up and reading this. The cat being told what really matters by Han Solo in his gruf pilot way and always taking care of Luke

 

*pictures Vader as a black pussycat* **fails, tries again** ***succeeds***

He keeps a list, what could be at the top??

Ew. Just ew.

Very funny scene!

 

Before I get to your two latest stories, I want to answer this:

I'm pretty sure that Lucas had no friggin' idea about the implications of what he was doing, actually, and he handled this issue with the sort of superficiality that makes my blood boil. As I said, I don't get worked up about works of fiction, but when a work of fiction integrates serious themes from the real world and handles them so poorly, I do get worked up – a lot. Sadly, that's par for the course for a lot of SW storylines. One of the more recent examples is Kallus who committed genocide against the Lasat, but all is forgiven when he joins the Alliance. I mean, seriously? Do we want the kids who watch Rebels to believe that anyone, ever, can be forgiven for genocide? It's such a First-World-Problems approach to storytelling, I don't know where to start.

Anyway. Luke/Shira. You wrote them really well, with a lot of parallels to Luke/Mara, but squicky indeed! I'm not sure either what the writers were thinking back in the day when they turned Shira into a Vader-like cyborg, but Papa Freud would like to have a word with them. And TBH, the whole shtick about Luke falling for women who try to kill him? Papa Freud would like to have a word about that too

And that's all I'm going to say about that story, certainly not because I don't think it's a good story, but, as you said, squicky.

The Talk, though. OMG The Talk. I laughed so, so hard with this, it just made my day. The various names Han uses to address Cat!Vader were so perfectly Han, from "Your Lord Crankiness" to "Lord Furface" and everything in between, but the moment I choked on my coffee was "His Imperial Wrinkliness". Also, as pronker said, the idea of Palps doing Vader's sex education... I'm tempted to say that I didn't need this image in my head, but now that I have it I think it's kind of awesome, even though I need to "bleach my mental eyeballs". I loved how Han doesn't buy the idea that Anakin was conceived without a father. He may have gotten used to a number of weird Force things, up to and including Vader's reincarnation as a cat, but the Immaculate Conception is a bridge too far