Beyond - Legends "Presque Vu" -- Luke short story, post ROTJ -- Complete

Title: ?Presque Vu?
Author: Knight_Aragorn
Characters: Luke Skywalker, miscellaneous
Timeframe: 6-7 ABY, between Shadows of Mindor and Courtship of Princess Leia
Disclaimer: Characters belong to Lucasfilm, and I play for fun, not profit.

Summary: Presque vu: [F., nearly seen] a feeling that you are on the edge of grasping something very, very important.

Author's Note: It pains me a little to split this one up, so will try to update within the next few days.

---

I.

The Qanar who?d led him into the forest fluted something, waving long fingers as Luke paused. Luke looked at Threepio, who?d fallen behind, tangled in the soft drooping branches of the shaded green-violet vegetation.

The Qanar spoke again.

?Threepio,? Luke said.

?Master Luke!? Threepio always sounded grateful to be addressed, Luke thought; strange, considering the places, ill-suited to his clumsy design, he was forced to follow his more flexible counterparts. The droid pushed through the last of the hanging vegetation, tilting his golden head as he stopped attentively by Luke.

Luke turned his attention to the Qanar. After a moment, Threepio said, ?Oh!? and turned, addressing the Qanar in flute-like tones. The alien ? though, it occurred to Luke, this was his world, so surely Luke was the alien here? ? seemed to be listening to Threepio, head tilted forward, but Luke thought there was some amusement in his body language. An indulgence on Luke?s part, probably; what did he know about Qanar expressions? Even their names were unpronounceable to him.

?I believe he wants you to continue on,? Threepio said.

?You believe?? Luke queried. Threepio was prone to hyperbole in other areas, but in translation he was usually precise.

Threepio grew flustered. ?As I told you, Master Luke, there are significant language differences between cultural groups of the Qanar, and much of their communication is by means other than verbal ??

?It?s fine, Threepio.? Luke looked at the Qanar, who tilted his head forward, small dark eyes on Luke. He said something, soft amid the rustling sound of the leaves around them.

Threepio answered, and the Qanar spoke again, and then turned and regarded the shadowed forest.

?He will not continue any further,? Threepio said. ?I believe this may be something of a sacred space within their belief system. Or perhaps a prohibited area.?

?But it?s all right for me to go on??

Threepio turned to the Qanar, turned back to Luke. ?His words seem to indicate so.?

The Qanar, by all human standards, seem quite at ease. His intricately layered clothing, light shades of stream-gauze, rippled in the wind. Luke caught his eye, nodded. The Qanar tilted his head. From what Luke had observed, this seemed to be a positive gesture.

He turned and set off toward the sheltered grove he could make out through close-growing stands of vegetation. There was an outcropping of rock in the small clearing, before which lay an area carpeted by soft, low-growing plantlife that sank and retained the imprint of his boots.

He paused, taking a moment to breathe in the leaf-rot scent of the vegetation. Something wisped under that scent, a sensation half-alive, half-remembered. For a brief instant, less time than it took to blink, he saw dead earth instead of forest, bodies instead of ground-clinging vines, a burnt sky. Blood against the rock.

He wondered how old the forest he stood in was. His familiarity with such terrain was limited; it still felt a little alien to him, so much life, sucking in moisture. But this forest had none of the density and age of the forest on Endor?s moon, or of Dagobah?s swamps. He guessed it to be only a few decades old, grown on the bones of an older landscape. Fed on bodies strewn like dirt.

He crouched in the soft pale ground-covering, staring at the rock, looking for bloodstains long since worn away by wind and rain. Had death been short, sudden, a gasp and a flare, or was it long, hunted and lingering?

Luke stood and returned to Threepio and the Qanar. Threepio wa

 

Ack, new story! *snags place in line* I'll be back asap! Might be tomorrow before I can find time to write decent feedback, but I'll definitely be back.

 

Very intriguing beginning, unfortunately very hard to pin down too in a feedback LOL Looking forward to see where this goes.

 

Ooh, great start!! I'm so excited to see where you take this! Could you please add me to the pm list? Wonderful job as always!!

 

Hello K!!

Fascinating beginning!! Your words paint such vivid and emotive pictures. I love seeing a missing moment from this time.

I'll definitely be keeping up with this.

Hugs!!!

 

Gabri: New story! I know, it's been awhile. Take your time.

kataja: Yeah, I can sympathise with that. It's one of those stories where it falls into place at the end, or at least I hope it does. But it's just a touch on the long side to post all at once, so everyone will have to bear with me.

dancing_star: Thank you, good to hear! More soon.

Jade_eyes: Thanks. It's a relatively blank slate against most EU time periods, so there's a lot to play with.

 

I've got a bit of time, so thought I'd get Part II up. It's fairly short again, but Part III is where things come together. It may make more sense to think of the story as three linked vignettes, though they do have a common thread.

Bear with me and my strange structure, I'll do my best to make it pan out in the end.

---

II.

The cabin was located at the foot of a mountain, far away from the bedraggled town where Beltite natives ducked their chins and called him ?Officer,? avoiding eye contact. He had tried to explain he wasn?t Imperial, but news of the New Republic had barely penetrated this far out. Their grasp of Basic was better than the few muttered responses he?d been able to cajole from them would indicate, he suspected.

His breath fogged in the air as he came to a stop before the lone building, hunched forlornly under the height of the looming mountain. It was in a sorry state. More so than the dry, cold air would suggest. There was violence in the splintered rough wooden posts, in the charred dirt littering the broken doorway. It was overkill from an Imperial perspective, lacking methodical focus. Luke suddenly saw the lowered eyes of the natives in a different light. Guilt had a long memory. What lengths would they traverse to prevent Imperial wrath falling upon them as Jedi sympathisers?

His boots crunched on the frost-covered ground as he crossed to the cabin, ducking through the ruined doorway. Inside, the signs of violence were plainer, and desperation hung on the air. He?d seen devastation with intent, and this wasn?t it. This was panic and fear and misdirected hate. A fire had been lit at some point, but had burned itself out. The blackened walls and floor and faint, old acridness in the air set his hair on end for reasons entirely personal.

Had the Jedi who had lived here, died here as well? He didn?t think so. The cabin was well-situated ? not by chance, he thought ? and the Jedi who had lived here would have had warning of the approach of a group such as perpetrated this violence. Unless the Jedi was very old or very young he or she should have been able to flee.

She, Luke thought, for no reason he could name in words, as he touched a charred scrap of what must have been fabric at some point, and it fell to ash. It was a female Jedi who lived here, who inhabited this space for a while, possibly until her death.

He had no idea if it was the Force telling him that, or if it was those personal reasons again. Truth or not, did it matter?

He set about searching for remains ? any remains ? amongst the ruin. The faint light filtered through the thick sky-haze outside dimmed to night as he sorted through the broken items, room by room, his fingers becoming coated in ash and dust.

He stilled as he lifted aside a part of a broken table in the second, smaller room, and found a child?s toy, a roughly-made soft doll. It was partly burned, its face half blackened, its smile askew.

He picked it up carefully. He had wondered, in the past, why more of the Jedi who escaped the initial purges had not settled into communities instead of remaining separate as almost all seemed to have done. Why they hadn?t partnered, had children. Perhaps they?d stayed true to the code of the Jedi Order, if such a code had existed and if it had covered families and children. Perhaps they felt it would not be fair to put innocents at risk through association. Perhaps they didn?t wish to bring children into a galaxy they must have seen as hopelessly darkened and diminished.

Perhaps this toy meant there was one Jedi who had chosen differently. Or perhaps it was a cherished remnant of the Jedi?s own childhood ? maybe far away, or maybe not so many years ago ? somehow retained through the horror of being forced to flee the destruction all she had known and loved.

He wondered, if there had been a child, what had become of that boy or girl. Killed with his or her mother as the progeny of a tainted line? (By Vader, probably; Luke had over the past few years lost all innocence when it came to what his father had been capable of)

 

Ooh this is very good! I love Lukie's thoughts as he holds the doll, and finally about his mother. How he thinks that Leia must have been remembering her adoptive mother. (Patches things up quite nicely between ROTS and ROTJ!) Great work!

 

Oh wow! Now the haze is starting to lift LOL. I love the sense of loss on so many levels that Luke is experiencing here, as well as his persistant search. I also like his confuson of what that is his personal feelings, what is the Force - already in last post you had some interesting observations there Very interesting, especially considering the timeframe...

And don't worry - with you, I bear over with anything, trust me! Well, almost anything

 

Superb update. I also think that was Breha Leia remembered... because even if Breha died when Leia was 3 or 4 years old, her infant/toddler memories would more likely surround Breha who was no doubt also dark haired, gentle and sad.

 

That was really good!!!!!!
HUMMMMMM are you going to make it that this person was like his step-sister????? That could be interesting!!!!!!
Where is he????(Luke) Like what planet????? I can't find it, I'm so LAME!!!!!!
Amazing Job!!!
Jordan

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Come read my story: http://boards.theforce.net/beyond_the_saga/b10477/29906747/p1/?4

 

Through the sheen of her shifting thoughts and feelings, tangled in scent-memory and sensation-layered meaning that echoed faintly through Leia?s perception, he?d finally glimpsed a woman dark-haired, like Leia, with dark eyes and a modulated voice. Leia?s love and grief were threaded through the memory, coiling around the woman, but Luke ?

Luke felt nothing, himself. No instant connection, as there had been with his father, with Leia. No sense of yes, this is true. Just a distant woman with pain in her eyes.

It was then that he first formed the notion that the woman was Leia?s adoptive mother, Bail Organa?s wife. It was a relief when the idea occurred to him, because the alternative was something he?d always dreaded. Had his mother looked at the child he?d been and feared one day seeing Anakin, seeing Vader? Had she seen spent dreams, lost hope, something darker and crueller? The saying was ?father?s son?, not ?father?s daughter?, veracity unsound but resonance certain. That legacy might have been a curse unbearable in her eyes.

Wow. Really loved Luke's thoughts here, but it pains me to see him worry the reason he can't remember Padme was because she didn't love him as much as Leia. Nothing could be further from the truth- she loved them both very much.
Wonderful update!! And I can relate to the structure difficulties with the story- My latest one is too long to be a oneshot (which I intended it to be), but also doesn't divide well into chapters.
Bravo!!

 

padawan lunetta: Thank you! Thrilled that you liked it. This era is fun to explore, given that it's sort of suspended between the movies and the full roll out of the EU. I hoped Luke theorising that the mother Leia remembered was Breha wasn't too intrusive, but surely they'd share the memory and it would make sense that it wouldn't feel quite right to him (because it really doesn't seem likely that the woman Leia mentions was Padmé). Thanks for the feedback!

kataja: Almost anything? Now I'm curious as to what I can't get away with. Hutt mush fics? I always imagine Luke being a little lost in this period, because compared to the Old Republic Jedi, he had very little training at all. I'm glad the story makes a little more sense.

Jade_eyes: It seems the only really likely explanation. Memories are such slippery things, too, especially early memories. Leia could easily have decided that the person she remembered was her birth mother and that stuck in the way memory associations do. Thanks for reading!

JordanCHFel: I may have led you a bit astray, because the Jedi is only a random Jedi, and the planet is entirely of my invention. So no lameness on your part at all. Thanks for reading, though, glad you enjoyed.

dancing_star: I can see Luke having some mother issues along with his more obvious father issues, because it always seemed odd that he was so focused on Anakin but not very curious about Padmé. Of course, there are a few explanations you could come up with for that, and I've encountered a variety of good ones in the varied melting pot that is fan fiction. It is a bit of a headache when the muse doesn't cooperate in terms of posting length, isn't it? Thanks for reading.

 

And the final part, involving a very familiar locale. Thanks to everyone who has read.

---

III.

Mos Espa had been the capital of Tatooine in the days of the Republic, when the Hutts ruled the planet unchallenged. After Tatooine was absorbed into the Empire, Mos Espa?s prosperity diminished. Mos Eisley, with its larger space port, became the main focus of trade.

This much Luke knew from the scattered records he?d been able to find through the HoloNet. He?d never been to Mos Espa in his youth on Tatooine, and knew very little about it. Local history in the area around Anchorhead had been passed orally, and concerned local families only; few on Tatooine had energy to spare for greater detail.

His first impression of Mos Espa, then, was curiously disjointed, two pictures overlain. By Tatooine standards, it was a large city, almost the size of Mos Eisley, which had always intimidated him on his few visits as a boy. By galactic standards, it was barely a town, hopelessly unsophisticated, dusty ancient streets and shambling awnings over worn buildings.

A laborious HoloNet search he?d recently completed had finally turned up reference to his father as a child, competing in Mos Espa in a podraces. The partial source he had located indicated Anakin Skywalker lived locally, and was something of a hero for winning a competition few humans ever survived.

Luke tried to imagine his father as a child, and failed completely. Had he been happy here? Had he been restless, like Luke had been as a boy? Had he known love as a child, been raised in a caring family? Luke worried about the podracing, because what parent would allow a child to enter a race that killed most of its competitors? Perhaps he had been abused. Neglected, mistreated, abandoned. Perhaps he?d had no family, lived out of the streets and dumpsters. Perhaps he was an orphan.

Luke traipsed through the dusty streets, feeling his body fall back into the familiar posture of a Tatooine farm hand: shoulders a little hunched to fend off the heat, head bent slightly. Personal space was granted widely between strangers on Tatooine, but narrowly amongst family: perhaps a by-product of the space and emptiness everywhere around. Despite the clothes that subtly marked him as strange, as an offworlder, few people gave him a second glance.

The buildings were all near-identical with the familiarity of Tatooine sandstone architecture, designed for maximum ventilation. He crossed through the market area, almost deserted in the heat of the afternoon. Stallholders ignored him, sitting gossiping together in the filmy shade of tattered awnings. Luke stopped to examine some beadwork, thinking of Leia. After a few minutes, the stallholder wandered over, extended an offer to barter for the piece Luke was looking at. Luke declined, and the stallholder went back to his seat. A man in merchant garb reminiscent of Mid Rim worlds entered the street, and the marketholders came to attention, noisily calling offerings of their wares. Luke took the opportunity to engage the stallholder over a rock pendant he?d chosen, the stallkeeper eager to close the transaction quickly and flag down the potentially prosperous offworlder. Luke tucked the pendant into his worn cloak, and continued.

Sections of the town were desolate, inhabited by dust and the desperate. Luke walked through them as the first sun sank across the horizon. He glimpsed fires in some of the crumbling buildings, smelled food and smoke and heard lifted voices, a woman singing a lullaby in a dialect of Huttese. Luke halted in the shadows, feeling like a trespasser. This wasn?t his place. It wasn?t his world, anymore, if it ever had been.

He made his way to the outskirts, where the darkness was black and cold, and winds blew up from the Wastes. The stars were as bright as he?d forgotten they could be; standing stark against sky, ribbons of light set in darkness, looking down over the desert.

He wondered what he?d hoped to find here. Some distant vestige of his father? A memory of the child, the man, that had been, before Vade

 

Very nice ending! I loved Lukie's talk with the mother and son from Tatooine. His thoughts on Anakin were excellent as well. Very nice introspection! Great work!

 

?Have you got any other weapons?? her son said. ?Can you do tricks??

I adore this little boy.


He?d seen himself how it had marked Chewbacca. The Wookiee never spoke about his time in slavery, but he had old injuries that spoke wordlessly of the kind of violence that had been inflicted upon him. As did his furious response to any attempt to curtail his freedom or to belittle him.

Hurray for highlighting that! It's usually overlooked - I tend to forget it, to be honest. Most of the time Chewie's slavery is only brought up as a reflection of how heroic Han was to have rescued him.



He was perhaps the only person in the galaxy who could mourn both the Jedi, collectively and individually, along with the man who had betrayed them.

This really captured the theme of this story. It's so intelligent, and yet so poetic. I'm so glad I'm just finding it, after all the updates have been completed.

 

Wonderful and poignant close.



Thank you very much for sharing this with us.




!!!!

 

Well, it didn't become much easier to pin down, really...
You certainly let the title cover both form and content alike, but in contrast you do grasp something important here. Now, could I only graps it back in a feedback...

As always it's a pleasure reading; the language flows so easily, catching poignant details, weaving a mood of loss, of melancholy, yet without never falling to the sloppiness that melancholic texts most often do...
I loved Luke's feeling of being an outstander and but also the greater was my joy when he had a home to return to!
He carries so many facets of guilt in his search, yet is determined to learn more, to understand, and if the that is impossible, to at least unedrstand what he doesn't understand.

Loved the child's recognition of him, like a light in the grey; then the encounter turns vaguely unsettling again, as the entire fic has been all the time. I must admit that I love to be unsettled by you!

I'm afraid I can't grasp more than that now, but this will be one more oft hose stories that I will return to again and again; always finding something new, always getting amazed by how much can be captured in words.

 

He could honour the Jedi who had died for their beliefs by living those same beliefs himself. The new order he would somehow, someday create would be their legacy, rather than the death and destruction that had been their recompense for devoted lives of sacrifice and service. And in some way, he thought, it would honour his father, too. If Vader ? Anakin ? his father ? had not given his life for Luke?s, the Jedi would be gone. Luke had to balance that sacrifice, that great and shining redemption, against the atrocities that had come before it; the darkness couldn?t win out, he believed, because he had to believe so.

He also believed he had the right to mourn his father, whatever others thought. Perhaps one day he would be able to do so without dissembling, but it didn?t matter if he couldn?t. Grief was a private thing.

He was perhaps the only person in the galaxy who could mourn both the Jedi, collectively and individually, along with the man who had betrayed them.

That passage represents the entirety of what this story is about, for me. I think it fits right in line with what he'd be going through those first couple years post Endor. I haven't read Shadows of Mindor yet, but I think the mixed sense of purpose and loss he has is very evident. And I love the title, because I don't think he ever really gets what he's looking for. He can gather all the knowledge there is to know about the Jedi and it will never reach its sum total, and while I do know he felt a sense of obligation and duty to keep the Jedi going, I think that took a back seat to the questions he had about Anakin, and in turn himself, at least in those early years.

I also love the way Luke tries to reflect on his mother. Those fears and contemplations are heartbreaking because we know they aren't true, but he doesn't. I'd never thought about him thinking about it like that before, but they're valid fears. I also like how he catches himself on thinking of her only in relation to Anakin and not her own person. For all her would-be faults from portrayal, dialogue, storyline, whatever, I think it's pretty hard to deny the idea of Padme and who she was as a strong, reasoned woman who fell in love and got betrayed like everyone else. I'd say I'm glad he finally gets some truth and insight into her and what happens, but Dark Nest is its own can of worms.

Another wonderful job.

 

Wow, am I late.

The alien ? though, it occurred to Luke, this was his world, so surely Luke was the alien here?

I loved this. It always slightly annoys me that any species other than human is spoken of as "alien," as though humans are always the dominant species.

As he returned his gaze to his Qanar guide, he wondered, uneasily, what his emotional state might be telling the Qanar, and whether the Qanar understood him far better than he could understand their attempts at conversation. Luke habitually held himself closed to stray emotional impressions from others, both out of courtesy and for self-preservation; without such safeties the emotional impressions could be overwhelming and confusing, melding with his own feelings until it was difficult to distinguish what was truly his own. He had no idea if it was even possible to prevent the flow in the opposite direction, to stop his own feelings from being detected by another with Force talent or high-developed empathetic skills.

This is positively gorgeous. It realistically shows Luke's abilities and insecurities at this point in time, before he became the nearly all-powerful Jedi Master, and is marvelously descriptive in doing so.

The Qanar blinked, eyelids coming together vertically.

That's a super nifty detail. (On a tangent, I quite like goats and sheep, but their vertical pupils always make me do a double take. )

When he slept, he dreamt of silence, deep, bone-aching silence, an emptiness that stretched and consumed, absence gnawing at the edges of the mind. For him it was a normal state, a natural thing, accepted, but in the dream he caught the edges of something else that could have been, that once was. It was bright and muted and strong, ten thousand voices at the borders of thought, spread across the galaxy; a welcome warmth at the back of his mind, a joining and a belonging only ever a breath away. He woke befuddled, infinitely bereft, but couldn?t track the threads of dream as they slipped away.

It never fails to amaze me how you not only see angles I hadn't, but express them so poetically.

It was then that he first formed the notion that the woman was Leia?s adoptive mother, Bail Organa?s wife. It was a relief when the idea occurred to him, because the alternative was something he?d always dreaded. Had his mother looked at the child he?d been and feared one day seeing Anakin, seeing Vader?

What a terrible thing for Luke to live with, that sort of suspicion of being unloved and unwanted. All the more so when he has Leia as a parallel and suspects that the same doesn't apply to her. (And even more so when you consider how much more Leia's personality and temper match Anakin's, while Luke is more like Padmé.) He shows tremendous restraint and maturity in not speaking his doubts to Leia to spare her, but that sort of self-sacrifice is so in character for Luke that one hardly bats an eye at it. Luke really deserves even more recognition than he generally gets for his profound generosity.

His first impression of Mos Espa, then, was curiously disjointed, two pictures overlain. By Tatooine standards, it was a large city, almost the size of Mos Eisley, which had always intimidated him on his few visits as a boy. By galactic standards, it was barely a town, hopelessly unsophisticated, dusty ancient streets and shambling awnings over worn buildings.

You know, the city I mostly grew up in has a population of about 120,000, but for the last sixteen years I've lived in a city with a population of more than 1,500,000 (and well over twice that, county-wide). My perceptions of the size of each have changed considerably as a result. I've felt exactly the same strange disjointedness when I've revisited my early home. It's an odd feeling, and you capture it well.

Luke worried about the podracing, because what parent would allow a child to enter a race that killed most of its competitors?

The word "worried" really does say so much about Luke, doesn't it? Whatever Anakin's situation, it's lo

 

Very good read! I liked the description and especially the introspection into Luke's mind as he thought about the Jedi of old and who his parents were. I've always found it harder to do that kind of scene without a lot of dialogue, but this was well done indeed.

 

Lovely. I think the part I liked the best was how you showed Luke's uncertainty at recognizing who his father really was out loud--both sides of him--Ani and Vader, the young boy and the monster.

 

I'm not sure how I missed this! I've just read the first post and WOW! I'm not at all surprised that one of your stories would make me feel this way, just shocked that I didn't comment earlier. I must be getting senile.

Another masterpiece!

 

Another extremely late reply -- sorry all. Many thanks for the feedback and for the noms in the awards.


padawan lunetta: Thank you!

leia_naberrie: I adore this little boy.

I'm glad! Luke's basically a magician with a fancy sword, so I can see why the kid thought he was owed some entertainment.

Hurray for highlighting that! It's usually overlooked - I tend to forget it, to be honest. Most of the time Chewie's slavery is only brought up as a reflection of how heroic Han was to have rescued him.

I'm guilty of overlooking poor old Chewie frequently, so thought when the opportunity to mention his backstory came up, I thought I'd better grab it!

This really captured the theme of this story. It's so intelligent, and yet so poetic. I'm so glad I'm just finding it, after all the updates have been completed.

I'm glad too. It probably works much better as a whole (I do so hate having to break up fics like this -- so awkward!). Thanks so much for reading!

Jade_eyes: Thank you.

kataja: You certainly let the title cover both form and content alike, but in contrast you do grasp something important here. Now, could I only graps it back in a feedback...

I'm glad the title fits! This one is a bit slippery, yes.

As always it's a pleasure reading; the language flows so easily, catching poignant details, weaving a mood of loss, of melancholy, yet without never falling to the sloppiness that melancholic texts most often do...
I loved Luke's feeling of being an outstander and but also the greater was my joy when he had a home to return to!
He carries so many facets of guilt in his search, yet is determined to learn more, to understand, and if the that is impossible, to at least unedrstand what he doesn't understand.

I really think it must have been a lonely task to carry the legacy of the Jedi alone, particularly in those early years when he was still to an extent mourning the loss of his father. So if I've captured a little of that, I'm very pleased.

Loved the child's recognition of him, like a light in the grey; then the encounter turns vaguely unsettling again, as the entire fic has been all the time. I must admit that I love to be unsettled by you!

Thank you! So long as it's good and not bad unsettling.

I'm afraid I can't grasp more than that now, but this will be one more oft hose stories that I will return to again and again; always finding something new, always getting amazed by how much can be captured in words.

I personally adore stories that I can come back to, so that's a huge compliment. Thanks for reading and as always for the lovely feedback!

Bri_Windstar: That passage represents the entirety of what this story is about, for me. I think it fits right in line with what he'd be going through those first couple years post Endor. I haven't read Shadows of Mindor yet, but I think the mixed sense of purpose and loss he has is very evident. And I love the title, because I don't think he ever really gets what he's looking for. He can gather all the knowledge there is to know about the Jedi and it will never reach its sum total, and while I do know he felt a sense of obligation and duty to keep the Jedi going, I think that took a back seat to the questions he had about Anakin, and in turn himself, at least in those early years.

It's such an interesting time for Luke, because he has to transition from who he was in the war to someone who can take on the mantle of responsibility for this huge, involved task -- and considering how spotty his own training was, he has a considerable way to go. I'm glad that sense came through.

I also like how he catches himself on thinking of her only in relation to Anakin and not her own person. For all her would-be faults from portrayal, dialogue, storyline, whatever, I think it's pretty hard to deny the idea of Padme and who she was as a strong, reasoned woman who fell in love and got betrayed like everyone else. I'd say I'm glad he finally gets some truth and insi