Chapter Text
The man who had been Anakin Skywalker, Darth Vader, and half a dozen more flattering names was generally content to think of himself without any name at all. His medical droid only called him Sir if it called him anything—when it was just the two of them 98% of the time, they didn’t generally need to specify who they were talking to. The other 2% of the time he was generally called Anakin, or his favorite name by far: Daddy.
He knew it was more than he deserved, being in contact with his children, but it was all that kept him going anymore. From the moment he woke up in the morning to his last glace at his chrono at night, he counted down the days and the hours to when he would see the children again.
He made toys and gadgets for them, which Ahsoka faithfully delivered for him. He’d even begun writing a series called The Padawan Guides with them in mind, featuring titles such as The Practical Application of Levitation and J-Wings, Juggernauts, and other Jokes: A Study of Poor Mechanical Design. He knew it would be a few years before they could fully appreciate those, however, so he added a few children’s joke books in the mix as well, such as Jumping for Droidikas. Ahsoka had helped him find an illustrator, and he read them to his children over their comm calls many times.
The twins were five now and looking forward to their first summer at the Lothal Temple. They were nearing the age that they were beginning to understand that their father had done something very wrong to be forced to stay on a secret asteroid lightyears away from anything. Anakin was planning on explaining things to them soon—certainly not everything, since they were still so very young, but enough for them to understand why things were this way.
Their grandparents, Ruwee and Jobal, were kind, practical souls—though they did not speak much to their estranged son-in-law, they occasionally sent brief messages during the week, such as if the children needed to miss the next scheduled visit for any given reason, or if one of them had been injured or taken ill, or if they had asked a particularly difficult question about their parents.
So he was surprised, but not unduly so, when his comm registered a message from Ruwee a couple days before their usual call. This particular message, however, was one he would never forget.
Someone took the children. The authorities think it was Cad Bane.
It took Anakin a matter of minutes to hack into his Force suppressing armband, and the moment it fell away he was nearly overwhelmed by the strength of two little souls reaching for him in pure panic. Anakin did his best to calm them and get a feel for their location at the same time.
Anakin got to work.
Cad Bane had been an old soul his entire life. Now that he actually had the age in his bones to back up his world-weary views, he was that much more disagreeable.
So when one of his little hostages looked up at him with a sneer and said, “Our Daddy’s coming,” he didn’t pay it any mind, just muttered under his breath about how inconvenient it was to look after the prisoners himself since that blasted old droid of his had run out on him a couple years back.
Not that he’d trusted that droid much anyhow—not after it had let that clone kid dupe him and lost all the credits for the job in the same day.
Stupid droid.
It took a couple days of Hyperspace travel, but Bane managed not to lose his temper even once, though it had been a close thing a couple times when the kids got mouthy at him. He was looking forward to offloading them on Nal Hutta.
He’d just eased into orbit when a group of distinctive flying saucers intercepted him. Bane snarled and toggled on his holotransmitter to give the Weequay captain the full benefit of his angry face.
“Waddaya want, Hondo?” he spat.
“Cad Bane, my very old friend!” Hondo called in that cheery, insulting voice that grated on every last one of Bane’s frayed nerves. “I am here to perform a great service for you! You may not have noticed, but your ship is on fire!”
Bane didn’t even look down at his instruments to check—his ship’s sensors would have been screaming at him if that were the case. He just blinked once and growled very slowly, “Get. Out. Of. My. Way.”
“Ahbababa, wait a moment!” Hondo exclaimed, holding up a finger to his ear, and Bane felt a distinct jolt in his ship as it was shot from very close range. “Now your ship is on fire! I suggest you drop your cargo and—”
“You idiot!” Bane seethed. He slapped the transmitter off and worked to steady his ship without help from the stabilizers, which had been completely fried. He was going to kill that Weequay.
Then a hull breach caused a new slew of alarms. Bane really wished he’d replaced his droid now, but he had to land his ship manually, and he couldn’t do that if he was investigating what could very well be a scavenger droid now working its way through bulkheads towards the cargo hold.
Kark, this was bad. If those kids were hurt, Bane’s neck would be on the line.
He pulled up his security feed to get an eye on the intruder, and he was taken aback not only because it had already reached the children but also because it wasn’t a droid at all—a Jedi was in his cargo hold, using his laser sword to stab through the ray shield controls and scooping the brats up in his arms.
Ah well.
Bane knew how to hunt Jedi.
Anakin held his children close and braced himself as the ship hurtled downward. The children clung to him and shrieked at the top of their lungs, but they weren’t screaming at him, and that made a world of a difference from the last time he’d held them.
They’d actually run to him when he deactivated the ray shield, and Anakin hadn’t been able to resist just standing there holding them in his arms, even on a bounty hunter’s ship that was actively falling from the sky.
“Jedi!” Hondo barked over his borrowed commlink. “You are not following our plan! You were supposed to escape with the cargo before the ship crashed!”
Anakin grit his teeth. How the Weequay was still alive after antagonizing some of the most powerful beings in the Galaxy was a mystery only the Force could unravel. “Just be ready to pick us up after we land,” he growled.
And then, with a hard bump, they landed.
Anakin cushioned their fall with the Force and lost no time pushing himself to his feet.
“Alright, children, it’s time to go,” he said softly, hoisting them higher in her arms.
“Is it over?” Luke asked, his voice muffled since he was still hiding his face in Anakin’s cloak.
Leia raised her head and looked towards the cockpit. “No,” she whispered, “we still have to get away from the blue guy.”
Which was a valid point.
What Anakin would give to have a trustworthy ally in that moment he could trust to protect the twins while he flushed out the enemy. He rarely ran missions alone, and never with children so precious to him.
But then again, he was much more powerful than he used to be, and it didn’t matter how strong-willed the Duros was—all the mental forditude in the world couldn’t stop the Dark Side. The moment Anakin caught a glimpse of that hated blue face, he reached out with the Force and threw him flat against the wall, conveniently back out of sight—the children didn’t need to see this. It would have been easier if Anakin had a free hand to guide the Force around crushing Bane’s windpipe, but he made do.
But the children wailed.
Anakin lost his focus and took a moment to reassure the children, but Bane was angry now, and he was not an adversary Anakin wanted to take chances with. So Anakin fell back to his very first parenting coping mechanism and sent the children to sleep.
Then he located the Duros again and broke his neck, making it a quick end.
Then there was silence.
Anakin took in a deep breath and released it slowly, processing a few things as he carefully picked his way back out of the ship.
A) He was a terrible father who couldn’t handle his own children any better now than when they were toddlers.
B) He was still Dark. Maybe not as Dark as he once was—he no longer lived and breathed in the Dark Side, but he had turned to it the moment he was in a tight spot.
C) His children were still better off being raised by their grandparents, aunts, and uncles, who would love them and raise them in a healthy environment.
In the last few days of scrambling to catch up with Bane, he had daydreamed of taking his children and disappearing into the black, of settling on some far-flung world and raising them himself.
But now he knew with perfect certainty that he was not fit nor deserved to be their caretaker, not as he was now.
They woke after a few minutes and rubbed their eyes in confusion at the thick fog outside of Bane’s still smoking ship.
“Where are we?” Luke asked.
“Nal Hutta,” Anakin answered.
“It smells,” Leia pouted with a deeply disgusted expression that was even better than Admiral Tarkin’s.
“We’re not staying for long,” Anakin assured them, and right on cue, Hondo’s round saucer-shaped ship descended from above, the ramp already lowered. “Hold on tight, children!”
Anakin leapt onto the ramp in one smooth motion, and the squeals of glee from his children did funny things to his insides.
One of Hondo’s men led him to a small, meeting room where Hondo was pacing restlessly. The chairs were all skewed from the table, and touch-points on the table and walls were dark with grime—even the floor was disgustingly sticky under Anakin’s boots.
Upon seeing them enter, the Hondo threw his hands out and smiled wide. “Aha! There is our Jedi friend and his cargo! Always one for the heroics, eh Jedi?”
“What’s cargo?” Luke and Leia asked at the same time. They were completely unafraid of the loud pirate and oblivious to the dirty room, which was truly something considering all they’d been through.
Hondo laughed. “What’s cargo, they want to know? Hah! Cargo is my life! Cargo is my business! In this case, you, my lovelies, are cargo!”
“Hondo,” Anakin growled, and the pirate raised his hands in a gentle motion.
“Joking, joking! Except it is true! But! Irrelevant! Come, sit. You are no longer cargo, but my guests, and you will be treated as such!”
Anakin breathed a silent breath of relief when their food was pre-packaged ration sticks and water pouches. The children were hungry enough that they weren’t overly picky, and Anakin kept a close eye on everything that entered their reach.
Hondo finally led them to a private bunk room and left them to themselves. Anakin took a twin on each knee, and they had a very serious talk about everything that had happened, and why they shouldn’t tell anyone about him when they got back, and why he had never come to see them before, and why he wasn’t coming back to live with them forever. He did his best to keep it simple and child-friendly, promising them that he would explain all the details when they were older.
“But I hope you know, children, that if you’re ever in trouble, I will always find you.”
“We know, Daddy,” Luke said as they both leaned in to hug him tightly.
“It’s because you love us,” Leia agreed in a matter-of-fact tone.
Anakin’s throat closed up at their pure, simple trust, and he blinked back tears as he held them.
“Yes, I love each of you very, very much,” he said hoarsely.
He just had to love them enough to let them go.
Obi-Wan Kenobi himself was at the space station on Naboo as Hondo’s ship eased to the ground and lowered the landing ramp. The twins came down first, holding hands and smiling at the familiar faces greeting them, and they bolted to their grandparents as soon as they laid eyes on them.
The children were followed closely by a nanny droid that looked like it had seen better days, and then Hondo swaggered down, set his hands on his hips, and shouted, “Kenobi! I heard you’re even richer than you used to be!”
Obi-Wan held back a cringe and simply prayed that the pirate named a price that was a little less than a mid-rim planet. Cody shifted slightly at his side, spreading his feet a little wider and cradling his blaster rifle a little higher in silent challenge.
“Lucky for you,” Hondo continued, gesturing widely, “I have already been paid!”
And with a wave, the Weequay sauntered back towards his ship.
Obi-Wan blinked, and then shook aside his surprise. “No, wait, Hondo! What do you mean, you—”
Hondo whirled back around with a dramatic swish of his coat. “Aha! You want information, yes? It just so happens that I’m in the market to sell!”
A few hours later, Obi-Wan was sitting across from Hondo in a briefing room, rubbing his forehead in vain hope of easing his building headache.
Hondo described his employer as a heavily scarred Jedi human with four prosthetic limbs.
“Based on that description, yes, I’d say I know him,” Obi-Wan sighed. “How did you find him?”
Hondo was tipped back onto two legs of his chair, resting his hands behind his head and apparently daydreaming about how he was going to spend all his new credits, but he blinked back to the present at Obi-Wan’s question. “Eh? Find him? He commed me from Pantora. He must have gotten my number from one of my—ah—old associates.”
Pantora.
How in the Galaxy had Anakin made it to Pantora? It was even further from Nal Hutta than Naboo, and according to Hondo, the pirates had arrived on the Hutts’ planet just hours before Cad Bane. The timeline just didn’t add up.
“You picked him up on Pantora?” Obi-Wan repeated, just to confirm.
“Oh, no, no, he met me on Mimban,” Hondo said. “But his comm came from Pantora, yes.”
Obi-Wan flicked up a map of the Galaxy on the table display and typed in the planets of interest, though he kept Anakin’s prison off that list—just in case.
Mimban was just over a day’s travel from Nal Hutta, and it didn’t take a huge stretch of the imagination to consider how ideal of a smuggling hub it could be. There was still a small mining operation there, but most of the planet was feral swampland—an excellent place to hide a ship, if you knew what you were doing.
But the closest civilization to Anakin’s prison rock was Ord Mantell. It was literally on the other side of the Galaxy—more than full week’s journey away.
Obi-Wan leaned back and scrubbed his face. The logistics just did not make sense.
“He was such an odd Jedi,” Hondo mused. “His lightsaber was nothing like I’d ever seen before—all black and white and different!”
Obi-Wan slapped the projector off and turned his attention to this new puzzle piece. “What was black and white? The hilt?”
“No, no, no, no, the blade! And it made this strange bwzwoom sound—I know what a lightsaber sounds like, trust me, but I have never heard one like that before.”
Obi-Wan slowly raised his eyebrows.
Hondo was describing the Darksaber.
Last known to be in possession of Darth Maul.
Obi-Wan pinched the bridge of his nose.
He needed to have a long conversation with one Anakin Skywalker.
Hondo claimed he’d dropped off the “strange Jedi” on Bothawui roughly twenty-four hours ago. If Anakin had any sense at all, he’d be rushing back to his prison rock, but unless he’d learned how to apply the Force to new and lofty planes, then he should still be enroute.
Obi-Wan paid Hondo for his time and sent him on his way. After taking a few minutes to center himself, Obi-Wan commed Anakin’s medical droid.
Droids always answered promptly. It was a much more reliable way of getting ahold of anyone if they had a droid nearby.
“Greetings, Emperor Kenobi,” the droid said as its hologram blipped onto the table.
“Hello B-Seventeen,” Obi-Wan began. He’d given up on correcting the droid about his title a long time ago. “I need to speak with Anakin.”
“Of course, my lord. One moment, please.”
The droid’s image blipped out of existence, only to be replaced with Anakin sitting at a table. He looked better than he had in a while, more filled out, but still had a particular hunch in his shoulders that he’d carried since they’d gotten him out of that terrible suit—as if he could physically feel the weight of his crimes.
“Anakin,” Obi-Wan greeted tensely. “Where are you?”
Anakin’s eyes flicked down at the plate in front of him. “Eating breakfast. Have the twins been found?”
“Yes. But where are you exactly?”
The corner of the ex-Sith Lord’s mouth twitched. “…exactly where you’d expect.”
“Anakin—!” Obi-Wan grit his teeth and forced himself to take a deep breath. If his old Padawan was acting, then he was doing a superb job. If he wasn’t, then Obi-Wan was being quite rude.
“The twins have been returned safely back to Naboo. By Hondo. Who said he saw you.”
Anakin raised a thin, scraggly eyebrow. “And you believed him?”
“For all his faults, he is not one to lie about such things,” Obi-Wan snapped.
Anakin started at him incredulously. He started to speak, but Obi-Wan raised a finger at him. “I know the logistics are impossible, but I also know you, Anakin, and you specialize in the impossible.”
Anakin just blinked slowly, giving no confession nor denial.
Obi-Wan conceded that he was not going to win this battle. “Whatever you did… just hope you’re never found out. I don’t think you’d walk away from another trial.”
“They can’t try me if I’ve done nothing wrong,” Anakin said stiffly. Because of course he didn’t believe what he had done was wrong. (Obi-Wan didn’t either, but that was beside the point.)
It was also a reference to Ahsoka’s sham of a trial, for which she hadn’t yet entirely forgiven Obi-Wan, and neither had Anakin.
“I’m not going to respond to that,” Obi-Wan said primly.
Anakin lifted his chin in acknowledgement and thankfully moved on. “Thank you. For telling me about the twins. And for… for taking them.”
Obi-Wan’s eyebrows shot up. “Anakin…”
“Did they find Cad Bane?” Anakin interrupted.
Obi-Wan stewed for a long moment over whether he should allow Anakin to change the subject after such a huge acknowledgment, but he looked at his old Padawan, saw his hunched shoulders and scarred face, saw his thin-pressed lips and pinched eyes, and he let the moment pass.
“Yes, they found him. Best they could figure, he was thrown during the crash and broke his neck.”
“But the children are alright?”
“Yes, they’re perfectly fine.”
“Good. Commander Cody?”
“Fussing, as always.”
Anakin nodded. “And Capt—Commander Rex?”
“Thriving. He and the 501st just got back from chasing a gang of Trandoshans out of the Saleucami system. I heard the Bad Batch made an appearance there as well—they took the battle in spades.”
Anakin nodded several times. “Good,” he said. Then he paused. He looked Obi-Wan in the eye, and in a thick voice, said, “Thank you,” and hung up.
Obi-Wan sat back in his seat and pondered for a few minutes about the weight of those words, of their conversation as a whole, and about all that was said and not said. Cody let himself into the room after a while, and as soon as Obi-Wan laid eyes on him he slapped the table and shouted, “Blast it, I forgot!”
Anakin enjoyed the rest of his breakfast of eggs and tubers, laughing softly to himself every few seconds. He knew Hondo had to have mentioned the Darksaber, but he’d managed to keep Obi-Wan off balance enough throughout the call that it had never come up—not that anything he’d said had been insincere, but that was what made it the perfect distraction. Anakin toyed with the saber hilt now, turning it over and over in his hands under the table, debating what mischief he could afford to get into.
He had been very bored over the last four years. If he wasn’t committed to keeping a low profile here on his prison rock, he could make a fortune on a new brand of space travel technology. He’d convinced Ahsoka to bring him various parts and pieces over the years for smaller projects, and he now had a one-man craft that travelled more than ten times faster than lightspeed, and safer too.
He’d keep it to himself for now.
After all, someone had hired Cad Bane to take his children. And he was going to find out who.