Lightning found me and the Force left.
The bolt drove through my sternum and exited somewhere near my spine, and for one instant I understood electricity not as a weapon but as a language, every nerve in my body screaming the same syllable. The throne room floor caught me. Cold against the back of my skull, and the absurdity of that detail lodged itself in my brain while the rest of me burned. That I could register temperature. That the floor still existed. That the galaxy hadn't ended just because my body was trying to.
Palpatine's laughter filled the chamber the way poison fills a lung. Slow and thorough. I couldn't see him anymore. The lightning had bleached my vision white and the white was taking its time dissolving. My fingers twitched against the deck plating. The saber was gone, knocked loose on the second or third impact, its crimson glow snuffed somewhere to my left where it couldn't help me.
The shuttle. Through the viewport, pulling away. A faint point of light against the stars. I'd felt them go. Kota's defiant spark, Bail's steady pulse, the fragile constellation of lives I'd led Vader to and then clawed back. They were clear. That was the math that mattered.
The cold of the floor pressed into my shoulder blades, and the cold kept pressing, through the tunic, through the skin, down to something older and warmer. The Rogue Shadow's deck thrumming beneath my boots and her voice from the cockpit doorway, cutting through all of it.
She stood in the cockpit doorway and the console's blue glow caught the strands of blonde hair she could never keep pinned. Her eyes were doing the thing they did when she was terrified and refusing to show it. Searching my face for something solid enough to hold.
I told her about the vision and the words fell out flat and graceless. The Death Star. Kota in chains. All of them taken because every mission I'd ever flown for Vader had been a thread in the web that caught them. Juno's hand found my shoulder, warm through the sleeve. Her fingers trembled and she thought I couldn't tell.
"You didn't know, Galen."
I knew enough. I knew I'd been his weapon and I'd been effective and some fraction of me had savored the simplicity of it. A target and a mission and the clean satisfaction of the saber finding home. That was the part the guilt fed on. The part I couldn't say out loud because saying it would make her look at me differently, and her looking at me right now was the only thing holding the me together.
She walked by my side to the airlock when it was time. The ship breathed around us, recycled air and engine vibration, the backdrop of the only peace I'd ever known. She stopped at the threshold.
"Be careful," she whispered. Her eyes glistened and she didn't wipe them and I loved her for that. For refusing to pretend.
"Probably not," I said.
She almost smiled. The worry killed it before it reached her eyes. Her scent hung in the space between us after she turned back toward the cockpit. Engine oil and something cleaner I never found a word for. I wanted to follow it back into the cockpit and stay inside the radius of that warmth until the galaxy forgot I owed it anything.
I walked the other way.
The corridor swallowed her scent and gave me ozone instead, the sharp electric bite of a holo-emitter already spinning up.
PROXY's frame flickered in the training bay, his skeletal chassis cycling through a stormtrooper simulation I hadn't asked for. He fired. I deflected without thinking, the crimson bolt caroming into the far wall where it left a black scar on bare metal.
"Success probability against Death Star forces." His tone was flat as a diagnostic readout. "3.7%."
"You never give me better odds."
"And you never fail to defy them, Master."
Something sat behind his optics that didn't belong in standard droid programming. I'd spent more years in PROXY's company than any living being in the galaxy and I still couldn't name it. Loyalty didn't cover it. The droid equivalent of whatever stubbornness kept me walking into rooms I wasn't built to walk out of.
I didn't say goodbye. Never did with PROXY. He operated on the assumption I'd return, and that was the most optimistic thing about him. The overhead lights shifted as the Rogue Shadow banked, flooding the bay with a cold that didn't come from the recyclers.
The Death Star filled the viewport and the Force went quiet.
Not silent. Quiet the way a room goes quiet when something walks in that changes the pressure. The station's gravity well pressed against my chest before we cleared the outer perimeter, Palpatine's malice steeping outward through the superstructure, slow and saturating. Turbolaser emplacements studded the hull in rows, each one a promise.
Juno set us down in a maintenance hangar and the cloaking held. She didn't look at me when she said "May the Force be with you." She was looking at the sensor panel because if she looked at me she'd say something else and we both knew it.
"And with you," I said. The words weren't built for the job. No words I'd ever aimed at her were, but these carried more weight than the rest because there was a real chance they'd be the last ones.
The airlock opened onto cold plating and harsh white light and the sterile bite of station atmosphere. I ignited the crimson saber and its growl filled the silence with something that felt almost like company, and I moved.
Somewhere between the third corridor and the detention level, while the Force threw stormtroopers into walls hard enough to leave impressions shaped like men and blaster bolts seared close enough to warm my cheek, my mind slid sideways to Corellia. The treaty room. Bail's measured voice laying out charter provisions while I stood near the wall with my arms crossed, calculating how many rotations until Vader tracked us. Mon Mothma speaking about governance frameworks I couldn't follow. Bel Iblis pushing for military command structures that would crumble on first contact with reality. They'd taken the Marek family crest and pressed it onto their banner, and I'd let them because the symbol meant nothing to me and everything to them. They needed the crest. They never needed the man. The thought arrived and passed the way all honest thoughts do during violence. Quick. Bitter. Gone before it could root.
The corridors compressed into a handful of images the memory preserved with surgical clarity. A squad of four in a junction, the first two split before they completed their draw, plasma sealing what it opened in the same stroke. The third lost his rifle and the hand holding it. The Force hurled the fourth into a blast door and the frame reshaped around his shoulders and what slid down the metal afterward didn't get back up. The satisfaction was immediate and clean and I catalogued it the way I catalogued all of them, the Sith-trained reflex that approved the clean work before the rest of me could weigh in. That reflex had never died. It just learned to keep its mouth shut.
Further in, a service corridor, three officers pulling sidearms in near-unison. The lightning gathered in my fingers before I chose to use it, the arc bridging all three in a chain that locked every muscle at once. Left to right. The first dropped rigid, the stiff fall of something that had stopped being a man and become a conductor. The second hit the wall and the current pinned him there, smoke threading from the gaps in his armor, visor fogging from the inside. The third folded mid-stride and the charge cooked the air around him until the corridor smelled of something sweeter and worse beneath it. My hand tingled. The current left traces in the muscles that wouldn't fully fade for hours.
Bodies behind me and alarms overhead, and ahead the alarms thinned into something steadier. Something I'd been hearing since I was five years old.
He waited at the chamber's core. Black armor and mechanical breath. The metronome of my childhood, steadier than any heartbeat and more reliable than any affection.
Vader's crimson saber ignited and the red light ran across his helmet in streaks. He didn't speak first. He never did. The respirator spoke for him. That slow rhythm that said everything words couldn't. I am here. I am patient. I have always been waiting.
I lit my own blade. Crimson against crimson. His weapon and mine, the only inheritance he'd offered, and I carried it because it had kept me alive.
We met at the center and the first clash rang through the deck plating. His overhead strike carried the full mechanical weight of the suit compensating for what the suit had cost him, and I caught it on my guard and felt the vibration travel from wrist to shoulder to jaw. The Force churned around us, two gravities warping the same space. Consoles detonated. Panels buckled upward and curled.
His reach against my speed. His precision against the Juyo aggression he'd drilled into me and now regretted. Each exchange carried the sediment of years. The backhand that had knocked a seven-year-old across a training bay on the Executor. Bones reset without anesthetic because pain was supposed to instruct. Approval that only arrived when I killed cleanly, and the silence that swallowed everything else. I fought the architecture of my own making and the architecture fought back with twenty years of programming built for exactly this opponent.
He caught my blade in a bind and leaned in. The respirator filled my ears.
"You were weak when I found you."
I twisted free and my saber raked across his throat housing. Plasma scored the vocabulator in a shower of white sparks and his next breath came out wrong. A whistling rasp that shattered the mechanical cadence for the first time in my memory. The sound of Darth Vader choking on his own damaged machinery was the most human noise I'd ever heard from the mask.
"Not anymore," I said.
I didn't wait for an answer. I pushed. The Force slammed his chest plate in a single concussive burst and sent him through the ruined consoles, boots cutting furrows in warped decking. He hit the far wall and the metal cratered around his shoulders. I was already past him, moving toward the corridor that climbed to the throne room, because Vader was not the point. Vader had never been the point. The man he served sat above. The people I'd freed waited below. The space between those two truths was narrow and it was the only space I'd ever fit. The corridor walls pressed close, then dropped without warning.
The throne room opened into a vault of cold and silence. Ceiling lost in shadow, polished floor reflecting the viewport's faint light. At the top of the raised dais Palpatine sat like something grown from the stone itself. His gnarled hands rested on the armrests. Yellow eyes tracked me with the unhurried focus of a thing that had never questioned its place at the top of a food chain.
Through the viewport the shuttle's glow was pulling away. A small point of light against the spread of stars. I felt them in the Force. Kota's furious spark. Bail's calm. The constellation I'd gathered and endangered and then torn free.
"You will die here," Palpatine said. The room carried his voice without effort.
My saber rang in my grip. My ribs throbbed from Vader's parting blow. The shoulder wound leaked slow warmth down my arm in a line I was choosing not to think about. My body ran its damage inventory the way it always did, the reflex Vader had installed early and never managed to remove. Cracked ribs. Left shoulder grinding where it shouldn't, the joint shoved half out of true. Both forearms burning from catching a man who hit like a docking clamp. Operational, but declining. And against Palpatine, declining meant terminal.
The arithmetic was clean. My reserves against his power. The shuttle needed time to clear tractor range and I was the only variable in the room that could buy it. My life for theirs. The calculation returned favorable. Even generous, if you factored the body count my life had generated. The only useful thing left in the inventory.
I charged.
His lightning met me three strides from the dais. White-violet current that found every wound I carried and used them as entry points, the electricity threading through cracked bone and torn muscle with the precision of a surgeon and the patience of something far older. My saber flew from my grip and skittered across the polished floor. I staggered. My knees hit cold stone. The current wanted me down and my body agreed.
But the shuttle was still in the viewport. Still climbing. Not clear yet.
I got up. I'm not sure my legs made the decision. Something older than legs, something that lived in the place where the Force met whatever was left of me, pushed me vertical. Palpatine's face twisted. Not anger. Genuine surprise. The lightning intensified and I stopped trying to fight it with technique or training or anything I'd learned from either of the men who'd shaped me.
I opened my arms.
The current poured through and I let it. Every remaining scrap of Force energy in my body gathered behind my sternum, dense and bright and compressing toward something that felt less like power and more like a door opening. I pushed outward. Not at Palpatine. Not at anything. Just outward, in all directions, the way light leaves a star when the star decides it's finished holding itself together.
The throne room detonated. Palpatine screamed. The viewport fractured in a web of white lines. The dais crumbled and the polished floor buckled and the sound hit a register that stopped being sound and became pressure, a single concussive note that emptied the room of everything except light.
The blast left me hollow. Every cell that had held the Force a moment before was scraped clean, emptied of everything I'd ever gathered, and my knees found the floor before I understood I was falling. The throne room was rubble around me. Palpatine lay somewhere in the wreckage, his screaming replaced by a silence that pressed against my eardrums like water. Through the fractured viewport the shuttle's light was pulling away, small and steady against the spread of stars, and I felt them in the distance the way you feel warmth through a wall. Kota's furious spark. Bail's calm. The fragile constellation, intact. Safe.
The math had worked.
My face hit cold stone and I couldn't remember telling it to. The Force was still there but I couldn't reach it, the way a drowning man sees the surface and his arms refuse to kick. My vision narrowed to a tunnel. The ruined ceiling above me, support beams twisted into shapes that didn't belong to reason, emergency lighting strobing red across the smoke. My fingers twitched against the polished floor. They were the only part of me still taking orders.
Somewhere behind me, heavy boots. And the broken wheeze of a damaged respirator, dragging closer. I knew that sound. I'd been hearing it since I was five years old. The rhythm was wrong now, stuttering through the throat housing I'd cracked, but the weight behind it was the same. Patient. Deliberate. His.
I tried to move. Nothing answered.
The dark came in from the edges and I let it, because there was nothing left to hold it back.
A chemical tang burns through sinuses I forgot I owned. Sour and sharp. Familiar in a way that doesn't have an origin. Medi-gel? The word surfaces with the taste and fits perfectly and I have no reason to know it. The question forms and dissolves before it finishes.
Voices erupt. Frantic. Overlapping.
"Synaptic conduits firing!"
Something stirs in my fingers but the signal dies before it reaches them. A woman's scream cuts through the rest, raw and breaking.
"We're losing him! Divert energy to the auxiliary injectors now!"
I reach for the voices. My thoughts fray at the edges, a fading ember the abyss is already swallowing.
The dark floods back and takes everything with it.