Chapter Text
On the Detention Level…
The ding echoes in the hallway and the three of them stop. The last body crumpling into the cell. Cinta gives it a kick to fully hide it from view and Vel’s hand drops to the blaster on her waist, her eyes flitting to her.
They were supposed to have more time.
“I’ll go,” she says.
Cinta nods and squeezes her shoulder. There’s no moment for anything more. She hopes she can talk her way out of this.
The gray uniform has felt wrong since she pulled it on, but Vel raises her chest and chin and marches down the hall like she believes every system should deign to roll in the mud of the Empire’s boot. She keeps one hand on the butt of her blaster, and barely arrives to the controls as the elevator opens.
Two stormtroopers flank a Wookiee, binders crossing his wrists and Vel can only stare. How did a Wookiee get on the Death Star?
“You captured a Wookiee?” She asks before she can stop herself, hoping she matches the normal drawl of Imperial officers. Though in this case, she thinks the stormtroopers could understand her confusion. They look towards each other, like they’ve never been asked a question before and she looks back at the looming Wookiee subdued with only a pair of flimsy binders.
Wait, she knows that Wookiee. In fact, it’s the only Wookiee she’s broken bread with.
“Chewbacca?” It slips out without permission.
Chewbacca roars, binders springing apart and a hand on each of the stormtroopers’ shoulders, “HOLD FIRE! IT’S A FRIEND!”
It’s not the first time that she’s happy that she learned Shyriiwook.
“Wait,” One of the stormtrooper shakes off his helmet, “Vel Sartha?”
Vel blinks, it must be a mirage. It is absolutely the last person she’d ever expected to have a reunion with on the Death Star. She looks at the other stormtrooper, the only face that could shock her more would be her mother.
“Han Solo?” she mutters.
He grins at her before frowning and raising up his blaster, “Wait? You’re with the Empire?”
“No!” Vel squeezes her eyes shut, “Of course not, I’m, what are you doing here?”
“Rescuing the Princess,” Solo nods.
“You’re,” Vel scoffs, “Sorry? You’re rescuing the Princess?”
“Kid’s idea,” Solo shrugs and nods at the other helmeted stormtrooper.
“Oh,” he shifts off his helmet and Vel can’t do anything but blink. He’s not much older than their youngest recruits. In fact, he’s probably younger. “I’m Luke Skywalker.”
She blinks. Skywalker? She knows that name, everyone knows that name, well everyone who was alive during the clone wars, knows that name. She’s traveled across the galaxy and she’s never heard of a single other, and now one is standing before her.
On the Death Star?
She rubs her face and calls down the hallway, “It’s clear.”
The men all try to peer behind her. Cinta steps forward, blaster in hand, blocking the majority of Leia from view.
“You know them?” Leia asks.
“Unfortunately,” Vel mutters under her breath.
“Han Solo,” he gives an unnecessary flourish with the hand not holding the blaster.
Cinta stiffens, and Vel fights to urge to take her hand. She’d mentioned Solo enough times when she was actively smuggling, or well, complained about him. Getting a smuggler to get a princess is, in some ways inspired, if it didn’t make so little sense. Who sent Solo? And why? How much were they offering for him to touch anything Imperial? And a Skywalker of all things?
“You have an exit?” Vel questions.
“The Falcon is waiting,” Solo nods.
Vel barks, “Seriously? You drove that here? Onto the Death Star?”
“Princess,” Luke Skywalker says, eyes round as he stares at Leia, “We have your droids. With the plans. We were going to Alderaan, but,” he bites his lips, “It’s gone.”
“Wait? You have the Death Star plans?” Cinta asks.
And it took them this long to mention it? That should have been the first thing out of their mouths once they confirmed they were among allies. She hadn’t fancied trying to figure out if one of these terminals could somehow get the blueprints on a datastick.
“And we have Ben, I mean Obi-Wan Kenobi!” He grins at them.
“Kenobi?!” Vel sputters, “Where?”
She needs to sit down. Skywalker talking about Kenobi? It is not the time, it is the last place in the galaxy it is the time.
“Disabling the tractor beam, rookie,” Solo smirks. She’s going to put a blaster bolt right between his eyes.
Cinta chuckles beside her and Vel feels a new headache coming on. In the short time they’d freed Leia they’d confirmed she hadn’t spilled that the Rebels were on Yavin IV. Leia wasn’t a liar. Or well she was, one of the best ones Vel knew. She’d only played sabbac with her once, and when Bail found the group of rebels he hadn’t lectured any of them because they were getting fleeced by a child.
He only wore a smirk like he wished she’d taken even more from them.
So, Vel had been impressed and proud that Leia had outsmarted whatever torture the Empire concocted for her and the slightest bit of relief that their initial evacuations weren’t completely necessary.
“Tractor beam?” Vel repeats, “So they know the Falcon is here.”
“Yes, had to use the smuggling compartments for myself,” he sighs.
“All of us,” Luke adds.
They have probably two minutes maximum before someone comes looking, and five minutes before a team does. She looks at Cinta, but she can already see the same conclusion written on her face.
“Okay, Cinta you take Princess Leia, Skywalker, and the droids, and use our escape plan.”
“Vel.”
“I know,” Vel looks at her and sighs, “Princess, we’ll switch outfits, I’ll go with the idiot and Chewbacca. Whoever sees Kenobi first grabs him.”
“We’re splitting up?” Skywalker asks. He has a little frown on his face like she told him his parents are getting divorced.
“Yes,” Vel says before anyone can argue. She’s already tearing off the jacket, “They’ll let the Falcon go because they think it will lead them to the Rebel base and we need those plans. They cannot find out where the base is.”
“I told them it was on Dantooine and Tarkin still destroyed Alderaan,” Leia spits out.
“We saw it. I’m so sorry.”
It feels horrible to say sorry about something as big as Alderaan. She doesn’t even really like Chandrila, but if the Empire blew it up she’d be trying to strangle all their necks in fury.
Leia barely acknowledges it, just looks down, like she’s keeping her temper tight against her chest or she might explode. It reminds her of Cinta, though she’s known Leia long enough to know the cool anger always erupts.
Cinta lays a hand on Leia’s shoulder, “Your dress.”
It’s perhaps the worst way Vel’s ever seen a woman be asked to take her clothes off. Leia steps to the side and the men turn to give them illusion of privacy as they both began pulling off their outer layers. For all of the annoying flirting that Vel has put up with from Solo, his eyes don’t stray over once as he turns his back.
“I don’t know about this,” Solo shrugs, “I’m here for the money. I’m not going on some suicide mission.”
“You’ll get it,” Vel promises. Hopefully whatever Kenobi and Skywalker offered him was reasonable. What a pair of names to think of together. “And they don’t want to kill us. They want us to get to the rebel base.”
“Which is where?” He crosses his arms.
“You’ll know if you need to,” Cinta answers.
Vel hands Leia the uniform and shrugs on Leia’s dress. It fits as well as any dress Vel’s worn, and she quickly buckles the belt and tucks her red hair under the hood.
“The boots,” Cinta says. Vel stares down. Her black boots stick out like a sore thumb. She leans against the security console as Cinta kneels, carefully easing them off as they gaze at each other without a shared word.
Her hand caresses Vel’s calf as she pulls on the white ones that Leia was wearing. There’s a long pause before she stands, and Vel wants to reach out.
“This will have to do,” she says. She doesn’t really have the hair for the buns. Leia carefully pulls down her own and Cinta wraps it up into a single bun to fit into the hat. It technically works, but once the Empire realizes that Leia is out of the cell, hopefully they will be too focused on the white dress to notice that auburn isn’t brunette.
There’s another ding and they all flinch. An elevator opens and the stormtrooper slumps down immediately, Cinta’s blaster already smoking.
“What is the meaning of this?” The officer yells but goes down immediately as the group opens fire. Skywalker runs over and pulls the two bodies out of the elevator.
“We don’t have much more time,” Vel grabs the blaster off the stormtrooper, “Time to move. If you can contact the droids or Kenobi about the change of plans, now is the time.”
Skywalker nods and then goes to his comlink.
“Vel,” Cinta turns to her and for a moment she can barely breathe.
“I know,” She recovers herself and grabs her hand, giving it a squeeze, “I’m sorry, but we can’t–”
“I know,” Cinta says and then after only a moment of hesitation leans forward. Vel meets her in the middle. The kiss is hardly more than a peck, but Vel swears she could fight the entire Empire. They’ve been together too long for it to be acceptable to blush, but she feels her cheeks warm all the same.
“Oh come on!” Solo yells, “Are you serious? What is this?”
“With me, flyboy,” Vel says as she presses a button to summon an elevator. Cinta stays beside her, their hands clasped together.
“You were in a relationship the whole time?” He whines and she ignores him.
Dual empty elevators open, one up and and one down, and with one final squeeze, their hands break apart. Vel keeps her eyes on her for as long as possible.
“Helmet on.”
Chewbacca nudges him and Solo curses as he pulls it over his face, “I flirted so long.”
“And it was annoying,” Vel says, “I’m sure Chewie remembers.”
He gives a long grunt, “You were an idiot, it was very pathetic.”
“I–”
“We have one minute until they discover the Princess is missing. Do you have a way to contact Kenobi?”
“No, that’s farmboy’s job,” Solo mutters, “And he’s all into that woo-woo shit.”
Vel fights from pinching the bridge of her nose, “Do you know the way to the Falcon?”
“Not really, I mean I can get us there, but the two of you a little conspicuous.”
“We’ll go a level below and hope for the best. Chewie, you’ll have to block me from sight if possible.”
He growls, “I’m not putting my fur on the line.”
“Not from blaster bolts,” she assures him, “Just eyesight.”
“Fine,” he hums.
At least she is small. That might give them an extra second.
“Why couldn’t farmboy come with us? This was his idea,” Solo grumbles, “I was fine waiting for the old man to finish with the tractor beam and be done with it.”
“He’s greener than Naboo,” Vel mutters. And a stormtrooper would lend some legitimacy for Cinta and Leia’s escape. “Alright, be ready.”
No one is waiting on the floor as they depart. She lets Solo lead, simply because the little bit of casing they did before getting to the detention level doesn’t help when they are going the opposite direction of their planned escape.
“Rook, I really don’t know where the Falcon is from here,” Solo mutters when the reach a closed blast door.
“Come on, you have the routes spanning the galaxy memorized, you can’t do a little mental math of us getting off a floor lower?”
Chewie laughs.
“Shut up,” Solo grunts, “It should be this way. And none of this will matter if the old man can’t turn off the tractor beam.”
Vel keeps her comments to herself. If they actually did manage to find Obi-Wan Kenobi, back from the dead, than that was the least of their problems. She keeps her ears peeled as they walk through the hallways. By now the dead Imperials will have been discovered. It will be only a matter of moments before they realize the princess’s cell is empty and the whole station will be on high alert.
She pulls Solo back against a wall when she hears the steady, marching footsteps of stormtroopers and shoves them all into some alcove as they go past.
“Careful,” she hisses at him.
“I’m trying to get us to the Falcon, I don’t have time to be careful. That’s on you.”
“You’re an idiot,” Vel rolls her eyes.
Chewie hums, “We should be good now.”
Vel shoves Solo back out, “And stop clomping around like how you dance. Pretend you can’t wake Jabba up.”
Han grumbles under his breath but Vel ignores him. Her grip on the stolen blaster gets tighter and tighter with each step.
“There she is,” Solo stops next to a window.
It feels wrong to see the Falcon sitting next to mint TIE Fighters. A whole battalion of stormtroopers surrounding it. A part of her still wants to disbelief it, regardless of the evidence from her eyes and the two next to her.
“How are we going to make it through that,” Vel mutters.
“You better make a plan quick,” Solo says.
“I have to make the plan?”
“It was your idea to go to the Falcon.”
“Like you would have left the Falcon behind!”
“I might of!”
Chewbacca laughs.
Vel desperately wants to punch Solo, but just nods him forward, “We need to keep moving.”
“Right,” Solo nods, “Just a couple levels now.”
“There’s nothing just about this,” Vel sighs. She takes the lead, now that she’s got eyes on it.
She’s not had a chance to spend much time on Star Destroyers, but she’s been on enough cruisers that she assumes she can get them down there.
“Down here,” she orders when they find a stairwell. It’s empty, or at least as empty as they can hope. There’s the distant humming of electricity and thundering of boots, but it sounds at least a half dozen levels up.
They pause on the hanger level, which is helpfully marked on the wall, and Vel pokes her head out. There’s two stormtroopers with their backs to them and she nudges Solo.
Chewbacca counts them down with his fingers and they both fire. It’s loud, but they’re dead and there’s no back up in sight. Vel lets out the breath she was holding.
“We’ll need to move quickly,” Vel mumbles, “We’re bound to run into more on this level.”
“You don’t need to tell me twice,” Solo says.
Chewbacca roars in agreement.
They run full speed down the halls.
“The prisoner!”
She instinctually ducks her face so the hood will shield her fully. It doesn’t help her aim, but Solo and Chewbacca each take down a pair of stormtroopers before they fly into the next hallway.
“Move! Move! Move!” Solo yells.
“Save your breath!” Vel yells back.
“Stop them! Close the blast door!”
They run and shoot as the blast door starts to close. Every step marked by haphazardly pointing behind them and hoping that she makes contact. Vel jumps over without issue and shuffles backwards to see that Chewbacca and Solo are able to follow.
Solo barely makes it.
“Okay,” she breathes out.
“They know exactly where we are!” Solo yells.
“And we’re close. Okay?” She can practically smell the Falcon, and they need to get to it before they’re pincered.
“I thought your plan meant they wouldn’t be trying to kill us?” Solo all but screams.
“No, just that they’ll be trying to kill us a little bit less!” Vel yells, “This is probably whoever’s in charge of the base doing a little test run to work out the kinks for next time.”
“I’m not doing next time! I’m getting my money!”
They turn a corner and Vel immediately shoves them backwards when a burst of fire almost torches them.
“Well fuck,” she says simply.
There was practically a whole squadron down there.
“We’ve got them!” She hears and looks at Solo and Chewbacca.
Solo gulps, his face white, “C’mon Rook, this isn’t the end.”
“I know,” she breathes. They’ve moved far enough away from the blast door that they can’t see it, but certainly they’ve started opening it again. “Chewie, cover our backs.”
Chewbacca nods.
“Solo, on my signal.” He nods and Vel waits, closing her eyes. Stormtroopers are constantly overheating the firing pin, and so they just need a moment. To at least go out fighting. There’s a pause, her heart thumping rapidly and she hopes that Cinta has already made it out. The firing slows. “Now!”
Except, as Vel leans forward it isn’t stormtroopers that greet her, but a glowing blue lightsaber piercing through them. The stormtroopers have started screaming, one blasts the one next to it as he tries to aim for the new adversary, and then in a smooth motion, like an afterthought, his head is sliced off.
Fucking hell.
Vel can only watch as the rest of the bodies crumple and an old man, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Vel’s mind supplies, stares at them and beckons them forward.
“Well come on now,” he says, “We don’t have all day.”
“The fuck?” Solo mutters next to her.
Chewbacca grunts and jogs after him, “I told you he was a Jedi.”
“That doesn’t tell me shit,” Solo shoots back.
Vel feels just as stupefied as Solo looks and has just the presence of mind to move slightly faster than Solo does.
“You’re not Princess Leia,” Kenobi says as he motions them down a different hallway.
“Congrats on stating the obvious.”
Vel ignores Solo, “No, and I’m not sure how you got here. I’m from the Rebel Alliance.”
“Ah,” Kenobi stops them with a raised hand. Vel bites back a smirk at how Chewbacca has to grab the back of Solo’s shirt. “The droids found me and we were supposed to deliver them to Alderaan.”
“Right.” It hits her, for a moment, who Kenobi was supposed to meet with. That Bail and Breha are not so much as dead as blasted out of existence. She gives herself only a moment to even begin to feel it before she shoves it down. It’s not the time. Not that there ever seems to be a time.
“Are the tractor beams disabled?” Solo asks.
“Yes,” Kenobi answers, “If we can get onto your ship we have a clear shot. But Vader is here.”
“Oh,” Vel feels the drop in her stomach.
She’s never met Vader before, which if she had, she knows she’d be dead. For a while she thought he was simply a story, and then she’d found a contact she was supposed to meet up with tied to a wall with beams of bent metal, head clean off, neck cauterized. It hadn’t taken much to get the people talking about what had happened, and even if it was almost unbelievable, Vel knew enough about the Jedi to know that one hellbent on murder and destruction had to be capable of this.
Not that he was ever a Jedi. Rather, something else more terrifying that she couldn’t fathom.
“He’s trying to force a confrontation,” Kenobi says, “But I think I threw him off. The Force is guiding us.”
“Great,” Solo scoffs.
The hurry down another hallway and then Kenobi stops them again, “Wait.”
They all tuck against the wall as the sound of boots got louder, but the stormtroopers don’t look at them. Just keep marching pass.
“Just a little longer now,” Kenobi says.
They all hold their breaths until Kenobi, without ceremony, takes off again.
“A fucking fool,” Solo shakes his head.
“And you’re still following me,” Kenobi smirks back.
And then there she is, the Millennium Falcon, the “fastest” ship in the galaxy. It hadn’t changed much since the last time she’d seen it about a year ago, maybe some more carbon scoring. The only thing that really was different was the hoard of stormtroopers surrounding it. For all of Solo’s faults, he had been excellent at staying off the Empire’s radar.
“I have a thermal detonator,” Vel says as they duck behind some crates.
“Anything else?” Kenobi asks.
“No,” she sighs, “We weren’t planning on this being messy. Not if we wanted to survive.”
“I take it your other group has Luke, the Princess, and the droids?”
Vel checks her chronometer, “Yes and they should almost be off the Death Star. So, no time like the present for a distraction.”
“I’m no distraction,” Solo says loudly, pointing at his chest. “I’m worth a lot. Alive.”
Vel frowns, “And the rest of us aren’t?”
“That’s not my point–”
“Quiet,” Kenobi lifts his hand, “I’m not asking you to make a risk I’m not willing to also take.”
“Oh that really comforts me,” Solo scoffs and rolls his eyes. Chewbacca nudges him and he thankfully shuts up.
“Now,” Kenobi says and points at the group directly in front of the ramp, “You get the detonator there, I’ll provide cover. Solo, Chewbacca, activate the ship as fast as possible. Vader is probably lurking around here somewhere.”
Vel swallows.
“And me?”
Kenobi looks at her, “Stay close and use that blaster. If Vader appears get on the ship and do not look back.”
“Understood.”
“Ready?” Kenobi asks them. They all give a nod, “After you,” he nods at her.
Vel lets out a breath and takes out the thermal detonator. She stares at it, at her vague reflection in the shiny metal, and then activates it. For one long second she lets it sit and then she peeks over the supply crates and throws.
She ducks down and hugs her blaster to her chest. There’s just the buzz of a hanger, the clacking of armor, and then–
BOOM!
The whole hanger shook.
“If you damaged my ship, Rook!” Solo threatens.
“GO! GO! GO!” Kenobi yells, his lightsaber already activated.
They run. Half the stormtroopers are down or reeling and Vel starts shooting at the others. Chewbacca and Solo follow her and the hum next to her makes her spine tingle. She knew a Jedi a lifetime ago, but she’d never seen them in action. Not in person.
Her nostrils fill with the faint stench of burning plasti and metal. In the corner there’s a small fire that’s growing, and a plume of smoke that’s filling the hanger.
“On the Rebels!”
“There’s a fire, sir!”
“The Rebels are the priority!”
There’s a wave of blaster bolts all around them. It’s the most chaotic environment she’s been in since she ran into the Ferrix riot. The trick of a good operative has always been to avoid fire fights.
“Now!”
“I can’t see anything!”
“Close it!” Kenobi calls as he places himself on the edge of the ramp, deflecting blaster bolts.
Han and Chewie have already sprinted inside. Blaster bolts flew around them as Vel presses the button the close the ramp. She shoots, barely registering one going down, before firing at another. They fire mainly towards the glowing blue of Kenobi’s lightsaber.
He moves like something else. Fluid and quick, nothing like she’d expect from a man of his age, deflecting bolts straight into the necks of the approaching boots.
There’s a heavy sound of mechanical breathing. It should be impossible to hear with the chaos whirling around her. She feels like she was dropped to the bottom of a freezing lake as she looks up, a red hum in the distance and sees him.
Darth Vader.
The ramp closes as the engines roar. Vel hurries to the cockpit, feeling her body tremble like she’s a new recruit that had just been handed a blaster in live combat. Solo tries to bat her away from the computer as she inputs the coordinates and the computer begins whirling as it makes calculations.
“TIE Fighters!” Chewbacca roars.
Vel sprints out.
“Can you manage it old man?” Solo yells after them.
“I’ve operated far more complex weapons than this,” Kenobi sighs.
“Are you–”
She climbs to the top gunner, their voices fading into absence until she slides into the seat and slides on the headset.
“We’ve got two coming!” Solo all but screams, “Two trailing behind them.”
“Focus on flying,” Vel barks back.
“You should see them soon, but they’re still out of range. We need another minute before we can make the jump.”
Vel adjusts in her seat as two of them come into view. She’s not sure she’s ever used a turret in this style before. Her previous times on the Falcon had consisted mainly of Solo losing spectacularly at sabbac and getting trounced by Chewbacca in holochess. The controls feel almost hypersensitive, and her first shots go wide.
“I need better than that, Rook,” Solo roars in her ear.
“Your turrets are out of the Old Republic,” she spits back.
Kenobi laughs and then there’s the faint sound of an implosion, “One down.”
Vel grits her teeth as they come around and focuses on the screen, she fires as the TIE fighters weave in front of her, but her bolts still found nothing but space.
There’s a loud blast and the whole ship shakes and rumbles. It jostles Vel in the chair, and she has to grip hard, her nails biting her palms to keep herself somewhat steady. It sounds awful and she’s reminded that despite Solo being an expert smuggler, this is just a freighter.
“They hit us!” Solo screams.
“Status?”
“We’re okay, but I need them gone now Rook! We need to get out of here!”
“Shields are still holding,” Chewbacca roars, “But not for long.”
There is another explosion.
“Rook, this old man is showing you up.”
“He’s a fucking Jedi!” Vel yells back.
“Always with the excuses with you.”
Chewbacca laughs.
Vel bites her lip as she hears the screech, adjusting about in the seat until one flies straight across her viewport. The computer beeps again and she presses down, hard. The TIE wobbles and then explodes as another bolt hits it. A bright flash of white and orange, filling her view and Vel leans back for a second and just breathes as the turret continues firing.
One more to go.
She barely has time to think it before Kenobi crackles in her ear, “I got the other.”
Vel sighs. At least, if her turret skills weren’t much, they were free.
“Punch it, Chewie,” Solo commands.
For a second, the stars seem to pause before there is the roar and jerk of hyperspace. They split into lines and Vel sits back, wiping at her forehead. There had been no signs of another ship. Not that they wanted that. But still. Hopefully they’ll be gone. She breathes, feeling the sweat cool on her neck and then eases herself out of the chair.
Please, she thinks, please let the others have gotten away. With a heavy heart, climbs down.
“Coruscant!” Solo yells when she walks back into the cockpit, “Rook, this is suicide the second we drop out of hyperspace and you promised me money. I can’t get that if I’m dead.”
“Exactly how many credits do you owe?” Vel asks him. Maybe if she gets Kenobi to distract Chewbacca she might get away with shooting Solo.
“Who said anything about owing?”
Vel crosses her arms.
“Fine, fine, a lot, and it’s my hide,” Solo sighs as he seems to consider how much of the truth to off. “Jabba has a bounty on my head.”
Vel raises an eyebrow, “What did you do?”
“Jumped a shipment from these fucking Imperials. You’d think he’d be happy I’m not dead or in prison, but no,” Solo rolls his eyes, “He lost a shipment so he’d rather I was dead.”
“Maybe you should fake your death,” Kenobi muses as he joins them.
“What? No,” Solo said.
“It would solve your money problems,” Vel agrees.
“And then what? I worked hard for my reputation!”
“As a smuggler who can’t deliver?” Kenobi asks.
Chewbacca laughs.
“I hate all of you,” Solo mutters, “But seriously Rook, what’s the plan?”
“We’ll go to the Industrial sector,” Vel says, “We were always looking for a reason to take the power plant offline. Dump the tracking beacon there, and then we’ll hop to Gorobei. It would be better if we could dump the Falcon–”
“We are not dumping the Falcon.”
“I know,” Vel rolls her eyes, “So we jump to Gorobei, then Mikkia, and I’ll let you know after that.”
If they get there.
“It would be better if we could make a distraction while we’re on Coruscant,” Kenobi says.
“How? Bomb downtown?” Vel shakes her head, “With a freighter?”
“There’s more than one kind of possible distraction,” He twists his fingers on his chin, “We’re dumping the parts, industrial sector you said?”
“Yes,” Vel frowns.
“Hmm,” he smiles, “I have an idea.”
Vel shares a look with Solo, she doesn’t like that at all.
Back in Docking Bay 327…
He stared into the blankness that once housed one of the most hideous ships he’d ever seen. That carried Kenobi. Gone. He could care less about the handful of rebels that went with him. The Rebellion was inert with this battle station. But Kenobi.
Kenobi was meant to perish.
He’d known, as sure as he’d known anything, that Kenobi was to be no more. After years of suffering, of the coward hiding, he was finally going to be gone.
His hand twist against the hilt of his lightsaber. He was meant to chop him to pieces. Detach every limb he didn’t deserve to have and eject the pieces into space where he’d never find peace. There was no peace, he knew that, and it was time for Kenobi to as well.
He crushes the railing in front of him. He turns to the stormtrooper who had carried Tarkin’s orders to not pursue, hands clenching.
The stormtrooper flinches.
No, it would better to hear Tarkin himself choking on his failures.
He turns, cape billowing behind him, and commands, “Come.”
“Yes, Lord Vader.”
He marches. Each step makes him angrier and angrier. What purpose could be greater than Kenobi’s body blasted through space for eternity?
Did the Force betray him?
No, he feels it burning through him as always. Something had shifted, Kenobi had shifted. There had been a finality to it, he could taste it, at long last Kenobi’s death was destined by the Force until suddenly, it wasn’t.
Of course Kenobi would try to escape his fate. He’d erased almost all of the incorrect lessons that swine had tried to impart of him, but now it seemed it was time to discard the last.
And then for Tarkin to command him not to pursue?
There was the creaking of metal behind him and he unclenches his hands as the doors come into view.
Everyone in the command center stiffens, except for Tarkin, who still stands, staring out the viewport that once showed Alderaan with hands clasped at his back.
“Tarkin,” he grits. There’s something like satisfaction at seeing the others, the engineers and officers of little importance, flinch at his voice.
“Ah Vader, you’re here, good, once they drop out of hyperspace–”
“You are a fool–”
“Patience Vader,” Tarkin cuts in, raising a single hand. “We’ve placed a tracker on the ship. They will soon lead us to the exact location of the Rebel base.”
“Kenobi was there,” he mutters. Killing him in space might not have given him to same satisfaction as cutting him down, but it would have been worth it. Even if Tarkin went through with his threat to destroy his collection.
It would be a small price to pay for Kenobi’s head. The vermin had breathed long enough.
“Whatever is left of the Jedi will be destroyed with the Rebellion as we show them the power of this battle station.”
“Don’t be so bold–”
“If I recall,” Tarkin says, “You had years to hunt down those who still cling to the false religion of the Jedi, and you failed.”
He takes a step forward. Tarkin doesn’t move, just regards him with the same passionless stare he does the ruins of Alderaan.
“Kenobi will meet his fate soon enough.”
“He’s the last surviving member of the Jedi Council.”
“And he’s done what? Absconded with some rebels that will soon reach their doom? He will be dead, Vader, I promise you that, and so will any resistance against the Empire.”
He seethes, baring his teeth behind the mask. He wants to rip it off and go for Tarkin’s placid throat. For too long he’s let the ambitions of others stop him. Now Kenobi had the plans and the princess. Tarkin was a fool, and never again would he let him stop him.
He storms out.