Lady Obscura: Vader's Shadow [Star Wars | Luke Skywalker]

Chapter 24

So much of her life had been lived in space that hurtling through hyperspace was comforting in its feeling of normalcy. Athara was still fighting to come to terms with her realization that she was the daughter of Obi-wan Kenobi and Neva Adyé, so any hint of normalcy was an immense relief.

It all felt like a dream, really. She faintly recalled asking first the Jengals and then Vader about her parents when she was a child. The Jengals had truthfully known nothing, while Vader...she had never understood his reactions. He had always closed off completely and eventually warned her off the subject as she grew older, refusing to even acknowledge her questions. And below that, hidden almost well enough to escape detection, there had always been a tangled, confusing undercurrent of bitterness, guilt and—what had bewildered her most—fear and even a hint of relief. Once her skills had developed enough to recognize and even notice those emotions she had been reluctantly intrigued despite the way she had forced herself to give up on learning the truth of her own origins.

She understood, now...mostly, at least. He was bitter in his lingering anger at Kenobi and his inability to find his former mentor. The guilt, well, now that was easy to understand. Even as a girl Athara had understood on some deep-seated level why she felt guilt among those swirling emotions. But the fear and relief? They were two such different feelings that she had never understood the way they had been so intricately woven together when they escaped Vader's formidable mental shields. She could only suppose now that they stemmed from fear that she might find out the truth, and relief that she had not. As if that didn't make her bitter about it at all...

She also now understood the look on Kenobi's face in that split-second when his eyes met hers on the Death Star. He had recognized her. The shock that she was alive when he'd spent so many years thinking she was lost with her mother...

She also understood why he'd felt so familiar. He was a part of her, and that part of her, no matter how unconsciously seated, had recognized him too. But if he had recognized her, why hadn't he come to her? He was obviously capable; he'd been visiting and mentoring Luke since his death, especially on Dagobah. So why not appear to her? Why not tell her himself? Why had he left her to find out the truth the way she had? They were questions she still didn't have answers to.

But answers to many of the questions she'd ever had about her past and her origins were hidden somewhere in the old case that she and Luke had found hidden away in Kenobi—her father's—workspace...it still felt strange to think of Kenobi as her father even weeks later. They still hadn't managed to power up the datapad and early on Luke had discovered—with no small amount of disappointment from both of them—that the chips weren't compatible with the other datapads they had in the hovel. But Athara still knew more than she had ever dared dream.

She knew her parents' names.

It seemed such a small thing, but she had long ago resigned herself to believing that she would never know anything about them. More than that, she knew so much about her father already just from the research she had done on Kenobi when she'd first gone on the run. Now she could also understand the careful, even gentle way Qui-gon had spoken to her about his apprentice...and why he'd seemed so amused when he'd said she was rather like Obi-wan had been at her age; impulsive, stubborn, periodically sarcastic, resourceful. And it now made sense to her why Vader had insisted on the Death Star that they leave the search of the Millennium Falcon to the troopers; he had sensed Kenobi then—she knew that already, of course—but he didn't want her to sense him, or to confront him. That's what he had been hiding that day. More than that, he'd been hiding her from him.

Her mother, though, was still essentially a mystery, and Athara's absent curiosity had been fanned into a persistent need to know more. She had gleaned a little about her from Obi-wan's journals and the possessions in the chest, now obviously hers given the way everything in the chest seemed to be related to Obi-wan's wife.