How to Take an Empire

Part 4: Chapter Twenty-Seven: Padmé

Vader wasn't entirely sure how he'd ended up on opposite ends of a playing table with Ahsoka in his Mustafar Fortress playing some unimportant strategy hologame. One moment, he'd offered to help Luke against Leia. Then Ahsoka proclaimed that wasn't fair and took Leia's side for what Leia had declared to be a girls versus boys match. The next moment, Luke and Leia had lost interest in playing the game and were more interested in watching Vader and Ahsoka play against each other. Leia had even run to her room to get her datapad and looked up creative ways to make the already simple game more challenging.

"You can't do that," Ahsoka said idly as he started to make his next move.

"The rules say I can," Vader replied, not taking his eyes off the board.

"The standard play rules do, but we're playing by the altered challenge rules," Ahsoka reminded.

In hindsight, it probably wasn't a good idea to let Luke and Leia encourage his and Ahsoka's competitive rivalry. But at the very least, he didn't have to sense her anxiety about bringing the twins to his newly constructed Mustafar Fortress.

She'd made it very clear that she didn't like the idea of the twins spending time on a planet that was so strong in the dark side of the Force, let alone the planet's dark side locus where his fortress was built.

Vader certainly didn't care about assuring her concerns when it came to the decisions he made about the safety of his children. He trusted her choices with them, even letting her annoying top special agent have access to them. She would eventually have to learn to trust his. But these visits generally went better when Vader didn't give her a reason to be angry with him. Better to placate her in the beginning rather than to have things explode spectacularly in the end, especially when it came to Luke and Leia. He was learning that sometimes it was best to pick his battles when it came to Ahsoka.

So he'd exposed the old bond he shared with her from the icy depths of darkness that usually shielded it. When he'd reached out with his senses towards her, she didn't reach back to him immediately but didn't falter or retreat from him. When she had reached back, Vader had to resist the urge to retreat from the heat of her light. But she'd had no desire to fight the darkness, nor to extinguish it, and so he had guided her senses to the bright balls of light that were Luke and Leia.

She wasn't wrong in her suspicion that the dark side leaped with glee at the prospect of consuming them. But Vader's power in the dark side was more powerful than that of a non-sentient planet, and he rose against it, establishing his dominance. The two bright presences of light were his, and the dark side backed off as Vader reinforced that dark blanket he'd created to mask Luke's and Leia's presence.

"Well then," she had said thoughtfully, "I suppose the dark side can protect sometimes. In its own way."

Vader couldn't blame her for thinking that way, but there were many hidden aspects of the dark side outside what the Order had permitted their Jedi to know. There were many hidden aspects of it outside what Sidious wanted him to know.

Vader finally cursed at the game, not liking any of the limited number of options left to him when he remembered the altered rule of their game.

"You said a forbidden word, Daddy," Leia said with an unimpressed look that perfectly mimicked the one he was familiar with from Ahsoka.

"It's not forbidden for me," Vader replied.

"How can it be forbidden for me and not you?" Leia asked, tone now mimicking the skeptical one that he'd been frequently on the receiving end of with Ahsoka when she found him being hypocritical back when she was just a padawan. A tone he was still frequently on the receiving end of.