Free at Last (OMFG updated 10/21?!)

[Surlethe]

Surlethe, you need a better title than this.

Do you have any ideas? I honestly suck at titling things, and with the other wonderfully titled fics in here, I don't know how I could compete.

[Surlethe]

Aha! More!

---


“Lord Vader.” His master’s voice was deep and throaty as ever.

“Yes, master?”

“Rise.”

Vader, meditation interrupted, smoothly rose from kneeling to standing.

“Kneel.”

Vader knelt, bending the other knee.

“Rise.”

Vader again stood, mind as clear as he could keep it.

“Kneel.”

He knelt. They had been performing the same mind-numbing exercise for eight hours, with only a short meditative interlude.

“Rise. Kneel. Rise. Kneel. Rise. Kneel. Rise ... kneel ... rise ... kneel ... .”

The orders came and came, and he obeyed; it was the only thing he could do. He had never been without a master; even at the end of his childhood on Tatooine, he had smoothly transferred his loyalty from Watto to Qui-Gon Jinn without tasting freedom in betwteen. The only way of life he’d ever known was servitude and obedience to his masters, and he could change it now as much as an ion drive could slingshot a ship into hyperspace.

Of course, Vader had always, secretly, wanted freedom. Freedom, he thought, like the freedom to love, the freedom to hate; the freedom to do whatever I want! That is why the Jedi Order is evil. And freedom was power: the power to order his life to his own wishes. Behind his mask, Vader blinked weakly. Freedom leads to power; power, to lust; lust, to anger; anger, to hatred; hatred, to suffering; suffering, to the Dark Side. The similarity to one of Master Yoda’s most revered sayings turned his unused stomach; the little green hypocrite -- he saw the leader of the council as it truly was -- had very little to offer in the way of instructive teachings.

Almost unbidden, a memory came to his mind: the Jedi Master, sitting across from the man called Anakin Skywalker, counseling him as the fear burned in Skywalker’s heart. Bars of light and shadow flicked across Yoda’s face as the diminutive master said, “Death we must not mourn -- rather, celebrate we must the passage of our loved ones into the netherworld of the Force; for, luminous beings are we, not this crude matter. Die we must, but never shall we perish.”

As he considered his former master’s words, the exercises stretched out, each one as painful as the last. His quadriceps were still cramped and tight from the operation which rebuilt them, attached them to the reconstructed terminus of his femur, and augmented them.

“Lord Vader.”

At last. “Yes, master?”

“Your exercises for the day are complete. Return to your chamber and meditate. Tomorrow, I will test you, and then, if you succeed, you shall construct your new lightsabre.”

“Yes, master.”

As Vader turned to walk back to his quarters, his master hid a smile.

That night, Vader slept standing, but only for half a standard hour; the nightmares were too vivid. The next morning, the medical droid arrived bright and early for his daily checkup, only to find Vader, with his gloves off, examining the contents of his mechanical left arm. “Lord Vader, what are you doing?” it nearly squawked, put off by the disassembled forearm and pieces lying scattered over his desk.

“Who constructed this?” Vader’s voice was flat and disapproving, filtered through the mask.

“Why, the bioengineering droids.”

“Get them in here.”

“But --”

Vader looked up from his arm, raised his complete hand, and flexed it as though he were holding a ball. The medical droid’s head casing began to slowly crumple. “If you do not immediately fetch me the bioengineering droids who constructed my arm, I will personally remove your circuitry piece-by-piece and reintegrate it into my arm.”

“Y-y-yes, sir. I will fetch them i-i-im-immediat-t-tely, s-sir.” Vader released it, and the droid scuttled away. He turned his attention back to his arm. The servomoters were imprecisely aligned with the artificial tendons, which, in turn, placed considerable -- given the strength of his lower arm -- and unnecessary stress on the wrist. He could already make out some slight wearing on the metal joint, where some of the dark lubricant had worn away and left the metal shining when exposed to the stark overhead lights.

He shook his head in disgust, then sealed his pressurized suit at the shoulder as he turned his attention to the integration zone between muscle and bone and the artificial limb. His former master’s lightsabre stroke had taken off the lower fifth of his upper arm along with the rest of the appendage, so the droids had had to construct a joint and augment his biceps and triceps with small motors and strands of metal running parallel through the meat. He rolled back his suit, feeling air rush into and around his upper arm, and looking with some interest at the scars where the artificial skin met the fragments of his real skin. The grafts had gone well; he suppressed a grimace as he peeled the leading edge of the artificial skin back to expose where muscle met machine.

The integration was more gradual than he’d supposed; but, as he peeled the skin back further, he noticed the same problem. That is why my arms were cramping so badly! The servomotors, only just visible to his enhanced vision, were again slightly off from the filaments running through his biceps; he supposed the same was true of his triceps. The muscle was still slightly sooty from Mustafar, though, he supposed, sterile. He knew for a fact that there would be no infection; his suit kept him pumped full of antibiotics and antibodies, and every day his med droid took blood tests to make sure there were no infections.

The door to his quarters slid open, and he looked up to see the medical droid enter, followed by two bioengineering droids. “He wanted to see both of you.”

Vader fixed them with a blank stare. “Which of you created this arm?”

“I did, sir.”

“Come here.”

The medical droid was about to have an aneurysm, if it could’ve, at the sight of Vader’s skin grafts pulled back on his forearm. Vader ignored its sputtered protestations, and instructed the bioengineering droid, “Realign the servos. When you have completed, I will require your presence in my quarters daily for realignments and further checkups on my mechanical limbs.”

Silently, the droid did as it was told. The realignment for both arms only took fifteen minutes, and when Vader excused it, the medical droid hurried forward again. “Sir, I must protest! You have exposed your muscles to the -”

“I am fully aware of what I have done,” said Vader, rolling the skin back down and inwardly wincing as his cold hands brushed the raw surface of his muscles. “You will continue your examinations as usual.” He pulled the suit’s sleeve back down, sealed it, and repressurized it, grunting as the vacuum pulled at the skin. Next, he flexed his arm, his hand, rotated his forearm, and then smashed his fist into the wall as hard as he could.

Pain exploded in his shoulder and upper arm, and he cried out involuntarily, grabbing it. The wall bore a deep dent, and his forearm, as far as he could tell, was operating perfectly. His upper arm, however, was a different story; probing delicately, as far as he could tell, it was broken in two places, and his shoulder had popped out of his socket.

The med droid was right there, tutting concernedly. “Lord Vader, you should come to the med center immediately,” it said. “This looks like a compound fracture to already traumatized muscle. I’m afraid it’s going to set your recovery back several days. Come, come.”

It floated ahead of him, only once turning to adjust the amount of painkiller in his IV, as he stomped down the corridor, supremely irate with himself. Vader, you stupid, stupid, stupid pig. What were you thinking?

After a minute’s walk, they arrived in the med center. The operation only took an hour and a half, but Vader’s arm was put in a cast, and he received instructions to keep it immobilized for the next five days while the bone reinforcement sutures healed, the muscles over it healed. He was also scheduled to have both legs and the other arm operated on -- not something to which he was looking forward. When he left the med center to return to his chamber, painkillers notwithstanding, his mood was as black as any since he’d awakened seventeen days ago.

[Stuart Mackey]

Not bad.

[ElPintoGrande]

I think it's refreshing seeing Vader from this point of view. Still merely human when you get down to it, not just a violent rage-fueled automoton. Very good.

[Surlethe]

---

Uuchben Han pushed through the crowd – yet another pustule of demonstrators, a drop in the ocean of Coruscant – gathered in support of Danil Gyda's troops, counterprotesting a much smaller group of far more liberal citizens. Since Palpatine's demise seventeen days ago, and especially after the two remaining Jedi's speech five days past, civil unrest had grown. The political machine on Coruscant was paralyzed; without orders from the top – apparently, Palpatine's inner circle had disappeared or gone missing in the confusion immediately following the Chancellor's assassination – the Coruscant city administrators had no positive impetus to act; the sector governor's forces, spinning around the planet in low orbit (the largest ships were visible from the ground even in the day as thumb-sized specks surrounded by an escorting cloud of bright points), mutely reminded the city's forces not to act up.

Gyda didn't even have to seize control of the city's shield generators, Uuchben reflected, though he had: if he decided to enforce a blockade, there would be massive food shortages within a week, and near-complete starvation would set in by the end of the next month. Food was already short from both economic uncertainty and unrest (the media was still bravely trying to spin the fragmenting Republic – Empire, now – away, but everybody saw through it), and the planet-wide news services had reported just today that public health services were beginning to clean more and more malnourished bodies out of the lower levels.

The reconnaissance mission had been a success; he had managed to ensure Vader a place precisely where they needed him to most effectively control the damage. Once his retraining had been complete, Master Okot had noted, Vader would require no further teaching into the mysteries of the Foundation, since his personal impulses would act in precisely the direction they needed him to go. No need to divest such potent knowledge into such an unstable and powerful mind, they had agreed.

Of course, this didn't fix the main problems facing the Foundation; it only guaranteed that they'd have a stable base to work back up from. It had been two weeks since Palpatine's death, and still Uuchben was in shock: somehow, somewhere, something had gone wrong. The shroud of the Dark Side Palpatine had spent decades weaving had maybe torn for a critical instant – but how was that possible? the vision permitted nothing of the sort. It would take a Jedi of Anakin's—

Uuchben froze, quieting his mind. What was that? A caress, soft as a lover's touch, had just filamented across his mind. It was almost like someone had brushed the crest of his hair, leaving his scalp tingling. He sucked in his breath – there it was again – and then he was running, pushing his way through the crowd away from the still-probing mind. The future flickered in his mind – bright, clashing blades – and he pushed it down, cleared an escape route (that was still possible, even more possible than before) through all the possible paths, and then it was set, and he needed only to follow the motions.

A half hour later, slightly out of breath, he hailed a taxi and rode the rest of the way to his hotel.

[thejester]

Just read through the whole thing and I'm extremely impressed. The whole thing is very intriguing, especially to those of us who don't have a deep understanding of SW beyond the movies.

[Stuart Mackey]

We need more of this.