101 Star Wars Variations 101: In a Galaxy Far, Far Away...

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away...

He was a little boy, growing up in slavery.  His mother had been a slave before him, and he was born into it.  It was an insidious kind of slavery, in that for all intents and purposes he was little more than an employee, who reported to work every day, was free to live with his mother in their own home, and he could even pursue his own interests, for instance once he'd convinced his master of the possibilities in podracing, which wasn't all that difficult, he could devote all his spare time to it, and even use what was left over building his own protocol droid.

But he couldn't leave and he wasn't free and all his dreams were confined to a dead world filled with people watching their lives waste away, whose only visitors were opportunists looking to bleed whatever remained.  The worst part was that these visitors brought with them the stories of an entire galaxy, and a boy thrives on stories.  If he's not careful, they can become his whole reality.

His mother said the worst thing was that no one ever helped each other.  Very quickly he learned that she was right.

How do you help the helpless?  How do you fulfill the dreams of dreamers?  With magic?  Ideas, he learned, could be dangerous.  He had friends, like any other boy, and he valued them very much, often enjoying just listening to them chatter, letting his cares slip away, but he knew, somehow, what they thought even when they didn't vocalize it.  He knew on a certain level that he wasn't like them, and that this created a barrier between them.  They scoffed at his dreams.  Because he was a boy, most of the time he didn't really think much of it.  They didn't share the same dreams, but they did with fantasies.  This was how he first heard about the Jedi.

It's easy to have faith when you're young.  You don't have any real experience.  It's when you're older and you think you know everything, instead of merely accepting it, that faith becomes difficult.  There's probably a little of that in the practice the Jedi had in taking their recruits at the youngest possible age, not out of a sense of indoctrination but in the hope that the threshold of faith could be circumvented.  The longer you believe in something, the more you think about it, if given the proper support.  Without it, you begin formulating your own ideas, and ideas can be dangerous.

His idea was the belief that a Jedi couldn't die, that no one could defeat one of them.  This is far more than hero worship.  On a world such as his, there were no such things as heroes, only family.  You put your faith in dreams and family, and that was all.

The more he thought about the Jedi, the more he hoped.  He dreamed about a man who couldn't die, who had all the answers, all the solutions.  Such a man was instantly a part of the boy's family.  How could it be any different?  For the boy, to have formed a connection at all with another person, a real one, nothing trivial like what he shared with his friends, would infinitely improve his life.

The trouble was, he couldn't reconcile his ideal of what a Jedi was supposed to be with that man who couldn't die.  He didn't believe his own fantasy.  He had spent so much time thinking about it, he no longer thought of it as something he shared with his friends, but as something private, something they couldn't understand, like the rest of his life.

An isolated life takes pains to protect that status, as difficult as that may be to comprehend.

The boy was very much alone.  He was a boy in every conventional sense.  To all outward appearances he seemed perfectly normal.  He was not.  He harbored dark thoughts, out of fear, because his life was out of his control.

The fantasy of the Jedi grew to occupy his every waking thought.  He imagined a man who could give him guidance, but this was not the pure Jedi.  This was the man who couldn't die.  The corruption.  The perversion.  The Jedi was the one who represented the contradiction, the thing he couldn't reconcile.

He thought about both a great deal.  In the fantasy, one of them came to rescue him from his plight, but it wasn't the man who couldn't die, the man of guidance, but rather the more generalized image of the Jedi, the idea of the hero, whose only function was to give him a different set of circumstances.  He'd begun to blend the idea of the hero with the image of the angels he'd heard of, who reminded him so much of his mother, the only source of support he had ever trusted, the one he feared on a daily basis would be taken away, if his master ever decided to send him somewhere else.  He began to fear the Jedi would not be able to help him, that a hero was someone who only intervened.  In other words, just another master.  Would the man who couldn't die, the man of guidance, be the same?  That was why he needed the angel, the one who would always support him, who would be there when he finally became free.  She, and he could not think of the angel in any other term, would be the necessary link, perhaps between all of them, the support he would need above all else.

The fantasy began to frighten him.  The more he thought about it, the more it seemed destined to end in disaster.  He had been left in a terrible situation, which he was keenly aware of, which was why he had the fantasy in the first place.  It was a fatal trap.  Even his great hope was pointless, self-defeating, destined for a bad end.

By the way, there are no fairy tales on Tatooine, only cautionary ones...

 

101 Star Wars Variations 100: Padme Didn't Die

Anakin Skywalker married the former Queen Amidala of Naboo, thereafter known as Padme, one-time senator of the Republic.  In time, he turned his dedication to the Jedi way into a path towards the Dark Side, where he became known as Darth Vader.

When the transformation was complete, after his body became horribly mutilated and scarred in his duel with Obi-Wan Kenobi on Mustafar and he stood encased in his life-preserving apparatus, he no longer had a bride.  But Padme didn't die.

She did not go into hiding.  You cannot hide on your home world, where everyone has known you since you were born.  She did not retreat.  She began a grieving process.

She had also just given birth, to twins, who were taken to Tatooine and Alderaan to be raised by foster parents, who could nurture them and give them futures that Padme could no longer envision on her own.  On her own she felt weak, too weak.  All her life she'd been strong, and suddenly she no longer believed in herself.  What else could she do?  What else could be expected of her?  Vader became the personification of evil, a specter even the Empire feared, buried in layers of myth, so that even those who knew him personally didn't know how to behave around him.  They came up with various solutions, and none of them were adequate.

The reverse would have been true of Padme as well, if she'd returned to her life.  She could no longer hide the truth, but she did not want to live with it, either.  There had been reports of her death, of course, and she let them persist so long that they became the basis for her exile.  The same had been said about a few of her Jedi friends, with whom she remained in contact.  One of them was Yoda, the other Kenobi, who agreed to watch over her son on Tatooine.  Theirs was an exclusive club.

In time, she wondered if she would reemerge.  For the time being she was content to nurse her emotional wounds.  On Naboo she was allowed privacy.  She had learned all its secrets a long time ago, and as part of another exclusive club, the royalty of that world, she was privy to those others knew nothing about.  She had trained for her new role all her life.

Yet it was a role without purpose, only that she try to forge ahead, if she could.  On Alderaan her daughter was raised a princess, though it was a life that was in all other ways separated from what she herself had known.  There were no demands on her daughter, but Padme smiled when she saw how Leia took up the crusade against tyranny.  Her son, Luke, toiled in obscurity, exploited by his uncle, but gifted, too, exposed to a world her daughter wouldn't know for years, a world of wonders.  Her son had the advantage of learning what her husband had discovered by accident.  The difference was palpable.  She saw the same restlessness in both of them, but while one had been spoiled, the other spent his time yearning, which was something he inherited from his mother.

No one asked a thing of her.  There was some relief in that, she had to admit.  No more demands.  No more pressure.  No more expectations.  She had to admit some of that had led to everything she had to struggle against regretting, for she loved her children dearly.  She lent her support behind the scenes.  She was the strength behind the leadership of the Rebellion.  She never left it behind.  As her contemporaries grew older and a new generation appeared, she felt the responsibility less and less, and she could finally relax.  When her offspring met for the first time, she wanted to be there, to tell them she loved them, that she was proud.  She knew their journey was not yet complete.  As long as Vader still lived, her own story remained unfinished.

Was there hope for him?  That was what her son thought.  The thought intrigued her.  He worked tirelessly toward his father's redemption, and it was that belief that led to the victory of the Rebellion, the end of the Empire.

And, at last, the day Padme emerged back into the rest of the galaxy.  She had much to tell her children.

101 Star Wars Variations 99: The Sadness

I don't remember my mother well.  She died in childbirth, after all, but I remember the sadness.

The sadness overwhelmed her.  The attending droid said she lost the will to live.  It had come to consume her, and as such as been with her for some time.  The sadness is all I know about her, except for what resides in the public records, which is about as far from personal as you can get.

I know much more about my father, and because of that, I know why my mother was so sad.  You see, Darth Vader was my father.

I could always feel it, as if she had suffused me with it in the womb.  I don't curse her for it, but there were times, when I was younger, when I thought it would consume me, too.  As I grew older, I learned to incorporate the sadness into my life, to channel it, to do what I could, the things I thought would have made my mother...happy.  The public record had much to say about what she believed in, and that shaped my formative interest in the Rebellion, risking everything to strike back at the Empire, even though for all intents and purposes I was just another loyal citizen on one of its many worlds, a prominent one expected to toe the line, give it the support that it in truth badly needed.  I knew how to do that because the whole time, I wished I could have done the same for my mother.  I wish there had been someone in her life who was always there, to give her strength.  That someone should have been my father.  But it wasn't.

I don't know what really happened, but I can imagine.  The last records of my mother relate how she followed Vader to Mustafar.  This journey was in secret, and the records were something buried deeply in the annals of Alderaan, a world that was to become my own but had in those days given a measure of support to my mother.  Not enough, and don't think I don't think about that.

I imagine in these moments that she isn't sad, perhaps for the first time in a long time, but rather angry.  Anger is something she would know intimately, for anger stokes the fire of a Sith Lord, which in the end was what my father became.  The man who should have been the strongest pillar of her life instead corrupted her.  In her final moments, she was no longer strong enough to resist.

Alderaan is a peaceful world, and so was my mother's Naboo, which famously withstood a blockade of the Trade Federation without giving in to violence until circumstances, and a handful of Jedi and an army of Gungans, forced it to act otherwise, as well a Sith, Darth Sidious, who was also responsible for the corruption of her husband, Darth Vader.  She would have become familiar with weapons, during the Clone Wars.  Few could have said otherwise in those dark days, when the entire galaxy tore asunder.  Usually, however, she would never have thought of violence as a solution.

Except this time.  This time she brought with her a weapon, and she trained it on her husband.  Too often in the past she had heard his equivocations, his lies.  She knew now that he was evil.  I've seen hologram that recorded his slaughter of Jedi younglings.  These would have been enough, surely.

She probably never gave him a chance to explain.  Why would she?  She was brave.  She would have shot him more than once, to ensure that the deed was done.  Mustafar is a volcanic world.  Vader burned.  There's no question that he died that day.

Darth Sidious saw to it that something else happened.  He was in possession of dark powers.  He brought Vader back from the dead.

And at the same time, I was being born.  The sadness came back to claim her.  New life was something that she couldn't handle.  It was tied up in too many implications.  She could sense what was happening to Vader.  This was something she couldn't overcome.

I don't blame her at all.  I pity her every day.  I've tried to dedicate my life to her memory.  I've never been able to escape her, or her sadness.

Strangely, I consider this a good thing.

101 Star Wars Variations 98: The Brother's Son

On a desolate desert world, two brothers become separated at a young age.  Until that point they are inseparable.  One is named Anakin Skywalker and the other becomes known as Darth Vader.

You'll know Anakin's journey well enough, but the one who would be called Vader?

He was torn away from family, and he felt torn away.  He felt rejected.  Every day he felt the burden of what his life was becoming, a tragedy.  Until the day his old life ended, he had believed it was headed in one direction, a happy one, and all of a sudden, it went elsewhere.

He could never explain what happened.

In time, he came to view his brother differently.  He forgot the loving companion of what he would call his innocent days, and came to resent him.  Anakin had every advantage.  Anakin was good with machines.  Anakin had special instincts.  Anakin, in short, excelled.  Everyone noticed Anakin.

Everyone just felt sorry for the one who would be called Vader.

Vader considered himself special, too.  That was the single tormenting thought he held onto.  There would always be moments, when others seemed to notice, but no one acted on it, until Palpatine, until the man who took him under his wing, believed in him.  Corrupted him?  It was too late.  He knew what was happening, and was okay with it.  He couldn't lose his way.  He had already found himself.

He had special abilities, too.  In most respect, they were the same his brother possessed, but like the opposite form.  He could never explain it.  He only hoped one day someone would notice, and so that was all he cared about when Palpatine introduced himself to him.

He became the Sith Lord's apprentice.  It wasn't a demanding life at all.  He observed his brother's Jedi training from a distance, scoffed all the more, hoped one day they would reunite.  He considered that he had finally discovered what he truly was, and hoped his brother would understand.

But Anakin didn't.  As usual, he didn't understand at all.  It led to a tragic encounter, a duel.  Anakin's death.  But Anakin had a son.

This was what changed Vader.  He realized he had another chance.  A shot at redemption?  A chance for someone to see him as something other than what he was?  He no longer saw the difference.  He saw himself as a monster.

Anakin's son thought differently.  It was astonishing.  Vader had no idea how to respond, except to accept what the boy believed.  That Vader was good.  That he deserved the boy's attention.  Not the way he'd gotten Palpatine's.  Not because he was willing to compromise himself.  But because of himself.  And nothing more.

It was a comfortable way to die.

101 Star Wars Variations 97: The Good Man Anakin and the Scoundrel Vader

The thing Obi-Wan never knew was that Palpatine's mind games were more extensive than anyone could have ever guessed.

In order to recruit Anakin Skywalker to the Dark Side, Palpatine took on a new apprentice, Darth Vader, who by all accounts was unremarkable except for his complete lack of scruples.  There was nothing Vader would refuse to do, and he was utterly ruthless.  The problem Palpatine consistently ran into regarding Skywalker was the young Jedi's constant need for reassurance, which was something he could get more easily from his secret bride Padme than anyone else.

Palpatine thought that if he paired Skywalker and Vader together, it would be a mutually beneficial relationship, at least until the point one would have to eliminate the other, which was how it always worked for Sith apprentices.  Naturally Palpatine hoped Skywalker would prevail, given his far greater potential, but if he won, certainly Vader would have proven his worth.

Together, Skywalker and Vader were a formidable combination.  What Skywalker refused to do he allowed Vader to accomplish for him despite his continued reservations.  Theirs was a relationship of a constant dialogue, Skywalker trying to get Vader to consider his nobler qualities, and Vader attempting to unleash Skywalker's darker impulses.

Over time, Skywalker grew less comfortable with the arrangement, but he couldn't tell anyone.  He was ashamed.  If he told Obi-Wan, he risked everything.  If he told Padme, he would lose her trust.  But he'd had a vision of the future, and he feared losing her above all else, and so he continued to trust Palpatine.

Vader's atrocities mounted, and Skywalker became afraid.  He became aware that the only way out of the arrangement would be a sacrifice.

Things came to a head on the volcanic world of Mustafar.  Padme was giving birth elsewhere, and with Skywalker nowhere to be found it was up to Obi-Wan to watch over the process.  She'd been experiencing terrible complications, and the danger to her life was overwhelming.  Obi-Wan alone knew who was the father.  Skywalker was distracted in every way possible.  The guilt of a lifetime poured over him.  It gave him great power, but Vader still had the upper hand.

They dueled in blazing heat, lava spewing all around them.  This would be a fatal encounter for one of them, and they both knew it.

Up until the moment it happened, Skywalker believed Vader would come around and realize that together they were stronger than either one of them would ever be, and could accomplish wonders, perhaps things neither had ever dared dream before.  He had never trusted Palpatine.  That was what he realized in those final moments.

The only thing Palpatine stood to gain from any of this was to avoid yet another usurper.  Palpatine was a survivor.  He knew better than anyone what the best result was.

It was brutal.  Vader was without mercy.  He carved away at Skywalker until there was practically nothing left, and then watched the rest of it burn.  How this had happened to one of the most powerful practitioners of the Force would be unimaginable, except that Palpatine had done everything to undermine him.

For the next twenty years, Obi-Wan convinced himself of many things, once he found out what happened on Mustafar.  But the truth wasn't one of them.

101 Star Wars Variations 96: The Skywalkers

The death of a marriage is a saga unto itself, and its ramifications can lead to unexpected results.

For instance, the day the Skywalkers broke up.  These days, you'll hear a lot of confusing things about them.  You may even believe that they were brother and sister rather than husband and wife.  Perhaps it's easier to go back to the beginning.

Or rather, the end.

Luke and Leia broke up sometime after the destruction of the Death Star.  Some say it was the pressure of becoming galactic heroes.  By the time they were living on Hoth their relationship had become frigid indeed, and they left going separate ways.  It's easy to assume that Han Solo came between them, the one-time smuggler becoming a friend to one and a lover to the other, but either way someone who couldn't be shared.  Much like their lives.

As the gulf between them widened, the Rebellion had some explaining to do.  It was victory that complicated things.  Suddenly there was nowhere to hide, not from the troops of the Empire, nor the glare of the media on countless worlds.  Once they'd been inseparable but now it was difficult finding them in the same room.

So an explanation had to be made.  It was more like damage control.  The Rebellion couldn't withstand bad publicity.  Fortunately, an observer in the media made the mistake and identified them as siblings for the first time.  Absurd, yes, for anyone who knew the truth, but there was plenty of supporting evidence, or so the interpretation could be.  Luke spent an increasing amount of time on the desert world of Tatooine, a place he'd often visited as a child, while Leia continued life as a celebrity, a role she'd basked in since her days as a princess of Alderaan, a title she'd abandoned when she wanted a common touch to more readily reach the masses.

It was like a splinter of the mind, convincing certain contemporaries that they'd never been lovers, but the more exposure the cause of the Rebellion received, the easier it was to forget, and the more amicable their relationship became again.

Suddenly there was room for other lies.  I'm sure you've heard about Luke's Jedi career?  The last remnants of their earlier days lingered in the form of a romantic destiny one or both of them shared, and a personal score against the Empire's dread warrior Darth Vader, who of course in this version of the saga was their father.  The things people will believe...

So much has been said about the Skywalkers, or rather Skywalker and Organa, as they were known once and again.  Truth and lies.  Wonders never cease.

But that was a long time ago.

101 Star Wars Variations 95: Kenobi's Son

From a certain point of view...

In his later years Old Ben almost became an acceptable member of the community.  He even considered relocating from his cave in the dunes to somewhere in town.  He took visitors and people were happy to come.  Even Owen Lars begrudgingly allowed his adopted son Luke Skywalker to visit him.

Things hadn't always been that way.  When he first appeared, Ben Kenobi had been a controversial figure at best, so closely tied with the bloody chaos of the Clone Wars that many people actually feared him.  And with good reason.  There were rumors that he had gone wild and begun murdering his fellow Jedi, including his own friends.

To put it mildly, when he first came to Tatooine, Old Ben didn't play well with others.  It was a self-imposed exile through and through, although in truth no one wanted him around anyway.  There were...incidents, nothing that had gotten too far out of hand, but his reputation had grown increasingly poor.

That was why his son was taken away from him.  The boy was young, too young to have remembered anything, only a baby when they had come.  There was no one who didn't wonder if the boy was even Old Ben's, but there had been medical confirmations, even if they had no bearing in the decision to place him in a foster home.

That home was Owen's.

There was one thing Owen and Old Ben agreed on, and it was the comforting illusion that Luke's only relationship with Old Ben was that of friendship, something that was only possible because of Beru, who fought constantly if quietly for Old Ben, should he ever earn it, to have a chance to prove himself safe, at the very least.  She would visit the hermit periodically to keep tabs.

On Luke's eleventh birthday, she decided it was time.  Old Ben had settled down.  He began holding normal conversations for the first time since arriving.  Until that point he had been almost a mute, antisocial, so that most people assumed he had all but confirmed what was said about him.  On a few occasions, he had flashed a temper, and he was known to hold grudges against those who wronged him.  All that began to change.  He grew restful in his isolation, and at Beru's prodding even learned to reintegrate himself with others.

He brought a gift to present the boy, a small trinket that had no identifiable purpose, probably some Jedi gadget that no longer functioned.  Luke was fascinated.  Owen was sparing in such matters.  It was just what was needed to establish a connection.  Soon the boy was venturing off on his own, with sufficient supervision from droids, to the hermit's cave in the dunes.

Beru watched with melancholy in her eyes, which was at least better than Owen's anger.  He never thought Old Ben was worthy of such a chance, regardless of whatever might have been the truth about him.

As the years advanced, she wondered if Old Ben would ever tell Luke the truth.  She couldn't say why she had ever considered giving him a chance.  But she never regretted it.