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Everyone on Tatooine has heard of the Skywalker twins. They are something like legend, except they are very, very real.
Luke is the soft one, the gentle one. He has the face of an angel and a disposition that seems to defy the laws of the planet, where weakness (decency. . .) is stamped out by the desert. She does not approve of it - everyone knows this. Even Luke Skywalker knows this, despite his genuine smiles.
Leia is the hard one, the fierce one. She also has an angel's face, but it is an angel of righteousness, and she will not accept any malicious comment levelled at her or her brother; she will not let it go without challenge; she will not let you walk all over her. She will fight tooth and nail for what she believes is right. She is the desert's favourite child - the one who heeded her lessons, but retained her morality.
Both of them carry the Skywalker legacy with open hands, with shoulders adjusted to bear it dutifully.
Luke recalls their past as slaves through his generosity, his kindness, his acute awareness of the feelings and emotions of every sentient thing. He will not so much as mistreat a droid if they have done nothing to deserve it.
Leia recalls theirs past as slaves through her strength, and her compassion. If such atrocities were happening in the so recent past, then she does not bother to deny that they are happening in the present.
They are very different, but everyone knows they are as close as twins can be, and when working in tandem, their opposition are dead meat.
But that's an exaggeration, surely?
No one knows where they were born, but there are rumours that they are not quite human. The few slaves living in Mos Espa slave quarters who are old enough to remember two other Skywalkers who lived under the light of the twin suns spread rumours about the late Shmi Skywalker, an otherwise nameless woman in a cautionary tale about the dangers of the Tusken Raiders, and her son Ani, who left Tatooine aged nine and, as far as living memory serves, never returned.
Watto the Toydarian still owns his shop, still buzzes around the city muttering in discontented Huttese, but if he knows anything about the Skywalker twins, he doesn't say.
The really curious ones - mainly children who don't know the twins personally and are too young to remember anything besides the Empire - scan the holonet for anything pertaining to the Skywalker name. But all official articles about Anakin Skywalker were removed from the holonet long ago, mere years after the end of the Clone Wars. Those adults that do remember tales of the Hero With No Fear have the details murky and muddled in their memories, and can tell their children only one thing: He was a Jedi Knight.
A Jedi Knight? awed children whisper at the stories. Their parents tell them to be quiet, that it is forbidden to speak about the doomed order, and will say no more on the matter. But they themselves wonder just as much as their children.
Luke looks like he was sculpted by the desert, crafted by the desert, born to be here: sandy hair and sunny skin and eyes as blue as the blazing sky. But Leia looks like an outlander, with pale skin and dark eyes and dark hair. She looks nothing like her brother.
Neither of them look anything like the aunt and uncle they were raised with, but that is to be expected - they are not related by blood. They are related by marriage, by adoption. By love.
No one can remember when the speculation about their origins began, nor whom it was by - they only know how unusual it is. Tatooine is a hard planet, and most have no time for worrying about the complexities of other people's lives, no matter how strange. But when those rare moments of pettiness are found, the Skywalkers are always the first topic discussed.
Perhaps it was the twins themselves who started the speculation; it's a well known fact that Luke Skywalker idolises his father, and knows next to nothing about his mother. Leia is the more grounded one, too busy saving the world to waste time on childish fantasies, but Luke is without a doubt the sort to make up fantastical stories when he has none.
Or perhaps what started the speculation was the way that in the marketplace of Mos Espa they're seen to glance at each other across the street and, to all appearances, have an entire conversation without saying a word. The way they both seem to know exactly what the person they were talking to is about to say or do, and react before the person knows themselves. The way that although they wear the clothes of any other moisture farmers, they stand out wherever they walk.
Luke Skywalker is good with ships. He could fly his T-16 after a year better than most adults can after decades. He can know what's wrong with a machine without even taking it apart.
Leia Skywalker has immaculate aim with a laser rifle. She holds the unofficial record for most womprats killed and sold for the bounty ordinance the Imperial prefect passed.
Neither of these things you know by looking at them, but living on Tatooine, it's impossible to not know.
Living on Tatooine, there's no escape.
"Can you actually talk into each other's minds?" Biggs Darklighter asks Leia Organa when they're nine. They are sitting and watching as Owen Lars teaches his nephew how to work a speeder.
Leia, confident and sure of herself even as a child, smiles. "You'll find we're full of surprises."
"Who actually was your father?" Camie Marstrap asks Luke Skywalker when they're thirteen. He is on an errand run with his uncle to deliver water to her family for their hydroponics gardens, and she has noticed the wary looks her parents are giving him.
He scoffs. "Anakin Skywalker, I told you. He was a navigator on a spice freighter."
Camie isn't convinced. "Are you sure?"
He doesn't look offended, just irritated, and slightly hurt. "Unless Uncle Owen's lying to me, yes." He takes a breath and she sighs inwardly; she knows what tirade is coming next. "One day I'm going to leave this dusty planet and fly starships around the galaxy myself. I'm asking Uncle Owen if I can apply-"
"Keep dreaming, Wormie," she dismisses. She can see how the nickname hurts him, but ignores it. It's too much of a habit to drop it by now.
Her tone says all she could ever say about the possibility of Luke ever managing to get off Tatooine.
Legends or not, they have done nothing to deserve their title until their nineteenth year, when everything goes to Hell.
First, Luke Skywalker is at Tosche Station when he insists that he has witnessed a space battle in the skies, and although Biggs Darklighter - three years his senior, and one of the few people on the planet who can honestly say he is friends with one of the twins - insists that the ships are just sitting there, although Camie and Fixer and everyone else in earshot scoff, they secretly wonder if he can see something they can't.
When the dead Jawas turn up a few days later, a few reckless, thoughtless people immediately go, "It's the Skywalkers' fault!" because they are strange, and therefore every strange happenstance must be because of them. They are wrong, but more right than they know.
The rest of the planet either dismisses the rumours as the Tuskens acting up even further than their previous boldness, or doesn't hear.
Then the Lars's family farm is torched, and the skeletons of Owen and Beru are found.
Again, those quick to place judgement shove it on the Skywalkers, before the witnesses who know these things correct them with scorn. The Skywalkers couldn't have done it - there was fire, and there were alarmingly accurate blaster shots, and there were Imperial stormtroopers sighted trekking through the desert.
This was the Empire's doing.
Why it was done, though, no one can say.
Luke and Leia disappear for a while, then reappear. It's said they were sighted leaving Mos Eisley in the company of that wizard Old Ben Kenobi, that reprobate smuggler who's always in trouble with Jabba but is miraculously still alive, and a Wookiee. Two droids are with them - if the rumours are true, they're the two droids the stormtroopers tore the planet apart looking for.
Plenty of people with personal (unwarranted) distaste for the Skywalkers try to point the Imperial forces in their direction. But they are never caught.
One day, they come back. The smuggler drops them off in Mos Eisley, and it's noted that he looks faintly sad to be leaving them behind.
Kenobi is never seen on Tatooine again.
They use their meagre savings to rent a place to stay in Mos Espa, and while Luke gets a job working in a mechanic's shop owned by a Toydarian named Watto, who conveniently seems to have been on Tatooine since before any human can remember, but knows nothing about the twins' bloodline. It can be said that sometimes he forgets that the human working with him is not a slave. Luke (with help from Leia) sets him straight quickly and ruthlessly, with a disgust that only comes from a hyperawareness of his heritage.
He is too valuable an employee for Watto to fire, though.
Leia brings in money bulls-eyeing womprats, as she always has. But when that proves inadequate, she applies for a job at the mechanic's shop as well. She is not as good as her brother, but she is still better than the average resident of the city. She gets the job.
Their savings begin to pile up. They never officially buy the residence they've been staying in, but they seem to be making a personal life here, a permanent one.
The rumours slow down a bit as their presence becomes a fact.
Then the first slaves disappear.
There is no proof it is them. But rumour mills don't care about proof.
It's one of Jabba's slaves that goes missing, a new one, a pretty young human girl who'd been sold to him for pleasure and been forced to dance. She'd cried that first day in the throne room, with so many people watching, and only her "outstanding promise" kept her from being thrown to the rancor there and then.
She disappears that night. People murmur, and Jabba is not best pleased, but she is one slave. Individual people don't mean much to Jabba, so an individual slave means very little indeed. He does not send anyone to pursue the rumours.
Even when the pale green Twi'lek woman disappears, he remains silent.
And then again, when several of the Wookiee mason workers escape. (How on earth Wookiees survive and escape in Tatooine's cruel climate without being seen by anyone is a topic hotly debated around Anchorhead and Tosche Station, but it's beside the point of the story.)
Eventually, people do what they have always done: They blame the Skywalkers.
Jabba does not agree or heed the mood of Tatooine's freeborn population at first - indeed, none of the Hutts do. But when five more of his slaves disappear, and his investments begin to dwindle, he grows angry. And as he always does, he throws a tantrum.
Someone must pay, he decides. And if it's the irritating twins who always seem to be the centre of attention without doing anything, then so be it.
He sends his goons to find and kill them. Nothing too gruesome or cruel - he doesn't want to seem excessive. It just needs to send a statement to the slave liberator out there who thought they could cross a Huttese crime lord that he is not to be messed with. He doesn't bother to send the bounty hunters either - the twins are right on his doorstep, so why bother? They are farm kids; an incensed bantha could kill them.
But his goons turn up as corpses later, dead from unerringly precise hits between their eyes. A cursory examination reveals the shots were made by a laser rifle.
Now Jabba is angry. How dare someone not die when he wanted them to! It's an outrage, a disgrace. He sends more goons, this time instructed to torture the Skywalkers a little before killing them. Defiance must be punished, and defiance of death is the worst.
But they have disappeared. And the smuggler Han Solo - who was in the area beforehand - has also disappeared.
Jabba doesn't like people disappearing on him. So he responds in the only way he knows how.
"You're trying to tell me that you two kids killed two of Jabba's goons?" laughs Han Solo from the pilot's seat of the Millennium Falcon. "As well as freeing all those slaves? I mean, I thought you were crazy when you turned down that old fossil's offer of living in a palace on Alderaan and learning the ways of this mysterious Force, but that's just straight up nuts."
Luke and Leia exchange a glance, and Chewbacca gives a mournful wail, one that more or less translates to, You're an idiot, Solo.
Han shuts up shortly afterwards. "Alright then, I suppose you must've," he concedes. "After all, the only human I know of whose head Jabba's slapped a bigger bounty on is. . . me." He gulps at the thought, and very quickly adds, "I don't suppose you lot wanna stick together?"
Luke and Leia look at each other again; a smile is tugging on each of their lips. "Sure," they say in unison, and if anything, this unnerves Han more than it will when he walks in on Luke practice levitating a ration bar.
"Old Ben showed me a few tricks in our brief time together," the boy explains when it happens, a mischievous twinkle in his eye.
"But we're going to visit Ben Kenobi first," the twins elaborate now, fixing him with their stares. One is light, and one is dark, but they feel exactly the same to the smuggler.
Belatedly, Han wonders what the hell he's gotten himself into.
Yavin 4 is hot and sweaty, but it doesn't seem to bother the Skywalker twins. The Falcon lands amidst the rainforest terrain, and Han Solo now sits making awkward small talk with a bunch of hardened Rebel pilots about the manoeuvrability and general state of his ship.
He's relieved when the twins storm out again, hastily followed by an irate Obi-Wan Kenobi who seems o be arguing his case on deaf ears. Finally, Leia stops her long strides, faces him down (despite the fact she's shorter than him by far) and says something that has him snapping his mouth shut, face wounded. She walks away unhindered.
Han waits for Luke with her by the Falcon, while the kid apparently greets a Rebel pilot who's an old friend of his from Tatooine. Han can't bear the angry silence, and Leia looks like she needs to go on a good long rant anyway, so he asks, "What happened in there?"
Leia sighs, looks him up and down, and apparently decides he's worth telling the story to. "Ben wants us to train as Jedi," she said bitterly. "Which neither I nor Luke is against. Apparently our power in the Force is dangerous to us and everyone around us - especially considering the death sentence essentially guaranteed to Force-sensitives in this galaxy."
Han nods. "So what's the problem?"
"The problem is that he wants us to completely forget about Tatooine," she spits, voice suddenly hard. "He insists we'll have time to free all the slaves in the future, that we need to be trained now, that an extension of the Empire's oppression can't be fully destroyed until the Empire itself is destroyed.
"But slavery was around before the Empire. The Republic didn't change that, the Empire hasn't changed that, and unless something is done here and now, nothing will ever change that.
"My father," she continues, quieter and softer now, "left Tatooine aged nine to become a Jedi Knight. He trained with his master, and Ben tells us that he would always think of the slaves and think, when I'm strong enough, I'm going home to free them. And here we are thirty two years later. Has he?!" She yells the last two words; a few people look over at them, but she seems like she needed to shout. She's calmer now.
"When does it end?" she asks, slightly forlornly. "When do people say enough, I am strong enough, I need to do something now, or I never will?" She sighs. "I asked the Rebel Command if they would consider lending troops and funds for a slave rebellion. They said no. They, like everybody else, don't give two bantha ticks about a sun-blasted, Hutt-controlled planet in the Outer Rim.
"But Luke and I do," she whispers. "We've always wanted to escape, to fly the stars, but Tatooine is our home too. To leave it be would be like leaving the Empire be. The slaves deserve better. The galaxy deserves better."
Han is stunned. "You're going to orchestrate a slave uprising?"
She crosses her arms and glowers at him. "Yes."
"There's no way you can do that on your own."
She gives him a scathing look. "Are you volunteering to help? Besides," she adds. "I'm not alone. I have Luke."
Looking at her, Han feels something stir in his chest he hasn't felt since he saw an Imperial mistreat a Wookiee slave, and he did something that got him disassociated with the Empire forever. He thinks of the strangeness Leia and her brother have about them, and how much they've already survived.
He thinks about what he's seen them do since the old wizard first hired him to get them off that stinking planet, and how he thought they were either very, very stupid, or very, very desperate when the twins chose to return.
Now he knows it was neither.
"Yes," he says. "Yes, you're not alone; yes, you have Luke. And yes, I'm volunteering to help."
She gapes at him. Chewie roars at him from inside the Falcon - curse him, he didn't know he was listening - and the words sound proud. They also contain some less-than-complimentary names for Jabba the Hutt and Emperor Palpatine.
Leia seems to get over her surprise then, and grins at him. And funnily enough, that almost makes it all worth it.
The Millennium Falcon flies into the spaceport at Mos Eisley the next day. Jabba is never any the wiser about who has returned to Tatooine.
The slave rebellion takes weeks to organise and months to carry out. Leia and Luke regularly report of Force dreams in which Obi-Wan or some green creature implore them to see reason and complete their training, until one day Old Ben himself walks into their base at Tosche Station.
Luke and Leia freeze up, and those freeborn residents of the planet they've swayed to their cause reach for their blasters.
But Old Ben takes a seat at the table, studies the sheaves of flimsi and datapads in front of him, and sighs. "Well, you're both reckless, you're both foolish, and you're both headstrong in your boundless hope and optimism." Luke and Leia don't breathe as he sighs again. "Skywalkers." He picks up a pencil and starts to sketch a line over one of their diagrams. "Now you see this plan won't work because. . ."
After that, they have Obi-Wan Kenobi on their side, albeit begrudgingly. The tides begin to turn.
There is no warning preceding the uprising. No slaves disappear, or shipments diverted, or displeased Hutts railing about how their underlings have failed them.
But one thing that does change is the steadily increasing pile of deactivated transmitters kept in a bowl in Ben's old house.
The uprising is bloody and brutal and neither side shows any mercy, but the sensible slavers flee, Jabba is killed, and the rest of the Hutts on Tatooine soon follow. Leia is confident that no Hutts on other planets will come to re-subjugate them; their previous masters are dead, and no self-respecting Hutt cares enough about another sentient to come to their aid or revenge.
There is a scramble in the ports on the planet as thousands decide to leave and make a life for themselves elsewhere, but others who have never known anything but the suns and the skies and the sands choose to stay. This is their planet, and they will treat it as such. Moisture farmers by the hundreds spring up all over the deserts, and hydroponics farmers buy their water and sell them food, and the spacers come and go as they please, and everyone lives in a symbiotic relationship for now.
Han Solo sometimes wonders how it's possible that he had a hand in all of this, but Chewie is always there to remind him that he was. And to invoke his newly awakened conscience whilst at it.
It has been far over a year since the Skywalkers stormed out of Yavin 4 with a smuggler and a Wookiee and became plotting an insane bid at righteousness. And it is a further several months before the Emperor notices something is wrong in the far, far Outer Rim, less than a parsec away from his home planet of Naboo.
He sends his least respected underlings to report at first, seeing nothing of any consequence in a scrap of dust far from the bright centre of the galaxy. Then he reads the reports of what has happened, and sends his most trusted enforcer.
Darth Vader hates Tatooine, and he is all too pleased when his master gives him the clearance to take the newly finished Death Star and destroy it.
What, exactly, a worthless Outer Rim planet has done to incur the wrath of Darth Sidious in such a way is something completely irrelevant - he can't even be bothered to wonder why Tatooine is becoming the test subject that makes this battle station operational, when Alderaan had been the intended target. So long as the smear against the galaxy is gone, he'll take any excuse.
(It doesn't matter that it's where his mother's remains lie, he tells himself. It doesn't.)
He almost smiles when the Death Star comes out of hyperspace and he sees Tatooine there, glowing with the power of the Force. There are Force sensitives present for him to hunt.
And, more specifically, he can sense Obi-Wan Kenobi down there.
A part of him huffs and recoils at the mere thought of having to actually set foot on the planet that will soon be (is already) bantha fodder. But he ignores it, and instead allows himself to think about how the galaxy will soon be free from its loathsome influence, how two (three, even, with that sort of Force signature, and very powerful ones at that) Jedi will soon be erased from the face of history as well.
His shuttle sets off immediately, and once it's landed he does not require a moment to compose himself before stepping into the harsh light of the twin suns.
He's landed outside Mos Espa, and he wastes no time in striding off into the city. He has Jedi to hunt.
The whispers and waves of crushing fear follow in his wake once the residents of Tatooine realise who he is. Even on a pathetic Outer Rim planet like this one, his infamy is known by sentients and droids alike. It's. . . gratifying. . . to know that the Hutt masters who he once feared and revered now do the same to him; if he wanted to, he could hunt down Gardulla the Hutt and kill her, and there would be no retribution from her associates.
He does not. His master would be displeased. His master's displeasure was something to be avoided at all costs.
Two of the Force signatures he's following lurk around where he remembers his old slave quarters were, on the opposite side of Mos Espa to him. He grits his teeth and approaches, one part of his mind diligently monitoring the thoughts and feelings of the civilians around him.
Something is. . . different.
The inherent sorrow that has always been an intrinsic part of the slave quarters, ridden by generations into the floors and walls of the accommodations, is still there, but there is also. . . happiness.
Or perhaps that isn't the word to describe it; Vader, unaccustomed to dabbling in positive emotions, stops to try and decipher it. Relief. . . Love. . .
Hope.
Hope, where all Vader remembers from his own boyhood here is the stifling lack thereof.
Despite himself, his curiosity mounts. What happened here?
He stops very suddenly outside a small house, belonging to two hydroponics farmers if the results of his mental probe are correct. He can sense Kenobi's presence up ahead - accompanied by the two new ones, new but so achingly familiar - and it is drenched in fear. He takes satisfaction in this, and decides to draw out the moment, so long as there is nowhere for the Jedi to run.
And if he gains answers about the frankly unsettling concentration of light here (aside, of course, from the fact this planet has twice as many suns as one such as Coruscant), then that's all the better.
When he raps on the door, the occupant who answers it is too terrified to give any sort of coherent answer, and he ends up leaving in disgust. Instead he sends troops to investigate what gossip they can pick up from the locals while he hunts Kenobi; usually he considers himself above such petty news, but something - likely the Force - whispers that this is important.
By the time he has finished his search of Mos Espa, the entire settlement is dutifully terrified of him, but his search does not yield anything fruitful. Kenobi and the Force-sensitives - likely two padawans of his - are gone.
Upon his return to the Death Star, he is so incensed he doesn't argue when Tarkin gives a suggestion - more of a thinly veiled demand - that they fire on the planet now, and not waste time chasing shadows. (An ironic choice of words, but Vader has no appreciation for irony.) He has bigger fish to fry - he wants to get to Alderaan before long.
Vader acquiesces - not that he has any choice. Tarkin is in the Emperor's favour.
The Death Star fires on Tatooine.
Later, Vader finds himself curious and forces himself to read the report his inferiors submitted.
". . .successful slave uprising. . . Jabba the Hutt overthrown. . ."
Oh.
So that was why his master had wanted the planet destroyed, and quickly. It might have been a threat to the Empire's slavery regimes.
Darth Vader wondered at the twinge in his gut. It felt entirely too much like regret. Maybe his suit was malfunctioning.
". . .orchestrated by two young people, apparently only just turned twenty. . . Luke and Leia Skywalker. . . known collectively and legendarily as the 'Skywalker twins'. . . no known living relatives, but raised by an aunt and uncle on a moisture farm near Tosche Station. . ."
If his respirator didn't prevent it, he would stop breathing when he reads this.
Twins - he thought it was a girl and she a boy-
Luke and Leia - the names they agreed on the names he thought the baby had never had the chance to bear-
Twenty years old - it was twenty years two months ago that he had killed her-
Skywalker.
He doesn't need a DNA test to know what the Force is singing to him. They are his children.
His son and his daughter.
His twins.
And they had been on the planet when it was annihilated.
Darth Vader is a Dark Lord of the Sith, the scourge of the Jedi, the murderer of many sentient beings. But there are some lines that one does not cross.
Namely, killing one's children.
(Twice.)
The Skywalker twins watched the sky with terror, Han Solo and Ben Kenobi no less so, when the mysterious moon appeared.
"That's no moon," Ben said. "That's a space station. The space station you delivered the plans to the Rebels for."
It was Leia who said, "Someone needs to alert the Alliance as to where the Death Star is. Maybe they've managed to find a weakness."
Ben insisted they be the ones to go. "They're still on Yavin 4. You'll need to hurry if you want to get there in time." He gave Leia a strange look, and nodded towards the hangar bay where they all knew the Millennium Falcon was docked. "You'll need a fast ship."
Luke raised his eyebrows. "I suppose we will."
Now, looking at the wreckage of their home planet left far behind, he wonders if Ben did it on purpose.
Wonders why Ben chose to die like that, rather than go down fighting, like reportedly the great Jedi Knight Anakin Skywalker had.
They reach the Rebellion, and warn them. When news comes in about Alderaan, and that the Rebel Base has been found, there is a scramble. Biggs Darklighter vouches for Luke and gets him into an X-wing, and then they are flying towards that monstrosity with proton torpedoes at their fingertips. Eventually the Death Star explodes at their fingertips as well.
But when Biggs dies, the Skywalkers are all that's left of the desert planet of Tatooine.
Vader's unbeating heart restarts with sheer relief when he hears the name of the pilot who destroyed the Death Star. Luke Skywalker.
His son is alive. And, hopefully, his sister.
Mustafar, Tatooine. Twice he'd almost killed them.
Maybe the third time would really be lucky.
When Luke Skywalker is lured to Bespin, his sister having foregone Jedi training for her work with the Alliance, he is only partially trained.
Nevertheless, Darth Vader is still vaguely encumbered by his resistance, and the skills he has to resist with. "Impressive," he admits, more to himself than to Luke. "Most impressive."
Leia's words from another time spring to Luke's mouth. "You'll find we're full of surprises."
They are not said with a smile, or a blithe shake of the head. They are not said by a callow youth in the desert, sun-beaten and glowing, and their listener does not understand the weight of the legacy they bear.
But they are said all the same.
Luke is still missing a hand from the duel when Leia asks him what was wrong. He does not share the news over the bond - the bond is too intimate, too scared, for him to defile it like that - but he shares it out loud, voice shaking.
Somehow, seeing Leia's distraught expression makes it all so much worse.