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Chapter Text

No one in their right mind would ever call Han Solo a pious man. He’s a born skeptic who lives by what is there in front of him, not by esoteric explanations of morality and afterlife. To know Han Solo even casually is to know that he believes in nothing but himself and those he is loyal to, and that no amount of space wizardry or precognition or ‘will of the Force’ mumbo jumbo will ever change that.

However, just because Han is a skeptic doesn’t mean he is not also a spacer, and spacers are an incurably superstitious lot. The vast void of space is, despite all technological progress, still largely unmapped and full of unexpected—and often inexplicable—dangers. Rare indeed is the captain whose ship, regardless of size, does not include some arrangement of religious trappings and good luck charms meant to maximize the chances of safe passage. Even the Imperial Fleet relaxes its brutal secularism enough to include minimalistic shrines for the sake of crew morale.

Han is no exception to this rule. In fact, as a man who hedges his bets whenever possible, he’s rather gone to the other extreme: filling the Millenium Falcon with the tokens and talismans and garnishments of as many deities as he can think of who might give him the time of day in a pinch. A few tricksters from the Corellian pantheons, some Shriwook saints, the common travelers' and mercantile gods, a Kuati blessing for the Falcon herself... He even has a kriffing Hutt idol that keeps disappearing from its shelf and reappearing the most disgusting locations of the ship. (Chewbacca denies any involvement, but Han only half believes him.) The cockpit is so crowded it could be mistaken for a roadside souvenir stall at a pilgrimage site.

The collection gets Han a few raised eyebrows from the occasional guest or passenger, but he just jokes that every man needs a hobby. He'd prefer one that featured more late nights with beautiful people, but despite his carefully cultivated reputation as a charming rogue, Han's sex life is depressingly sparse, so instead he collects lucky charms and idly researches layouts for different religious shrines to house his various trinkets.

Of course, it's all tongue in cheek. Han doesn't actually believe that any of these deities would actually look out for an irreverent, unlawful layabout like him. It's just a hobby. They're just trinkets.

--until one of them actually works.

Chapter Text

The day after his first officers' meeting aboard the Devastator, Firmus Piett is nursing an after-dinner coffee in the officers' mess in grim anticipation of his third shift in thirty-six hours when the army general with two faces, Maximilian Veers, finally confronts him.

"You have a truly divine sense of patience, cousin," Veers says with a small quirk of his lips that must be what passes for a smirk on the face of the implacable Iron General. Uninvited, he sets down his own coffee and a plate of some sort braided pastry and takes a seat. "I would have decked Ozzel for far less."

An exaggeration. Admiral Ozzel was vicious in the meeting, but not so overtly that Firmus could file a (futile) report over it. And General Veers has been the perfect image of restraint and cool indifference every time Firmus has seen him, his current friendliness not withstanding.

Firmus does not break character. "Cousin, sir?" he says mildly, hoping Veers will take the hint.

He does not.

"This corner you're hiding in is private enough to dispense with formalities, isn't it?" Veers says. "You can call me Verza, though I am Max Veers as well. On Denon we reincarnate. What can I call you?"

The name means nothing to Firmus, but his knowledge of other pantheons is deplorable. Presumably whatever reincarnation entails is why Veers appears to Firmus’s senses to be at least two people, but also not. Despite his casual tone Veers trips ever so slightly on the word 'we', which Firmus takes to mean that Veers hasn't seen any of his own people in a long time. Either they're Faded, or he's exiled, which gives some explanation of what another old god is doing serving in the Death Squadron. As for why he's being so forward—well, perhaps he's lonely.

Firmus would be too weary for pity even if the feeling didn't contradict his very being, and regardless he's not here to socialize, so he keeps his tone bland.

"My name is Captain Firmus Piett, sir."

Veers raises an eyebrow. "It's that way is it? At least drop the 'sir'. I can tell you're not one of the small fry. You have some power left to you. I'm surprised I didn't notice the instant you came aboard."

Firmus had noticed the general immediately, of course. Veers—Verza—isn't bothering to mask his presence at all. Bold of him, considering his direct supervisor is a jedi (or sith, whatever, there's no difference) who surely can sense Verza's so-called 'Force presence'. Lord Vader must be particularly unobservant if Verza can flaunt himself so brazenly. Firmus, on the other hand, has always been one to keep a low profile, to slip into the Void and lie in wait.

Inclining his head at Veers, Firmus says, "I'm surprised that a decorated army general has taken any notice of me at all." Surely the man can tell Firmus would rather be left alone?

Veers's expression shifts minutely, but at that moment his PDA pings. He checks it, gives his pastry a wistful look, and rises from his seat. "I do try to keep abreast of unknown elements in the Squadron," Veers says pointedly, "so I will be seeing you around, Captain."

Ah. Veers wants to know whether Firmus is here with malicious intent. Fair enough, he supposes. Being navy, Firmus is not technically the General's problem, but he can't blame Veers for being suspicious. Firmus would have been too, back when he commanded the Axxilan Anti-Pirate fleet, if another diety showed up unannounced in his territory and failed to explain themself.

Firmus looks Veers in the eyes and nods to acknowledge he's been warned. "Safe stars, General."

XXX

The general does not leave him alone, cornering him in the corridors, in the lifts, even once at the firing range. Firmus doesn't quite go out of his way to avoid the man, but he does use a touch of the Void to escape a confrontation once or twice when he is particularly strung out from another of Ozzel's triple shifts. Fortunately, their schedules don't coincide often enough for Veers to catch him at mealtimes, although that might be more a result of Firmus's habit of forgetting mealtimes entirely. More relieving but also more confusing is the fact that despite the general's alleged suspicion, Veers continues to be both amicable and discrete about the whole thing.

It's more than Firmus can say about his other superiors. To think that his favorite place on a starship used to be the bridge with its breath-taking view, when nowadays he gets a headache every time Ozzel summons him there. He’d initially thought Ozzel was feigning incompetence in order to manufacture busywork for him, but apparently nepotism is so ingrained in the Imperial Fleet that it is in fact possible to rise to the rank of Fleet Admiral of the Death Squadron without having ever developed a concept of time management.

Then there's the harassment he faces in the corridors for his humble background and lack of Academy pedigree—and not just from Ozzels Core-worlder flunkies, either. For all Firmus's mythical patience, some days he feels himself overwhelmed with the urge to open up his Maw and swallow—

By the Mother, he misses his old fleet.

XXX

At the close of the next officer's meeting, Firmus elects not to disappear immediately upon dismissal and instead allows Veers to fall into step with him in the hallway. Before the man can begin another of his friendly interrogations, Firmus asks, "Do you prefer to be referred to as male or female, General?"

Veers seems nonplussed at the question. "What?"

"Verza is the patron of warriors, and a goddess of motherhood, is she not?"

Veers's confusion clears, and although his default stony expression doesn't change, he seems very pleased. "I've never been asked that before. On Denon it's not... you could say gender is a non-issue." His eyes glitter in triumph. "You looked me up."

"It seemed prudent given your nature," Firmus says. He refuses to confirm to Veers that he himself is anything more than mortal, feigning polite bewilderment when the topic inevitably comes up, but he's not about to risk giving offense by pretending he doesn't believe Veers is who he says he is. Not when Verza exudes the energy and health of an actively-worshiped deity and Firmus is a mere shadow of his former self—a conflict between them would not end in Firmus’s favor. Not to mention, Verza could just as easily take a leaf out of Ozzel’s book and make Firmus’s life difficult as General Veers, no divinity necessary.

"Speaking of our nature," Veers says, "I find myself wondering about the origin your accent."

Firmus has no doubt Veers has read his personnel file, picking for clues, but of course Veers has no way to know how much of it is fabricated.

"I find I can't quite get rid of it," he lies dryly, "especially around certain people."

To most of members of the Imperial Fleet, the quiet, competent comms officer Captain Piett speaks with near perfect Core-world tones, spiced with just a touch of his native Axxilan. Whenever he can get away with it, however, Firmus scandalizes Ozzel and other Core snobs by leaning hard into the distinct dialect of the Outer Rim. It's a small balm for the frayed edges of his pride. Having to bow his head to any mortal, let alone as pathetic an insect as Kendall Ozzel—is what he deserves for his failures—is galling in the extreme.

"Including a certain Fleet Admiral?" Veers responds with a hint of smirk. Against his will, Firmus feels his own expression mirroring.

The two of them are both still on duty, and reach a point in the hall where they need to part ways to go do their jobs, but Veers lingers. "Are you Axxilan, truly?" he asks, a hound on a scent.

Firmus suppresses a sigh. While Veers’s company has been growing on him, slightly, Firmus is still not a social creature. Perhaps a small clue will be enough of a bone for stubborn man to gnaw on, and he'll stay off Firmus's back for awhile. It’s not as if narrowing the field of investigation will help much anyway—the Axxila that worshiped Firmus’s pantheon has been gone for generations now, lost when pirates took over the quadrant and scattered the population in the early days of the Republic.

After weighing the idea for a moment, Firmus nods at Veers. "Yes, Axxila has always been my home."

XXX

Firmus has been onboard for over a month without once meeting the master of the Death Squadron, heir presumptive to the Empire, Lord Vader.

Given Ozzel's loudly professed belief that Outer Rim trash like Firmus shouldn't be assigned to the Fleet, let alone the flagship, Firmus can only assume that his transfer was approved by Lord Vader himself. Yet, there has been no summons for an audience, no acknowledgement of Firmus's presence at all. According to scuttlebutt, Vader was off-ship when Firmus arrived, slipped aboard without fanfare, and has been holed up in his quarters since. This is apparently normal behavior. How the Fleet gets anything done at all with its highest officer absent and its second highest incompetent is beyond Firmus’s comprehension. Then again, many things mortals get up to are beyond Firmus’s comprehension.

Vader is expected to emerge any day now, resulting in a distinct increase of tension amongst the ranking officers. Even the implacable General Veers looks more harried when they cross paths, although that may be because the Death Squadron is readying for a ground campaign on Ahlko IV.

Some of Veers's preoccupation must be attributed to Vader, however, because he arranges a trivial excuse to summon Firmus to his office, and tosses the requested flimsiwork aside as soon as Firmus delivers it.

"What do you know of Lord Vader?" he asks without preamble.

Firmus is uncertain what Veers' intention is with the question, so he remains at attention and gives the answer that would be expected of Captain Piett, loyal Imperial citizen.

Veers cuts him off immediately. "I'm asking, cousin, if you know what you're getting into."

"He's a jedi," Firmus says instead of answering, and watches Verza's reaction. As far as mortal religious orders go, the jedi aren’t so bad. Remarkably non-territorial, since they view competing religions as merely different manifestations of the Force, but with an irritating habit of taking credit for other entities’ miracles. The general consensus of the galaxy’s esoteric population is that the jedi are obnoxious but not ultimately malicious. Whether or not Verza feels the same way will affect how Firmus interacts with him henceforth.

"Sith, technically," Veers says, but his tone is sardonic and Firmus feels an unexpectedly strong spark of relief that he does not have to make an enemy of Veers. "And he has even less sense than the last batch of them did, which is why I get away with all I do," Veers continues. "But that doesn't mean he's not dangerous."

Veers is more right than he knows. Situated in an ageless but unfortunately very mortal body, Firmus is as vulnerable to ‘death by Vader-induced asphyxiation’ as anyone else in the Death Squadron. Nor can he afford to make himself a replacement body should he lose this one.

"If Vader hasn't sensed you flaunting around, he certainly won't sense me," Firmus says, treading quite close to the line of admitting his identity for the sake of staying on topic.

Veers acknowledges neither the implicit admission nor the light jab at his flamboyance. He seems genuinely concerned. "He won't sense what you are, or mistake you for 'Force sensitive', but he will notice that you do not fear him," Veers explains, "which is not something he tolerates in anyone he doesn't respect."

Firmus nods, finally getting the point. "...and I am but a lowly comms officer from the Outer Rim, worth less than the dust on his boots."

"More like you're someone our beloved Admiral will gleefully scapegoat next time he fucks up in front of His Lordship," Veers corrects.

"Only a matter of time, then," Firmus says dryly. He mulls over the problem, not for the first time. "How did you come by your own immunity?"

Veers grimaces. "By being exceedingly good at my job and knowing when to shut my mouth, but--"

"--scuttlebutt says that's not enough," Firmus finishes for him. The Fleet has lost plenty of competent crew to Vader's indiscriminate rage.

"Exactly. You wouldn't happen be a deity of good fortune, would you?"

Firmus doesn't even try to disguise the snort that escapes him. "If I were a deity of good fortune, I would certainly not be standing here."

Veers cocks his head like a bird of prey. The air in the office stills unnaturally. "Why are you here? I've been very patient with your mysteriousness so far, cousin."

Firmus tenses at the sudden swell of pressure in the office. In response, the Void sluices through the spaces between the atoms of his body like a wave breaching tree roots at high tide, ready to pull him through the membrane of reality into the safety of the Deep. But even though he could sink out of Veers's grasp untroubled, could sink down and down and down out of the Devastator entirely if he had to, Firmus remains resolutely where he is. He can't leave yet.

For a moment, he considers slipping back behind the mask of Captain Piett with an answer along the lines of "to serve the Emperor" ...but Veers has been very patient.

"I'll tell you if you cease the dramatics," Firmus says calmly.

For a moment, there is a Multitude of beings—or perhaps a Being that contains multitudes—peering at Firmus from behind Veers's eyes. Then they vanish, taking the unnatural tension with them. Veers makes an approving grunt. "You don't crack under pressure, at least. We should spar sometime."

"You would crush me in a physical fight," Firmus says without a drop of envy. "I'm more suited to the role of referee than gladiator," he adds meaningfully.

"That's a juicy hint, I'm sure," Veers says, "but you can't bribe your way out of answering the question. What are you doing in the Squadron? Why put yourself in Vader's way at all?"

Bracing himself for the tender topic, Firmus says, "I'm here because a Seer told me I would be. Beyond that I truly have no more idea than you do."

Veers snorts. "Last I checked, Seers tracked the whims of their patrons, not the reverse."

Firmus tries to keep his voice even, or failing that, at least human. It's not Verza's fault Firmus can't let go of old wounds. Stupid mortal bodies and their heightened emotions. "Denon doesn't put much stock in Seers, then?"

"I don't. No vision, no matter how authentic, has ever helped anyone change Fate," Veers says with obvious bitterness.

Something intimate and painful drives the other deity's words, Firmus can tell, so he shouldn't take it personally, but his own loss is still too recent. Like a mother sensing her child's distress, the Void grasps Firmus again. The riptide pulls at his ankles. Sink, it says. Sink deep where no one can touch you.

"Perhaps you would feel differently," Firmus says in a voice as heavy and cold as the lowest crevice of the deepest ocean, "if the vision was the last blessing your sister ever gave you before she Faded into nothing."

Sink—and he does.

Chapter Text

The problem with joining the Imperial Fleet is that when Max messes up, he can’t blame Verza and be instantly forgiven like on Denon. Of course, that’s kind of the reason he enlisted in the first place, but old habits are hard to break. While he hasn’t made any professional mistakes worth pleading an excuse for in ages (Darth Vader doesn’t put much stock in excuses), Max has never been quite as competent at socializing as he has been at making war—and it’s always the social errors that he feels utterly inadequate to resolve alone.

Back home, where Max’s people know him both as a man and a deity, no one holds him accountable. After all, how can you fault someone for making the same mistakes over and over when that’s the whole point of their existence? From the moment news reached the public that the eldest child of the House of Veers was the latest reincarnation of the Paragon Verza, everything Max did and said was attributed the lifetimes he’d lived before this one.

It’s a huge honor, of course. Like all the Houses of Denon, the Veers are proud of their heritage. And there’s perks to being a living deity, certainly. Even beyond the social capital it grants him, Max can draw on the faith of his people to wield dizzying power, especially within Verza’s area of interest, the battlefield. But the Houses of Denon are fated to act out their myths over and over again across history, their victories serving as a source of inspiration and their failures as cautionary fables—whether they want to do so or not.

Verza is tired of making the same mistakes over and over again. Not just on the epic scale of a deity desperate to avoid another re-telling of the same old tragedy with new actors, but also as a person struggling to be better on a day-to-day basis while surrounded by people who don’t understand why he would want to be. So this time around he decided to take the nuclear option and leave the karking planet entirely. The farther he gets from his base of faith, the weaker he becomes as a deity—but also, hopefully, the weaker Fate’s grasp on him will be.

There are two other Paragons currently incarnated on Denon right now, both of whom called him an idiot for proposing he can outrun Fate, but since neither them are forced to relive myths where they bury their own children, Verza doesn’t put much stock in their platitudes about acceptance and inevitability. Even if they end up being right, at very least in the Imperial Fleet Maximilian Veers will get to stand on his own feet and succeed on his own merit.

It’s surprisingly easy to sweep his true nature under the rug. All it takes is a few comments to the correct people and Max’s divinity is reduced to a footnote in his personnel file about an inherited title that holds cultural significance on his home planet but involves no true political influence or responsibilities. The Empire’s aesthetic of monolithic, cosmopolitan secularism pressures the few Denon natives he meets within the Fleet to be discrete about their reverence. The whole plan goes stunningly well.

So does his career. War is in his nature, after all, and the Empire is not yet so corrupt that sheer competence cannot carry Max as high up the chain of command as he cares to go. He even starts accumulating new legends, and takes perverse pleasure in the fact that, thanks to Imperial propaganda, more people recognize Maximilian Veers as the Iron General of the Thundering Herd than they do as the Paragon Verza of Denon. It takes him far too long to realize his rising rank and the legends of his battlefield prowess have once again set him above his mortal peers—Fate creeping in to tell Verza’s story despite Max’s efforts to veer off course.

So it goes. Every time Max tries to choose the road less taken, the path rounds a bend and reveals that Verza has tread here before.

Part of the reason Max is so intrigued by the appearance of an Axxilan deity in the Death Squadron is that it is unequivocally new. The mysterious, stubbornly reserved ‘Firmus Piett’ doesn’t seem to be a clear analog to anyone from Verza’s many myths. That could simply mean that Piett isn’t destined to have a significant role in Max’s life, but it could also be that as a foreign deity Piett is immune the Denonian Fate nonsense—in which case Verza would be an idiot not to seize the opportunity for the first truly novel relationship he’s had in a thousand years.

And so, of course, Max manages to kark the whole thing up before they’ve even properly become friends.

Things had been going so well—Piett had mostly stopped running away when he spotted Max coming, and even smirked at Max’s jokes on occasion—but ever since the disastrous conversation in Max’s office (in which Piett handily beat Lord Vader’s record for Most Dramatic Exit Verza Has Ever Seen), Max has not seen him once. According to logs and scuttlebutt, Piett is still on the ship and carrying out his responsibilities with unflappable competence, but in between those responsibilities he may as well not exist. Max doesn’t even bother trying to check security footage; Piett is clearly using divine power to disappear, either from notice or from reality itself, Max isn’t sure.

Even if he could track Piett down and corner him long enough to apologize, it’s not like Max has any idea what to say. He’s already composed and deleted a dozen different private messages along the lines of ‘Listen, Verza is mythically bad at words, I can’t help it, please forgive me’—but, ironically, if Piett were to accept such an excuse, Max would no longer be interested in winning his friendship.

It certainly doesn’t help that as the departure date for the upcoming ground campaign approaches Max has less and less time to come up with said apology. He hates the idea of leaving the issue to fester until he gets back, but there’s so much on his plate already that Max only manages to keep up with it all by taking a leaf out of Firmus’ playbook: leaning on his divinity in order to skip meals and forgo sleep.

The regular military preparations he’s responsible for as General Veers are simple enough, if extensive; he can and does delegate them as appropriate to his rank. But before any kind of hostile planet-side engagement Max also has to discretely reach out as Verza to the local deities and convince them that while he is showing up on their doorstep with an army, he’s not doing so in a divine capacity. Most pantheons are composed of self-important, isolationist nerfs who've never left their home planet and refuse to fathom the idea that Max is merely following orders rather than orchestrating some sort of covert holy war--which means Max is in for weeks of mind-numbing diplomacy to ensure that the Thundering Herd won't be smited by a natural disaster the instant the transports touch down.

Luckily, the local VIPs on Ahlko IV are a little more cosmopolitan than usual, enough to understand and accept Max's explanation that he means no harm, he’s just slumming it with the mortals for a few decades. Unfortunately, they’re also familiar enough with galactic politics to understand and disapprove of Imperial interference with their planet, and so they’ve pettily decided to make Max jump through various diplomatic hoops in exchange for the dubious privilege of walking around on their turf unmolested.

In anticipation of this nonsense and the other last-minute obstacles that always crop up before big operations, Max grudgingly resigns himself to shelving the Piett Problem until after the campaign—which is, of course, the cue for a solution to drop into his lap from the last source Max would ever have expected.

It comes in the form of a holo-memo from Admiral Ozzel—truly one of the most irritating mortals Verza has met in any lifetime—alerting Max that the naval officer assigned as the Thundering Herd’s planet-side transport liaison will be unavailable during the upcoming operation due a scheduling conflict with a professional development conference Ozzel himself is hosting in the next system over—and so will the next most qualified officer. In fact, the recording informs him with supercilious glee, all of the naval personnel with the necessary experience to liaise between local Ground Control and the Imperial Fleet for an engagement of this scale are expected to be at the conference, and would the General like to suggest any of his own people who might be up to the task?

It’s more of Ozzel’s usual navy vs army bullshit, carefully timed to screw Max over at the worst possible moment. If Max assigns one of his own people to the position they will be, at best, under-prioritized by their naval counterpart Fleet-side, resulting in sluggish communications and decreased operational effectiveness, which will of course reflect badly on Max and the army—a win for Ozzel. If Max requests that Ozzel excuse one of the officers from attending the conference, he allows the implication that the army has no competent officers to go unchallenged—also a win for Ozzel.

Alternatively, Max can complain that the navy isn’t doing its kriffing job to Lord Vader, who will then order one of the naval officers to skip the conference—but involving Vader in these power plays is rarely worth the trouble it causes further down the line. Every incident where Ozzel can force Max to go over his head gets filed away by Ozzel to use as evidence next time he wants to scapegoat the army as uncooperative and incompetent. Not to mention, it makes Max look like a child tattling to the teacher.

One of these days, Max is going to go full Paragon-Of-The-Battlefield on Ozzel and rip the smug bastard’s spine out of his body. But not today. Because as slimy as it is for Ozzel to pull this little maneuver less than a week before the Fleet arrives at Ahlko IV, the move is about to backfire on him in a way benefits Max greatly. After all, even if Ozzel’s list of unavailable naval personnel encompasses not just the Devastator but the entire Death Squadron, there remains one Navy communications officer Max can be certain Ozzel did not invite to the conference: Captain Firmus Piett.

It’s perfect. Ozzel will jump at the opportunity to assign Piett a difficult, unwieldy role that will go unappreciated if he performs well and sink his career if he performs badly; meanwhile, Max will benefit from having a competent, cooperative naval liaison for once, and Piett will have to stop avoiding him.

Grinning like a tooka-kit with a bowl of cream, Max drafts a quick reply to the Ozzel’s memo. You don’t know it yet, kriffer, but I’ve won this round.

Chapter Text

Chewbacca tolerates Han’s hoard of religious paraphernalia with a remarkable patience for someone who professes to hate clutter, although said patience might have something to do with the little nook in the Falcon’s hold that Han spends a series of long hyperspace jumps remodeling into an altar to the particular Shyriiwook tradition Chewy practices. If Han’s research is reliable, it’s as authentic as you can get outside Kashyyyk—kinda hard to orient things toward planetary north when you’re halfway across the quadrant, unfortunately—and he surprises himself with how proud he is of the finished project.

(He’s also surprised by how choked up Chewy gets when presented with it. The crushing wookie hug of gratitude Han receives is mortifyingly sappy and also cracks two of his ribs.)

Up until this point, Han hasn’t ever really considered trying to learn about the junk he collects, but Chewy’s reaction is an eye-opening demonstration. All this stuff actually means something to people, and Han finds himself feeling curious about some of the other pieces in his collection.

Is studying the galaxy’s myriad religious traditions an embarrassingly nerdy past-time? Yes. Is Han desperate for an activity to occupy long hyperspace jumps that doesn’t involve losing round after round of sabacc to Chewie? Also yes.

XXX

Obviously, Max goes to great lengths not to fall in love. Can’t lose your child if you never get the opportunity to have one, right?

This plan is flawed from start. In lifetimes where Verza has a same-sex partner or no partner, Fate has no difficulties dumping an adoptive child in their lap—which is worse, because those children might otherwise have lived, if only Verza hadn’t selfishly chosen to love them.

(This plan is flawed from the start because it is in Verza’s nature to love too easily and too much.)

Like all plans, it does not survive first contact with the enemy: a Chandrillan civil servant named Lavinia. She’s spunky and delightful and Max does not think to guard himself against her because she’s a good deal older than him and fresh out of a dramatic divorce. But the age difference is not so dramatic after all with Verza’s maturity bolstering Max’s side of the scale, and apparently Lavinia is not the once-burned-twice-shy type. Nor is she intimidated by Verza’s existence and baggage. She firmly believes it is better to love and lose than to never love at all, so really Max is doomed from the moment they lay eyes on each other.

XXX

When the slave boy who wins his freedom in a pod race is told he has the Force to thank for his victory over insurmountable odds, he says nothing about the prayers he breathed during its most hair-raising moments. His mother taught him better than to speak of the ways of the Desert’s Children to outsiders.

And of course he doesn’t even think to mention the strange encounter with a slave who had, a few days prior, winked at him before nudging an old grav-processor (the final impossible-to-find piece for Anakin’s scrap-built speeder) off of the sled of spare parts they were hauling in the footsteps of their Master. It fell directly into the gutter in front of Anakin, who to managed to kick some dust and trash over it in a rare moment of instinctive discretion. When he’d looked back up, both the slave and the sled were gone, obscured by traffic. The bizarre stroke of luck in a life that had heretofore included precious little of it had given Anakin pause. The slave’s expression had been cheerful, cunning, and peculiarly familiar, as if it were not Anakin’s eyes that recognized them but his bones…

No. It must have been a coincidence. After all, the revered trickster god of Anakin’s people surely had better things to do than help a single, insignificant boy fly away from Depur’s reach.

Anakin Skywalker never forgets Tatooine, but the demands of the Force and of an overwhelming, cosmopolitan, warring galaxy leave him very little time to devote to his faith. Without the whisper of shifting sands to sing him to sleep each night, Anakin has difficulty preserving crucial distinctions in his mother’s teachings—such as the difference between suffering caused by the natural, unavoidable harshness of the Desert and that caused by the unnatural, unnecessary cruelty of sentients. There are so many factors chipping away at his youthful faith and idealism that it is hardly his fault that he eventually loses his connection to the Desert and the ways of her Children.

At least, that’s what a embittered soul known as Darth Vader will tell himself on the rare occasions he allows himself to recall a time when he was anything but a barely-contained vessel of rage and pain. This one thing, at least, was not his fault.