A/N: You know, I'm not even going to apologise for taking so long to finish this. It was hellish and it is now 11 at night and this thing is 5000 words long. . . . Also I might have played through Arkham Knight in one week, which took away from my writing ability. . . . Sorry.
At the heart of the Seat of Mercy was a circular chamber vaster than any other. It was built as a kind of amphitheatre, with concentric rings of high arches separating stepped levels descending towards a flat open space some thirty metres across. Harvan was not quite sure if it counted as one room or a sequence of many and could scarcely imagine what its purpose had been. Given the Seat's original role, perhaps it had simply been somewhere to house thousands of people at short notice.
The Alliance engineering teams had, with their usual spectacular speed and efficiency, transformed that central space into a fully functional courtroom. Tiered benches ran around half of the circumference. The other half was given over to platforms for the presiding judges and their entourages, arranged in a complex pattern presumably derived from the equally complex relationships between the various peoples represented. A ring of screens hung overhead ready to display whatever information everyone would be required to see. At the very centre of the chamber was a podium, large enough to comfortably hold a single person.
From his seat, high at the back of the make-shift auditorium, Harvan watched people pour in. Taken as a crowd, they were a largely sombre one, beings from dozens of species in the formal wear of three times as many cultures filtering in from the outside in groups of ones and twos. There was little in the way of noise, just the soft susurration of the occasional murmured exchange and the patter of shoes and boots against stone and metal. The room as a whole was holding its breath. The hush was an expectant one.
He could see Princess Organa and General Solo standing together right down at the front, the General's freighter-captain clothes sticking out sharply even against the myriad of styles. The Princess' golden 3PO droid was just walking away from them, moving remarkably quickly for someone restricted to moving at a precisely modulated stroll. Harvan recalled a rumour that had gone around the fleet a few weeks ago about an attempt to recover data from the droid's memory banks – some piece of pre-Empire information long thought deleted that might be relevant again. He had not heard whether the effort had been successful, or if it had anything to do with Vader. Likely not, given the low odds that both droids employed by the Princess and her brother would have a connection to their father.
Solo and the Princess bent their heads together, presumably to talk quietly while people filled out the seats around them. They were near a section of the stands reserved for people who might be expected to give in-person testimony, which made sense. Any other details were lost to distance and Harvan let his attention wander away from them. It felt too much like intruding to keep watching.
The judges' platforms were starting to fill out now. While the court was physically set up in the ancient Selketh style, it would be run strictly according to Republic principles. This necessitated a certain amount of protocol and formality, particularly to ensure that all participants were appropriately sworn in. Slowly, that process was being completed and the various parties were taking their places. The platform in the middle, shared by Mon Calamari and quarren, was already nearly full. A group of dresselians in the brightly coloured garb of a half-dozen different states were making garrulous conversation as they climbed to the platform at the far end of the arc. Members of the Alderaani remnant filed on to the one at the near end in sombre silence.
Someone's elbow brushed against Harvan's shoulder. A short human woman in a belted tunic muttered an apology and settled down next to him. Almost at once, an ithorian came stomping along, trying to get to the spot on Harvan's other side. It took some considerable manoeuvring to get everyone into the right places and by then the benches were becoming crowded as more and more people found their seats. A soft rustle of voices rose and fell, dropping quickly back into the prevailing expectant hush.
Looking back towards the front, over the heads of the three bothans who had taken the seats on the next row down, Harvan saw six Alliance officers troop in, moving stiffly in uniforms several degrees more ornate than they were used to. He recognised a couple of them, the captains of a pair of blockade runners seized by the Empire during Vader's hunt for Commander Skywalker. Lieutenant Torbel still favoured her left leg when she walked.
A line of astromechs followed in their wake, splitting up and gliding off in various different directions. They warbled to one another, the sounds carrying clearly up to the heights of the arches. Perhaps realising that, they fell silent one after the other and settled into their allotted sections, interfacing with consoles around the platforms.
Harvan's eyes drifted back to where Princess Organa had been standing. She was seated now, looking at a datapad. General Solo was still beside her, arms firmly folded. It was too far away to make out his expression but his body language said everything. It was hard not to wonder how much it had taken to persuade him to attend. He was not exactly the kind of person you could have simply ordered to report for transport.
The more romantic observers might well have put it down to the woman sitting next to him, an assessment to which there was surely some truth. Given what Harvan knew about Solo's experiences during the war with the Empire, he suspected that it was also at least partly down to wanting to make certain things went ahead without problems. From what little Harvan knew about Solo from people who'd actually met him, he might simply have been there to make sure he'd be on hand to say 'I told you so' if said problems occurred.
A new figure was coming towards them across the courtroom, turning heads as he approached the Princess and the General. Comander Skywalker, not as distinctive at a distance as his sister or friend but recognisable by the dark uniform showing under his white robe. Seeing him walking rather than sitting, there was something in the cut of the robe that reminded Harvan of the Princess' clothes. A hint of Alderaani design. Was that intentional? Or simply coincidence or necessity? There were probably a finite number of ways to cut a robe that simple on the human frame. Still, an interesting signal to mix into all the other implications bound up in his being Vader's son, Princess Organa's brother, a hero of the Rebellion, and a Jedi on top of all the rest.
Skywalker reached his sister and stopped, not quite looking at her, awkwardness and uncertainty showing in his stance. Princess Organa lowered her datapad and must have said something because Skywalker ducked his head in response. Solo stirred in his seat but did not uncross his arms. After a few more words, the Princess reached out and took Skywalker's hand. He relaxed immediately, uncertainty transforming into gratitude and relief, and glanced at his friend. The General tilted his head in a way that suggested he was rolling his eyes, then waved briefly towards the seat on the other side of the Princess. Even from so far away, Harvan was sure he recognised Skywalker's almost-shy smile as the young man took his place.
A soft, penetrating chime rang through the courtroom and out through the many archways. This triggered a rush for the few remaining empty seats, one snivvian taking a flying leap for the third row up, coattails streaming out behind him. Recording droids swept overhead in a cloud of buzzing spheres, spreading out to create a watchful halo just below the display screen ring. The screens themselves brightened, stand-by images flickering into real-time views of the judges or the central podium. Guards stationed around the chamber came sharply to attention. The last few judges settled into place. Expectation became anticipation among the assembled audience, people leaning forward or muttering quickly to their neighbours. The chime sounded again.
Darth Vader was led in flanked by dozens of troopers in full battle-armour. Whether they were there to protect everyone from Vader or Vader from everyone else remained an open question. With the visors of their helmets covering their eyes, it was unclear how they felt about either. Glimpses of their chins suggested their faces were, to a being, set in stony grimaces.
They had shackled Vader's hands in front of him with a pair of high-security blinders, the type that could be electrified or magnetised as needed. A stipulation of the agreements that had brought the hearing together, though what anyone expected such a device to do in the event that Vader suddenly reclaimed both the power and temperament wielded at the height of his service to the Emperor, Harvan was not entirely sure. In all likelihood it was just the image of him in chains that was wanted, either with an eye on posterity or simply to provide some small measure of psychological reassurance.
A small measure swamped by the way Vader still towered over the tallest of the guards. Outwardly he was much the same as when Harvan had last seen him – the patches marring the scuffed black armour, the scars and burns on the helmet, the simple covering of the rough grey robe. There was evidence of an attempt to neaten up the larger areas of damage, to seal them properly against an environment that was not completely sterile. This restored some of the smooth blackness to the armour, restored a little to those gleaming Imperial lines. That, though, was mere window dressing. A few brush-strokes to complete the portrait.
Darth Vader, no longer slumped in a overly small chair, no longer confined in a room barely wider than a couple of his strides, was walking among the soldiers like a king. He held his head high and matched the guards' pace exactly without hesitation or any apparent difficulty. There was no swagger in the way he moved, no arrogance. But neither was there any sign of weakness. The chamber did not grow chill at his presence. But Harvan was sure that many people's blood ran cold at the sight.
For a brief, horrifying instant, Harvan was filled with the idea that Vader really had been shamming all along and with all the dreadful implications of that.
No. No, that was not it. A moment's thought dismissed the notion from his mind. This was not the return of the old Vader, not the Emperor's Fist restored to power. The helmet was too rigid in its poise. The lights on the chest panel flickered wildly, warning messages stuttering on the displays. Anyone who had spent time closely observing Vader would be able to tell how much effort it was taking for him to appear so composed, how much willpower he was having to exert to hide the cumulative effects of his injuries.
In ringing silence, they watched him being led from the entrance to the podium, the cameras tracking every step. His escort fanned out as he stepped on to the railed platform, moving away a couple of metres before coming to attention. Automatically, the shackles locked themselves on to to the guard rail, pinning themselves at a comfortable height. Another concession to those who, quite reasonably, doubted the sense of being in the same room with him if he was not restrained. The distinctive shimmer of a magnetic shield activation rippled up in a column around the podium. After a second or two, it settled into transparency and there he was: Darth Vader, standing tall and alone, scrutinised from every angle by everyone around him, the dark lord trapped as if under glass.
There was a moment, a couple of seconds at most, in which Vader's helmet turned, just slightly, towards the seats in which his son and daughter were sitting. Not enough to look at them. Not enough even really to have glimpsed them. Just enough that it was clear he was aware they were there. Was it Harvan's imagination that he stood straighter still after that?
The podium rose smoothly upwards by two metres, lifting Vader so that he could more easily face the judges. A third time, the chime rang out. The foremost judge, Salvabaric, rose to her feet. She was a Mon Calamari, old enough that her skin was starting to mottle and grey with age. For over five decades she had been one of the highest legal officiators among her people, garnering a reputation for staunch fairness – albeit not leniency – that persisted even in the face of the Imperial occupation of her world. Her support of the Alliance was tempered by her convictions about the rule of law and changing society through debate not violence. Those convictions created friction between her and those Alliance leaders more willing to countenance open aggression against the Empire. The rumour was that it had only been after the details of the Death Star became widely known that she had begun to view the Rebellion in any kind of positive light. Her appointment as chairperson and Mon Mothma's noticeable absence spoke of a serious attempt to enforce a degree of neutrality on the proceedings.
Salvabaric cleared her throat. "My honoured colleagues, sentients." Her amplified voice reached everyone in the chamber, its slightly raspy quality unable to disguise the raw authority booming in every word. "I stand before you with the gravest of responsibilities. It is my duty to open a hearing that will determine the fate of a being charged with crimes so calculated and malignant that they strike at the very foundations of civilisation. We stand here as representatives of worlds freed from the tyranny of an empire that condones acts of unspeakable barbarity, united by common bonds of decency that have placed forever in opposition to that most monstrous of institutions. It is in the spirit of those bonds and of civilisation itself that we submit this case not to the swift judgement of perceived righteousness triumphing in battle over presumed wickedness but to the calm consideration of open discussion between those who may not walk in step regarding the precise minutiae of law yet who are as one in a belief in justice for the low and the high alike.
"In what follows, we do not seek to address judgement of the entire spectrum of horrors perpetrated by the so-called 'New Order' and the Empire that it built. There will be much temptation to do so as we examine the evidence in all its gruesome detail and I must urge all of you to avoid conflating the whole with the part that is the subject of these proceedings. We are here to judge one man, not that system that enabled his crimes nor the abundance of collaborators and accomplices who share the blame for the Empire's atrocities. For those beings who formed the greater part of the Empire and the inner circles that controlled it, we hope that justice will come in time but it is not for us to pre-empt or by rushed generalisation mitigate that reckoning. We must focus solely on what is immediately before us: the life and actions of the person known most widely as Darth Vader."
The gaze of the court shifted back to Vader as she spoke, insofar as it had ever left him. He was, quite naturally, impassive. "It must be clearly stated for the record," Salvabaric continued solemnly, "that 'Darth Vader' is an assumed name for the man formerly known as Anakin Skywalker, a Jedi knight of the Republic. How his former existence, prior to the injuries that necessitated such a dramatic physical transformation, factors in to his subsequent actions is directly relevant to this hearing and given this, agreement to broadcast this information has been obtained from all parties on whom it could have an effect. Let it be noted that this includes the prisoner."
Harvan felt no surprise about that, though he wondered how exactly Vader had responded to the question. He would understand the implications for his children. For himself too, perhaps, although it seemed likely that would be the lesser concern. Harvan wondered if he had asked what his son and daughter wanted.
Salvabaric's address continued. She described the form the hearing would take. The balance struck between a dozen different legal systems and the varied groups of judges and jurors assembled around her. The precedents, such as they were, from history. The need to be scrupulous in their deliberations. "If we are to restore the ideals of the Republic and build a galaxy in which every world is equal, we must admit that an insistence on justice defines a responsibility to fairness. We are here to weigh all the factors before us and we shall follow where they lead, into whatever darkness they take us but also into whatever light. We must not dismiss evidence that does not fit with our preconceived notions of who it is that stands in the middle of this chamber. He is a being in a mask, indeed he is trapped behind that mask. There is necessarily part of him hidden from the casual observer. It is our responsibility to examine what is beyond that casual observer's gaze and not be misled by our worse instincts into wilfully ignoring whatever mitigating circumstances may exist."
Anger bubbled through the thick, tense atmosphere, anger at the very idea of giving Darth Vader the benefit of the slightest doubt. Harvan could see it in the way people sat, the way they shifted or stayed perfectly still, the twist of an expression, the twitch of a mouth. It was understandable. Yet he could see the other side of the blade Salvabaric was wielding. The careful positioning of the positive evidence on an equal footing with the negative – without once making a claim about which was the most numerous.
He watched the images of Vader's helmet as Salvabaric's speech built towards its conclusion. It was strange: had the mask lost its ability to scare him? Or were there simply so many new associations layered on it that the most terrifying ones became smothered? He still felt the old twisting in his stomach, but it existed alongside images of Vader struggling for breath more than ever as they fled from Kraver's men or staring morosely at images of his dead wife. A strange quirk of experience: Harvan no longer feared the Vader of the present, the being he was now, after the Emperor, after finding his son – or his son finding him. He was not going to unleash dark forces upon them all or single-handedly tear the Alliance apart from within. That drive to destroy all that opposed him . . . it seemed simply to have evaporated. Lost in Palpatine's funeral pyre, in the fireball that had consumed the Death Star forever. However terrifying the powers Vader still wielded and whatever their true extent, the will to use those powers was gone.
No. Harvan was not afraid of the mask. But that did not take away from what it represented.
How would you judge him? That was the question Skywalker had asked him. He knew he had avoided doing so in quite the way the Jedi had intended. Just as he had refused to respond to Vader's question – which was more or less the same one. Despite the soundness of his reasons, evading the same question twice sat awkwardly on his conscience. It echoed still in the confines of his head. How would you judge him?
Harvan closed his eyes. Disjointed images from a dozen massacres flocked up from his memory, death tolls flickering past, one after the other. He had dissected those figures, picked them apart to allocate responsibility as far as possible at such a distance. So many names reduced to numbers. Worlds burned for disobedience. Police action against refugees and the dispossessed. Summary executions justified by tyrannical laws. Failure treated as a capital crime. Erratic brutality. Tactical cunning interspersed with instances of boundless rage. Violence committed for a cause Vader scarcely seemed ever to have believed in, in the name of an Emperor to whom he felt little loyalty.
The Empire was necessary. That was the reason Vader had given for turning on the Republic, on the Jedi, on his friends. Necessary to enforce order. Strong enough to protect what Vader – Anakin – believed worth protecting. He was far from the first to have gone to war in the name of peace. That had been a lie of course, as it often was, told by a man who engineered crisis after crisis, scandal after scandal in an endless pursuit of more power. A lie that followed to its ultimate extension meant bringing worlds to order by blowing them to rubble. And Vader had followed it to that end, burning up everything that he had wanted to protect, destroying everything that made his life worth living. Because it was necessary.
All he had been left with was a burning, empty hatred and the teachings of the man who had betrayed him, driving him to survive at any cost. And the power to lash out at anyone the Emperor did not actively care about, with only the fear of what the Emperor would do to him if he visibly stepped out of line to hold him in check. A life lived in agony and in inflicting agony on others. Malice as a religion.
Put up against that was – what? The very fact of that initial manipulation. The intoxicating effects of the 'dark side' of the Force. Vader's ultimate betrayal of the Emperor, saving his son and likely cutting the Empire's lifespan in half with one blow. Total compliance in the aftermath. How many lives would now be saved because Vader had shared his secrets?
There was no way to tell in advance. No way to see if the numbers balanced. And even if they did, could lives be balanced like that? Where was the equivalence in one person saved while another remained dead? Harvan thought about Supervisor Yisa, her neck snapped for minor errors, the consequences of which would have been negligable if the Empire had not earned the violent resentment of entire cultures. Captain Needa, throttled because he had the temerity to try and apologise for making a mistake in the heat of battle. Major Kraver's squad, butchered without remorse. Tork's crew, slaughtered without hesitation. He thought about the House of Kelom, the ruling family of Shu-torun and all the others killed to make a point. Phoenix Squadron, the Plasma Devils, a hundred other rebel cells, squashed without heed to whoever else got caught in the crossfire.
All those thousands, all those casualties of Vader's anger – no matter what happened, they were never coming back.
Vader was not the ultimate cause of many of those deaths. Likely the Emperor would have found another way if he had not been able to command his Fist to strike down his enemies. But Vader was responsible. For every demonstration of power, for every slash of a lightsaber, for every carelessly deflected blaster bolt. He, the man who at the height of his powers could slaughter armies single-handedly, who had remained impassive as Alderaan burned, he was responsible for every death that had occurred at his hands.
When Harvan had first joined the Rebellion, he had known that it would likely mean having to take lives. That was a logical consequence of partaking in an armed insurrection. It was not a decision of which he was at all proud. And despite shooting to injure whenever possible, despite working through sleepless nights to find ways around Imperial security that would remove even the chance of a fire-fight, he had killed. He was directly responsible for the deaths of exactly eleven sentient beings. All during pitched battles, all when the only choice was to fire back or be killed – for all that that was any justification. He had waived the right to judge others for taking lives in war. But the sheer number of Vader's victims went far beyond any sane definition of 'war'. For Vader, the war was endless and without boundaries. There was no atrocity he would not commit, no line he would not cross. Enemies lurked everywhere, mistakes were betrayals, nothing in the entire galaxy could be trusted if it did not bend exactly to the demands of his will. Commander Skywalker had suggested that he had wanted to be a great warrior. Well, he had become the greatest. None could ever have hoped to match him.
Before Luke Skywalker.
Vader had changed. His obsession with his son had given him a purpose beyond being the Emperor's instrument and, eventually, a way out of the mire of anger and misery he had created for himself. Was it truly love, unearthed from deep within the armoured shell, or simply a desperate need to reclaim some piece of a lost past? Harvan was still not sure. Functionally it made little difference. Vader turned on the Emperor, an act of self-sacrifice that brought him to the brink of death and forever diminished the power to which he had clung for so long. And ever since . . .
It is what Luke would have done. The simple explanation for using his remaining abilities in defence of others and attempting to shield his jailers from being caught up in the vengeance that pursued him. An explanation too for defending the fleet from metaphysical attack. It was what his son would have done. So Vader did it and in doing so . . . maybe he would become the person Luke hoped he could be. Because whatever else he was, whatever he had done, Vader cared deeply about his children. He would give his life for them. In some ways, he already had.
Harvan opened his eyes. The mask loomed overhead on the screens, grim, imposing, the face of a thousand nightmares. Powerful. Unbroken. A lie. The man inside the mask was dying. He had been dying for years. Sooner rather than later, those flickering lights would go out and the respirator would hiss for the last time. Maybe that would be a relief. In all their interviews, they had never really talked about what it was like to live inside the armour but Harvan had enough outside sources to have built up an idea of how much Vader suffered. It was not a great reach to imagine that a surrender to death would be preferable to the burden of persisting in the husk of what he had once been.
As the opening speech ended and Salvabaric gave up the stand for a quarren herald, Harvan thought about Corporal Jenz' spluttering protests to being ordered to protect Vader. He thought about Kaitis' anger at the very idea of leaving him alive, about Orrimaarko's single-minded thirst for retribution, Toman Veturvia's unashamed fear, Lando Calrissian's unabashed glee at seeing Vader caged, Chewbacca's studied indifference. He thought about Leia Organa's determined refusal to forgive or forget.
Those points of view and all those that mirrored them throughout the Alliance, across known space – they were not invalidated by the changes Vader had undergone. Far from it. The past was not undone by the present. It was not balanced by it. But neither did Vader's crimes mean that his change of mind – his reclamation of the light, however you wished to describe it – did not matter. Luke Skywalker wanted to see the best in his father. That was probably the only reason they were both still alive. He believed Vader had changed, based on Jedi insight and gut instinct. From the outside, gazing through the spectres of the dead, it stank of naivety and wishful thinking. Yet Harvan could not reject the idea. The progression was real, the change non-trivial – Anakin Skywalker who had become Darth Vader had become someone different again. Someone who could feel regret. Someone who could feel guilt. Someone who strove in whatever limited ways were open to him to be worth his son's efforts to save him.
As the herald began to read out the list of indictments, Harvan knew without a shadow of a doubt that Vader would admit his guilt to every single one of them. He would stand before the representatives of the peoples he had wronged, in a room full of beings who hated him and everything he had embodied, and he would do precisely what he had done in all those long hours with no one but Harvan and a holo-recorder as witnesses. No attempt to hide. No effort to dissemble. No desire to be excused.
Harvan looked down at him. Not the death's head image, glowering forever in the recordings that would be beamed across the galaxy but at the man. A single dark figure in simple robes, standing straight-backed and tall yet somehow becoming lost among his surroundings. The world had inverted around him. He was no longer striding above everyone else, the dark lord before whom all others trembled. At long last, Vader was the one facing judgement and it diminished him, robbing him of the scale he had enjoyed during his time at the Emperor's command. For all that they were only there because of him, he was no longer the only thing in the room that mattered.
The herald's voice continued evenly from one atrocity to the next and Harvan listened to the figures he knew by heart and looked up again at the image of the mask. It really was impossible to see the man behind it. And that was the truth of it. Vader had changed, was striving to be someone better, was struggling to shed the darkness – but the past would always be there. The mark he had left in history. Whoever the person behind the mask became, the mask would remain.
The galaxy had survived Darth Vader. It would out-last him, it would recover from him. But he would never recover from what he had done to the galaxy. Any good he did, any good he had ever done, would forever be eclipsed by the extent of the harm. The final consequence of that necessary choice.
How would you judge him?
Simply that he had earned every bloody word the history books would record about him.
And Vader knew that.
And his choice now, maybe the last choice he would ever make, was to face it head on.
Because of sincere regret? Because it was the right thing to do? Or simply because it was what Luke would have done?
With some sadness, Harvan realised he would probably never be able to ask.
The End.
Really, yes it is. I won't say this is how it was always going to end. There was a vague notion of some sort of epic mirroring sunset shot. Possibly even on Tatooine. But that would have been a bit hard to convey without a John Williams soundtrack and the poor man is probably still improvising twiddly bits over the end credits of The Force Awakens somewhere (seriously, they just never end!) so I didn't want to bother him. Thus, back-up option: the thematic ending rather than the ending theme.
Thank you for taking the time to read this monster.
And only when it's over does it hit me that I never once described what Harvan Sahtou looks like. Such is life.