Entry tags:

Arrival + Open to all

Post-Medical/Around the Hospital:

After arriving and getting his debriefing, Vader took time to see to his own physical state. Awakening and not needing assistance breathing was been a shock he hadn't had time to process, feeling fabric on his skin - his skin, not a patchwork of skin, blisters, synthskin, and the wide swatches of scar tissue that was mostly still numb had bordered on sensor overload. Not that he still wasn't covered in scars - so many - but he could get a sense of feeling from them, not just pressure. It seemed his would-be captors understood his gloves and gauntlets served a practical purpose to protect his cybernetic arms and his heavy boots served the same function for his legs. And they must not have known how to take his helmet apart. The neck seal being open and having a breeze rush up against his face was certainly sensory overload. An exam - one he was unhappy about - later and a recommendation under the strongest possible terms he seek to establish care for further follow-up finished, he'd at least had a long list of options. Something he hadn't had before and some questions about the chip and a thick folder of paperwork in his hand, Vader started to explore the area. Making sure he could memorize the area in low light, as he knew his vision at nighttime would be difficult and if the helmet was damaged well.

That would be problematic at best.

Xin Night Market:

Two things Vader had purchased immediately: a large backpack in a familiar military style and a drop bag which fashioned around the waist and dropped down the length of one thigh to buckle behind his knee. He had no illusions he'd fill the military-style bag, it was partly for the familiarity of something on his back and in case of finding something bulky. The other bag, however - that was more purchased with purpose in mind. He'd spent time examining the various bags, the pouches: their size and durability of them, and the fasteners.

And he bartered expertly. He meant it for tools, bits and bobs, and technology he could salvage or break down for other parts. But he was also keeping an eye out for faces he knew.

Magic Markets

Given the odd dimensionality of this place, Vader made short work of hunting for things in the magic markets. Anything which looked like it may be related to the galaxy he was from, things relating to the Sith Order, the current one and the ancient ones. But also anything related to the Force. Be he was also searching for information on the Tethers, Tian, and Heba.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

It takes everything he has not to recoil from that touch. There's too much in it that's reminiscent of that last moment with his father, and all the conflicted feelings that stirs. But he stands his ground; if Snoke taught him anything, it's how to do that.

And when he hears the way Vader speaks those words, something inside of him utterly shatters. It carries all the feeling he's ever wanted, spoken by someone he'd desperately wanted acceptance from. Not for his reputation or his power, but for simply being his grandson.

He doesn't dare try to speak, and he wills away the tears welling in his eyes, bidding them not to fall. But the emotion is plain on his face no matter how he might try to keep it in check.

Vader doesn't withdraw his hand, at least not right away. He can't, it's a if he's magnetically attached.

And he see those tears, although he says nothing. He's shed plenty himself. He has a grandson. He finally let's go off Kylo's face, putting his hand on his shoulder instead. "Tell me about you."

It's both a relief and a loss when his grandfather's hand moves. He's grateful for the continued contact, and stunned by the interest that shows even through the unchanging shape of the mask.

He opens his mouth, and closes it again. He's not sure whether anyone has ever in his life simply asked him to talk about himself. Most people bring too many of their own assumptions to ask something so completely open ended. He has no idea where to begin.

"What do you want to know?"

Vader is almost afraid if he let's Kylo go, he'll vanish. Like so many progeny in dreams. So he holds on. Warmth and flesh under his hand to remind him what was really there.

Everything.

"How old are you? Where were you born?" It was a start. He'd prompt from there.

Kylo feels much the same. He's used to Vader being something mostly in his own mind, a memory cobbled together from stories and vids and occasional visions. Him being alive and here with him is a reality difficult to grasp.

"I'm 30. I was born on Chandrila." Those are easy questions, at least, and enough to provide a starting place. There's so much to tell. So much that has to do with the entire state of the galaxy as much as his own place in it, because there's never been a moment those two things haven't been somehow intertwined.

"The Empire had fallen, and my parents were trying to rebuild order in the galaxy from nothing. I didn't see much of them, a lot of the time." He's aware that they cared about him. He won't deny that. But that doesn't stop him from feeling that they cared about their optimistic vision for the galaxy more. "They sent me to train with my uncle when I was ten."

Thirty. Older now than his wife ever got to be. There's a moment of sheer rage howling in his mind over the sheer unfairness of that. The Empire falling is...disappointing and another tick in ratcheting up his rage.

If the Empire falls, then everything, every loss, every betrayal, every nightmare, was for nothing. There's a fraction of a second where his fingers flex into Kylo's shoulder. He doesn't mean to grip so hard and immediately relaxes his hands, rubbing the spot to try to soothe the hurt he inflicted. "I began my training at the same age. Leaving my mother was difficult." It had broken both of their hearts and shattered any sense of security he'd had in the universe. But sure. Difficult.

"Your mother wouldn't train you?" He couldn't imagine Leia wasn't a powerful Force user.

That moment of harsh grip is noted, and Kylo internally kicks himself for just how casually he'd revealed the fate of the Empire. But it is a fact of his time, one that his life can't be explained without. Something to come back to whenever he gets around to talking about the First Order. He'd like his grandfather's advice on that front, when there's a chance.

The question about his mother inspires a bitter frown. "She wasn't a Jedi. She learned, but then chose to give up on her power." He shakes his head. "She didn't feel qualified."

Kylo's easily forgiven (because Vader plays favorites) because he doesn't know the cost of the birth of the Empire was. Doesn't know how much and how dearly his family had paid, and paid, and paid, decades before he was born.

"The Force doesn't work that way. It doesn't care how you feel. And atrophied abilities are still there, ignoring them doesn't make them vanish." Ask him how he knew.

Regardless, he'd have to have a talk about things with the tiny Princess.

The words are true, and he has no doubt that his mother could have taught him. He expects she has been teaching Rey, though he has no solid confirmation of that. One more way that Rey keeps ending up with things that should have been his.

But in the end, it's not that his mother couldn't have taught him. It's that she wouldn't.

"She didn't feel qualified to keep me from the Dark Side," he clarifies. "As it turns out, my uncle wasn't good at that, either."

"Because she herself knows how close she is to it. I've only known one other person to carry that amount of anger and hatred so close to their hearts. And I know what it did to them." He wondered if this future version of his daughter understood the truth of that. How she in so many ways people may not understand was much more like him than Luke was. Maybe could be.

"Tell me. I can't imagine he wouldn't have tried but he wouldn't be the first to fail."

"He tried too hard." That's all there was to it, in the end. He couldn't accept the parts of Ben Solo that had been dark from the moment he was born, and because of that, they had no choice but to grow.

"He tried not to let it show, but he was afraid of me. I saw it." Long before he'd ever expected that fear to turn against him in the way that it did, he had seen the cracks forming. For a long time, he tried to live up to what his uncle had wanted from him. What a silly notion that was. "And then one night, I woke up to him holding a lit saber over me in my sleep."

Vader's reaction was out of his mouth before he had time to consider his words. "I shall endeavor to teach this younger one to not be such a coward." Because both moves were in Vader's mind, the mark of cowardness.

He lifted his hand back to Kylo's face, his forefinger under the boy's chin, as his thumb traced over his cheek. The touch was light. He knew all too well the feelings of having to struggle under teachers and masters who feared you. Windu, he thought, would have done the same thing, had he been gifted with Foresight and the future not cloaked by Palpatine's efforts.

"I'm sure you were a brilliant student."

Cowardice. Kylo would agree with that, and it's refreshing in a way to hear someone call it what it is, rather than try to make excuses for the galaxy's great hero. He has his doubts as to how well Vader can get through to him, but his intent to attempt does more to give Kylo hope of a different future than any assurances from Luke himself ever would.

"I was the best of us." The strongest. The most skilled. Probably even the most knowledgeable, though he might have had competition from Hennix on that one. "Most of the other students feared me, too. Or were jealous."

"How familiar." Too familiar. He remembered his classmates and their treatment.

And his teachers.

"I haven't the slightest doubt in you. It is tragic this is how we have had to meet." Because not once had Kylo mentioned him. He could assume what that meant.

He can tell how honest Vader is when he says that, and it moves him enough to nearly bring back the earlier tears. When has he met anyone who didn't doubt him? Whose respect for him wasn't based on him fulfilling some requirement, spoken or not? He had spent so long wondering whether he was failing his grandfather's memory, and he barely has any idea what to make of that question being so firmly settled in the other man's mind.

After all of his other experiences, a part of him still wonders, how long will that last?

"I've spoken to you so many times. This helmet." He reaches up to touch it, similarly to Vader's touches to his face, resting his fingers on the cheek of the mask. Even the texture of this is different.

"It was broken, but I kept it. I often felt that you were the only one who would listen, even if you didn't reply." He's never admitted that out loud to anyone, and it feels strange to do so, but also right.

The number of people Vader allows to touch his suit, much less so intimately touch him is probably frighteningly low. Normally at best someone would be smacked. But his grandson he allows. It's even welcome. A circuit of types.

His helmet is highly polished and smoothed, given it's one he's currently wearing. And he tends to keep them in good shape. "Even as a shadow, I am honored to have been your confidant." He did understand, completely.

Somehow that makes the fact he had a real family out there even more real than the people he's met. Spoken with.

Once that touch is allowed, he can't help but let it linger. He had laid his hand on that mask so many times, searching it for any vision or memory it might hold, but this is the first time there's been a real, living person underneath it.

"I'm glad." He truly is glad. He'd held such conflicting images of Vader in his head. One, the steely powerhouse that Snoke had wanted him to perfectly emulate, and another, the grandfather who could care and accept him without fear. Somehow, he's seen some of both in the very short time they've been together here.

Vader would not be quick to shake off the touch unless they were interrupted. It wasn't weakness but vulnerability that he was protecting against. If other Sith had been able to cultivate families and it hadn't always ended in full-scale slaughter, he could as well. Especially here, it seemed.

He increased the pressure he was putting on Kylo's jaw, just a fraction, permission, not demand, to come in closer. You're safe with me, he wanted to say. But such things were easy to say and difficult to prove. And it was the proving he wanted to do. "Tell me about your name, how it came to be." Vader was both things, or at least he wanted to be. He became this to secure his family, to protect and provide for them. Whatever he had to do, whatever cruel act at Palpatine's hand or heel, he would preform, no matter the cost to his soul, to keep his family safe.

Now he was understanding Palpatine would never allow that to occur. But that didn't mean he couldn't, wouldn't, find a way out of spite if nothing else.

Kylo steps closer at the prompt. He feels the intent and accepts it. True safety is something he's long forgotten how to feel, but to Vader's credit, this is the quickest he's gotten to feeling a semblance of it in a very long time.

"Ren is the name given to the leader of the Knights of Ren." How familiar might his grandfather be with them, he wonders? His understanding is that they had existed for long enough, but had never been very well known. His own awareness of them had been entirely by chance.

"I had met them once on a trip with Luke. We were enemies then, but they noticed the darkness in me. I sought them out again when I turned my back on the light." At the time, it was all he could think of, aside from just running to Snoke and letting him decide every part of his next moves.

"Kylo is my own. A name I came up with sometime when I was young."

Knights of Ren he knew. Mostly through their dealings with Crimson Dawn which really had been amusing more than threatening, at least on his end. Maul was no threat to him and even less of one to Palpatine - after all, he'd raised him. He knew Maul's weaknesses inside and out, and had probably created some of them. And Maul had even more cybernetics than he did, really. Palpatine favored Force Lightning.

And Maul had been trained as Sith Assassian, only shifted to 'Apprentice' by lack of other options. Ventress had always been more of a threat. Really he'd considered them more of a distraction than anything. But in a galaxy without the Empire...

Well. He could see their appeal. What if he'd run into them, as a group, on Tatooine after his mother? Without Padmé and especially if Obi-Wan had been killed on Geonosis? Yes, he could easily see the appeal.

"I was unaware they named themselves. Keeping your own name is special." Given most Dark Side groups somewhat followed similar traditions of the Sith, with Masters naming their students. "Was it a good fit for you?"

In honesty, it hadn't occurred to him that choosing a name would be strange. Not just the Knights, but Snoke, too, had asked him about it. His hand drops to Vader's shoulder, much as his grandfather's had been on him before. He nods.

"Much more than the one I was born with."

If Kylo doesn't feel it fits him, then Vader isn't inclined to ask him what it was. He spends too much time protesting Anakin Skywalker is dead to be a hypocrite about it. But then, he was also aware of Naboo's culture.

He reacted up, taking Kylo's face in both of his hands. "My wife, yes she was my wife, we married in secret because we had to, was from Naboo. They are generally a wonderful people. Respectful. They have a tradition there, of changing your name if yours no longer fits, if you grow beyond it, or if you simply must cut ties with your past. She changed hers, and most of her most loyal changed theirs to match her's to honor her. Did you know that about your grandmother?" Probably the most shocking thing about Vader was how his voice softened, gentled, when he spoke of Padmé.

He's prepared for that question, but it doesn't come. He might be curious, one day, to know what his grandfather thinks about him having been named after Obi-Wan Kenobi, with all the innate pressure that entails even if it hadn't been done in the most immediately recognizable form. But it's not something he wants to get into right at this moment.

The insights about his grandmother are far less expected. "No, I didn't know that." Being from Naboo, yes, but not the rest. He knows something of Padmé Amidala, but nothing too specific, similarly to how he knows relatively little about Anakin Skywalker. Any stories from his mother or uncle's lives centered on the people who had adopted them... and considering how they had entirely concealed his relationship to Vader, that calls into question what little he does know. "I was never told much about either of you."

Given the pressure that was unceremoniously dropped on his tiny back when he was ten, he would have even more understood Kylo changing his name. It was too much to drop on a child.

"I'm not surprised in my case." He kept his life a mystery on purpose. "But it grieves me to think you don't know about her." Her, the center of his universe. His reason for being. "Your eyes are darker than her's but I do see their influence. She wanted to help people. To make the galaxy better for them."

The tone of his grandfather's voice isn't lost on him. It's obvious that he cared about his wife, deeply. Even saw value in her compassion. It brings into focus just how wrong Snoke had been, about so many things. His former master surely would have seen the inherent influence of someone so altruistic as yet another flaw.

"Is that what you want?" There's no expectation in that question, one way or the other. No judgement. Only curiosity.

Post-Medical/Around the Hospital:

Xin Night Market:

Magic Markets

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