Force Destiny

Destiny

No!" Kylo staggered backward in the sand, away from the stranger who impersonated the one man Kylo had been desperate to know his entire life. "My grandfather was Darth Vader! He destroyed the Jedi Order! He only cared about power and revenge! He wanted to bring peace and order in the galaxy! He was killed during a weak moment of sentiment! You're wrong! You're wrong about all of it!" Anakin chuckled as the younger man fell back into the sand, nearly falling off the crest of the dune. Kylo looked over the edge to see a pit in the sand below him containing a fearsome-looking creature with a beak and tentacles. When he realized how close he had been to falling prey to its trap, he stumbled away.

"What the hell is that thing?"

"A Sarlacc," Anakin said in amusement. "I wouldn't go down there if I were you; that thing will digest you over a thousand years...and you will be alive for all of it."

"The way I died doesn't seem so bad in comparison," Kylo mumbled to himself as he searched the barren landscape for shelter away from this man. No, not just "this man." His grandfather. It couldn't be true, yet everything in the Force told him it was. "Though, now I'm sitting in the middle of the desert talking to the ghost of my grandfather. And he's actually talking back. But he's pretending he isn't the monster whose shadow I grew up trying to escape. Ask me in a few hundred years which one is worse."

"You're still taking this better than my son," the young apparition of his grandfather laughed. "He jumped."

Kylo shook his head. His former master had told him the story. "He refused to join you, so you pushed him."

"No, I cut off his arm, asked him to join me and then he jumped," Anakin said. "And, yes, I destroyed the Jedi Order, and I cared about power and revenge, and I wanted to bring peace and order to the galaxy. That is all true. But that moment, when I had to choose between Luke or Sidious, that wasn't weakness, that was strength. That was who I should have been all along."

"Liar!"

The glare behind those steely blue eyes was sharp. "Because Sidious told you the truth?"

"I..."

"The truth is, I was born Anakin Skywalker. I lost the woman I loved...and myself. I let the darkness win because Sidious told me things I wanted to hear. He made me feel powerful. He made me think he believed in me when no one else would. I became Darth Vader. Luke saved me; he saw the good in me I refused to see. I turned my back on the dark side; I died Anakin Skywalker. I am Anakin Skywalker. That is the truth."

The truth. Anakin said it as if it were something simple to admit. Kylo might have had the assurance of the truth in the Force, but it didn't make the acceptance any easier. It was something he had known for so long, it had become a fact, like the color of the sky on Chandrila. If he had been told since early childhood that the color of the sky was "red," if everyone he trusted all confirmed that the color was "red," then he would have believed that the sky was "red" without question. But if someone came along one day and insisted the color was "blue," even if they were correct, the truth of it didn't undo all the years of believing otherwise. "Even if I accept that everything I know about you is a lie, that doesn't change what I am."

The intensity in his grandfather's eyes softened. "Because Sidious told you who you are?"

"He was right about me."

"No, he was wrong," Anakin asserted, stepping closer with an intimidating presence that still embodied Vader. Kylo may have been more physically imposing, but he didn't feel it in the face of his grandfather's powerful energy. "He was wrong about me," he continued, softer. "He was wrong about you. He was wrong about your family—"