#(that awkward moment when your dad is a Sith Lord and trying to shovel talk a girl you're not even dating)

[jessicas-pi]

So. You guys remember that AU I had? The one where Darth Vader kind-of adopted Inquisitor!Ezra as his son? Among other things? No? Ok yeah here's the link to the OG post

...

ANYWAY I HAVE MORE THOUGHTS NOW!

Shortly after arriving on Lothal, Sabine found Ezra some armor and painted it to match hers. Since they look pretty much the same and never take off their helmets when they're out vandalizing, no one knows who they are or even how many of them there are. People start calling them the Mad Mandos. Sabine thinks it's a lame nickname, Ezra thinks it's awesome.

When Vader shows up, Ezra insists he stay for dinner. Yes he knows Vader can't eat with the suit, but it's polite and he hasn't had a family dinner with Dad in so long...

Cue the most awkward meal of all time. Vader tries to make small talk. Sabine is silently panicking while Vader is making small talk. Vader is trying to figure out who the Mandalorian is (is she ezra's friend? is she ezra's girlfriend? did she kidnap him? did he kidnap her? was it mutual kidnapping? this is all very unclear and vader needs answers) without being too scary, for Ezra's sake, but frankly there's nothing he can do about it. He's terrifying. It's a fact.

Anyway. Ezra's happy. Sabine's freaked out. (She's so glad she took Ezra out of the bounty hunting profession because this would have ended so badly if he'd been hurt.) And then...

Actually, I have to back up and explain.

So, the Empire is in absolute CHAOS right now. Mostly due to the fact that the Emperor is dead.

Palpatine had been trying to get rid of Ezra for some time, seeing the boy as a weakness to Vader, so Vader offed Palps as soon as he had the chance.

Then Vader realizes oh no, am I the Emperor now??? Vader thinks quick, trying to figure out someone who he could appoint as Emperor. They need to be smart and responsible and able to deal with crazy people and...

Cody!

Vader makes Cody the Emperor, and immediately runs off to find his missing kid.

(Cody lasts two years as Emperor before abdicating due to how much he absolutely loathes the job. He departs from the public eye and instantly vanishes. No one can find him. No one knows where he is. He goes down in history as the least hated emperor of the short-lived empire. Legend has it that he can still be seen, now and then, drinking space margaritas on the beaches of Scarif.)

But with Cody's abdication and immediate vanishment, nobody is left in charge. Power struggles are immediate and messy, and in all that chaos, some of the regular protocols are forgotten.

Such as the one maintaining Vader's life support system.

See, Palpatine didn't want Vader being operational without him, so he had something built into the suit so that it would shut down if he didn't enter a specific code every week. Cody kept it up because it was just one of those regular protocols, he didn't even know what it did, but now with the chaos, it's forgotten about.

On Lothal, Vader collapses suddenly.

Sabine would rather do anything than touch the machinery of Vader's life support system, but he's Ezra's dad and he's dying and grrrrrrh FINE SHE'LL HELP.

With some quick thinking, she gets the most essential parts of the suit to work, pauses briefly to make sure Ezra's not going to have a panic attack, and then sets to work on restoring the rest of the suit.

Sabine is horrified by the state of Vader's prosthetics. This equipment is like... 10, 15 years out of date.

Project: Repair Ezra's Dad becomes her new hobby. Vader is a begrudging participant in this project. He's just doing it because she's Ezra's friend. Well... probably his friend? He passed out before he figured out what, exactly, she was.

But once he is awake and functional, it's not long before Vader comes to the conclusion that she's SEVERAL things to Ezra, including his ride-or-die best friend, his roommate, his partner in crime, his occasional parental guidance, and his substitute moral compass.

By means of incredibly unsubtle questioning, Vader does rule the girlfriend thing out. By equally unsubtle means, he also makes it very clear to Sabine that the girlfriend thing is completely off the table in the future as well. Like forever. Hands off his son.

(That was a dinner conversation neither Sabine nor Ezra would ever like to repeat.)

Anyway, over time, Sabine and Vader get to talking. No one--especially not Ezra--knows how it happens, but Sabine and Vader actually become friends. It's kind of a terrifying idea.

(Vader attempts, with his usual unsubtle means, to gauge Ezra's opinion on potentially acquiring a sister.)

(Oddly, Ezra doesn't seem too keen on it.)

(Vader, now worried, makes a mental note to reiterate to Sabine that under no hypothetical future circumstances will she ever be allowed to date his son.)

So, yeah. Time passes. Vader just kind of... sticks around. A couple Inquisitors show up and he yells at them for interrupting bonding time with his son but he doesn't Force-choke them because it makes Ezra upset when he does.

In fact, Ezra seems to be getting upset about several things Vader does that he used to be fine with before. Vader almost wants to be mad at Sabine for giving his son a conscience, but he begins to realize that he doesn't quite like doing those things, either.

(Without the outdated, barely-functional suit tormenting him nearly every second of the day, and on a planet that shines with Light, Vader's grip on the Darkness is slipping.)

(One day, standing amid the long grasses, watching Ezra trying to show off by climbing the rock spires, Vader smiles.)

(He has not smiled in fourteen years.)

But good things don't always last, do they?

One day, on one of their vandalism missions, both of the kids go missing. Vader, filled with rage, takes his TIE and chases their kidnappers down to one of the shanty-towns.

He is seconds away from going on a murder spree when Ezra's frantic intervention stops him.

Some intimidation and a bit of mind reading later, Vader uncovers the truth. These people, it seems, got Ezra and Sabine out of a scrape, and were genuinely going to bring them back home after their stop here--or, if that didn't work out, after they went on a brief mission to free Wookiee slaves.

Vader doesn't even really notice that they were going to be freeing Wookiee slaves from the Empire.

Ever since the oozing slick of Darkness started to be washed away, Vader has felt something worryingly like pangs of conscience for what he has done in service to the Empire.

Long before he was a Sith--long before he was a Jedi--Vader was a boy who had a dream about freeing all the slaves.

"I'm coming with," he announces.

"Dad, I'm not really sure that's a good idea--"

"This is not up for discussion, son."

Oh Force, Kanan thinks. Oh Force, this is definitely a Sith Lord. There is a Sith Lord going on this mission with us to fight the Empire. what the kriff what the kriff what the kriff---

What follows is the most awkward, tense mission the Spectres have ever undertaken.

It's also, without a doubt, the easiest mission the Spectres have ever undertaken.

Vader goes all Rogue One Hallway Scene on the transport full of Stormtroopers, which Ezra frowns at him for, and Vader feels a little tiny bit bad about it.

Zeb is slightly impressed by Ezra's ability to whack stormtroopers together by their helmets without even touching them.

"Hey, Kanan, kid's like you!" he says, without thinking.

There's a long, terrified pause.

"Cockroaches," Vader huffs, pointing at Kanan in something more like annoyance than anything else. "You're like cockroaches. Squish one and three more show up. Utterly impossible to kill."

"Da-ad!" Ezra complains. "You can't kill my friends!"

"I'm not going to kill your friends. I merely said they were difficult to kill."

"Well you made it sound like a threat! And you said you wouldn't do that anymore!"

"I know. They're just like this," Sabine mutters under her breath, giving Kanan a consoling pat on the shoulder. "You get used to it, after a while."