From a Certain Point of View: Return of the Jedi (Star Wars)

by Olivie Blake

People, stop tossing each other into my mouth! I’m serious. I’ve tried letting you know every way I can, and you still keep doing it. Every once in a while, one of these flying machines soars over me, full of these little spindly creatures with their limbs flapping around in the air. I always hope they’re here to make friends, but then their bodies just plummet into my mouth, without even trying to communicate.

The armored man remained, but he was terrible company—he didn’t speak my language, and all he did was thrash around from time to time. I was so relieved when he finally got hold of some kind of cutting device and sliced his way out of me.

For a moment, it was as if Anakin stood before him, returned from darkness, from death.

It was maddening how like his father he looked, with his high cheeks and shining blue eyes. During the Clone Wars, Anakin had risked his own life over and over to save his friends. Over the years, Obi-Wan had wondered so many times what would have happened if he had taken Anakin by the shoulders and shaken him, screaming in his face, Don’t destroy yourself to punish the Order for our failures! You’re worth so much more than this! “When I first knew him, your father was already a great pilot, but I was amazed how strongly the Force was with him…” Another unbidden memory: Anakin’s round childish face gazing hopefully at him across a wooden table just before Qui-Gon announced that he and Obi-Wan had not come to Tatooine to free slaves.

“There is still good in him.” It was the last thing Obi-Wan expected to hear. These were the last words Padmé had said to him, and to hear them now from her son made Obi-Wan feel as if, for all that he had joined the Force and become one with the infinite, part of him could still feel small and shocked. How to explain to the young man that it mattered little—if at all—whether there were shards of Anakin’s true and noble heart buried beneath the rotten, scabrous surface of Darth Vader. He worshipped power and desolation, committed himself to spreading darkness throughout the galaxy because he believed that what light there was could never triumph.

“Then the Emperor has already won,” he said. “You were our only hope.” He felt thick as mud. He was missing something. Something vitally important. “Yoda spoke of another,” Luke said. Leia. Years ago, after rescuing her and returning her to the Organas, meeting Vader in single combat and unleashing on him an avalanche of power, Obi-Wan had let go of his regret for the past and terror of the future. Yes, darkness swept across the galaxy, and every day the Empire had tightened its oppressive grip, but he’d remembered the joy of life, taking delight in the twins, even as they knew nothing of each other. Even as years passed, Obi-Wan thought of Leia as that same little girl he’d spoken to on the landing pad, but he had followed her progress carefully. Something electrifying had occurred to him when he watched a recording of a speech she’d delivered before the Senate. Her rhetorical style was sometimes gentle, and sometimes fiery, each swell and retreat applied deftly—sometimes in the same sentence. At first, he’d wondered where he had heard it before—until he realized he hadn’t heard it at all. He’d felt it in his sparring sessions with Anakin, and in his duels with Vader after his former pupil had fallen to the dark side. Leia’s voice and bearing were a lightsaber, and she wielded it with implacable mastery.

Before his death, Obi-Wan had feared that, as strong in the Force as they both were, one or both of the twins would simply pluck the knowledge of their relation from thin air—especially if they spent a significant amount of time together. That’s what Luke did now. “Leia,” he said. It wasn’t a question. “Leia’s my sister.”

Obi-Wan stopped short. The similarities between Anakin and Luke should have terrified him, but they didn’t. This was the detail Obi-Wan had missed!

She has always been the cautious one. The planner. The last contingency. She will be those things again. But not now. There’s no time left for planning. Or caution.

Always have multiple sources of information that no one else knows about. Always have deniability. Always have a contingency. Lessons she’d learned from many years on Coruscant. Every bureaucrat needed a secret.

A common mistake at the sabacc table is keeping your face completely blank. The trick, you see, isn’t absolute blandness; people will make extreme assumptions about what’s happening underneath that nothingness. The less you’re showing, the more people figure out what you’ve got to hide. And they will figure it out; there’s a galaxy full of little ways your blankness can crack under stress. No, Lando Calrissian knows the trick isn’t to stay blank; it’s to show exactly what you want someone to see.