It is merely a house. It was never anything more.

Anakin Skywalker stood in the entrance hall of the vast, palatial house he had once owned on Coruscant. It was the property of the New Republic now, and once his business here was done, he had no idea what they intended to do with it. It was spacious and well-appointed, but it was a cold and unfeeling place nonetheless, and he couldn't imagine anyone wanting to live here.

Leia had come here once, ostensibly to collect a trunk that had belonged to Amidala, and some local wag had beaten Republic security here and painted the shape of the penitential mark on his face under the covered windows next to the door. He hoped they would be cleaned off. Other than that, it had been undisturbed since before Palpatine's death.

Before Anakin's own death, for that matter. But despite the fact that he was able to think of his life as a continuous one, despite the fact that he had been living in this cloned body long enough to be comfortable in it, he found that he couldn't think of the moment of his death without great discomfort, so he instead thought of that day as the day Palpatine had died, and the Empire with him. That there was an hour in that day which he could not make himself think about…

Well, he had greater faults than a distaste for the memory of death, and it was far more important to be cured of them.

"Father?"

Anakin looked over his shoulder. Luke was standing in the arch that led to the dining area (he'd kept up appearances for visitors, though of course he had never dined in that room, and now he supposed he never would). His padawan, the girl Dritali Neral, was wandering around the room behind him, looking at the furniture and art without much interest. "It's a strange sensation, being here."

"I can imagine."

"Can you and Dritali find your way back to the library without help?""

"I remember," Dritali offered.

Luke just regarded him calmly. "I'm not sure," he said. "Can we? Or should we stay with you?"

Anakin smiled. "I'm all right, Luke. Your sister asked me to check on certain items that various people have claimed are in my possession."

"Are they?"

"Some."

Dritali frowned. "That wasn't your reputation."

"As with the Temple library," Anakin said carefully, "I considered it a question of safekeeping, of putting valuable items in a place I could control."

She still looked troubled by it--more troubled than Luke, actually, since Luke had never held him, at least in his Vader guise, to be a hero. Dritali had. She was able to accept and cope with the more egregious things, but when she stumbled across some little wrong, she had trouble dealing with it.

Luke shrugged. "Well, it seems to have worked. And now you'll return them."

"Yes."

Anakin turned his back on them to end the conversation. He supposed he needed to learn a better manner for doing so, but he was tired, and this place, this place that was only a house and had never been anything else, was full of memories, even for muscles that had never experienced it. He could feel his shoulders straightening and his movements becoming sharp and defined, rather than fluid and seamless. He didn't like it, and he didn't want them to see it.

He heard Luke lead Dritali back down the narrow staircase that led to the lower levels, to the place where he'd kept and gloated over the large Temple library. The memories for him there were not as bitter as they were elsewhere--his love of books had been only slightly corrupted by his fall--but he did have other work to do here, and it could not be put off.

And he did not want to go through this house with Luke.

He took a deep breath, and the action reminded him that he was no longer the crippled wretch he was before, physically or morally. He'd made a justification of the thefts when he was Vader, and now he would make that justification true. He would return the stolen items, undamaged, to their rightful places.

With that resolve, he strode up the entrance hall, through the first meeting room, and into the main part of the house, the library that had been accessible to those rare officers and politicians who had deigned to meet at Darth Vader's home. Here on the shelves, in nooks he'd made for them, were treasures of many worlds. The statues of gods, the crown jewels, the precious works of art, taken from the museums of war-torn cities. Many of the museums had been destroyed. No wonder the people wanted what few pieces were left.

And it was so little!

I should have saved more.

He shook his head and laughed at himself. Still, he was thinking that he should have taken artwork away. Of course, what he should have done was stopped the destruction of the museums in the first place.

He settled in, and began the inventory for Leia, putting the pieces out on the table, along with the names of the worlds and cities they'd come from. He put the dates when he could remember them. To his surprise, even without the memory chips, that turned out to be most of the time.

The treasures all fit on a single table, a pathetic memorial to worlds set to the flame. But they would go back.

It had only taken two hours. He'd heard Luke and Dritali moving things up during that time, but they hadn't come back here. It would take them a long time to move even part of the library, but Luke had insisted that they should at least start it themselves. Anakin had not objected. He was just glad that Luke, bless his occasionally pragmatic heart, had not said, "Well, we could leave them where they are."

There was no more to do here in this upper library. The books would revert to the New Republic, and that was a tug at his heart. He'd taken some pride in his personal collection. But Leia would see that they went somewhere useful. He let his eyes scan the shelves of things that were no longer his, then sighed and stood up.

He didn't have any clear idea where he meant to go, or at least he told himself that he didn't. This place wasn't his, he'd never spent the majority of his time here. His feet carried him through the library, through the kitchens that had almost never been used, through the parlors and sitting rooms that had been used still less. He didn't pause. The doors all led straight back, to the long, utilitarian room at the back of the house. There was a door at either end of this place. A scratch on the floor showed that Leia had been here--she'd dropped the trunk at one point during her visit.

The trunk had been here.

All of the things Anakin had genuinely treasured had been here.

The room was lined with large metal crates, most filled simply with the machinery of his life as Vader, others filled with strange bits of droids or ships that he'd meant to examine more closely, if time ever permitted. The few things that he had of his mother's were here somewhere. Dritali had her bracelet. Beyond that, he had only a few simple hair ornaments and a poor-quality holo that Owen Lars had once given him.

In the center of the room, dominating it as it had dominated Anakin himself, was a large metal sphere, gray on the outside, white on the inside. A chair was set precisely in the center of it.

Anakin sat in it, and closed his eyes. His hands grasped the ends of the armrests. The chair back held his spine poker straight. He could almost feel the machinery hanging above him, awaiting its command to descend and clean him, to take his body apart and remove all the impurities, to…

His eyes were suddenly too hot and too full, and he felt the tears push out from under the eyelids. They were angry, cheated tears, and they were tears of shame.

I lived like this! My whole adult life, or all of it that counted, lost, to this chair, these machines, that mask and helmet… I allowed myself to be dismantled, bit by bit, and I lay on this floor… so many times… fully paralyzed and helpless as my droids tended me like slaves of my own creation.

He might have stayed there for hours, drinking his misery though he knew it to be poison--this place that was only a building housed his own malignant ghost--but the silence was broken by a crash, then a sudden, high-pitched scream.

Dritali ducked under the dining room table, not knowing what else to do. She rolled to one side just in time--a red blade sliced down through the furniture, burning into the floor.

She couldn't hide here, and at any rate she knew that Master Luke and Ani would have heard her scream, and she didn't want them to catch her cowering under a table. She guessed Ani was closer--Master Luke had been far back in the library when she'd left him--but she didn't know which of them she wanted less to see her like this.

I can take this thing. I let it out and I can take it.

She shoved the chairs out, pulling her lightsaber as she moved. A down stroke from above the table singed the air beside her ear, but didn't hit anything. She met it in a bone jarring jolt of power.

It was so strong, so quick…

What was it?

The droid was a modification of one she'd seen many times in the Empire, but it moved faster than any droid she'd ever seen, and it was equipped with a lightsaber. She had picked up a small, unlabelled control from a shelf, hit a button to see what would happen--okay, stupid thing to do, she could admit that--and it had come from a wall panel and started attacking without warning. The remote that had started it had no effect.

The clashed blades pushed her arms back toward her, then the droid snapped its lightsaber in a quick arc. It snatched her weapon from her hand as easily as she might have snatched a silk scarf from Kerea at home. It held the second saber in a new appendage, and moved forward threateningly, the sabers held like deadly scissors.

Dritali pulled herself to her feet. She had no advantage but her own maneuverability. A narrow catwalk surrounded the room a story up, presumably for visitors to view the artwork on the walls more closely. She gathered the Force around her, jumped, and caught her hands on the lowest railing.

The droid took a swing, and she flipped her legs over head just in time to miss losing a foot. She landed on the catwalk with an ungraceful thump.

The droid made a move as if to follow, but a green flash came from the doorway, and suddenly the appendage holding Dritali's lightsaber fell with a crash. She called the saber into her hand. The green saber spun back to the door, where Ani stood with his hand outstretched, waiting for it.

"Stay up there!" Ani shouted. "It's programmed for deadly force."

"I noticed."

"Stay up there. I mean it."

He moved in on the droid. It struck suddenly, swinging its lightsaber violently. Ani met it, parried, spun the machine around. He led it away from the wall.

The next parry was so fast that Dritali couldn't even mark the separate movements in her mind. It was just a blur of lights, and a whine of clashing energy fields. She raised her saber tentatively, wanting to help, but Ani caught even this motion, and shouted. "Stay out, Dritali!"

Then the droid moved in again, and Ani's attention was focused entirely on it.

The dueling droids had been a necessary part of Vader's life, Anakin knew, and he knew intellectually that there had not been a chance to go in and disable everything. But he'd forgotten about them. And he'd forgotten the curiosity of youth, and not paid attention to Dritali's examination of the house. He'd thought it without interest, but that wasn't true--she had been looking for something that would catch her interest.

Well, she'd found something.

On less than a month's saber training, she had set off the deadly droid.

It could have been Leia, when she was here alone.

Anakin beat the droid back. Why had he designed the things with deadly force? He could have gotten the same practice with some kind of failsafe mechanism. But he'd wanted something that would engage him, something that posed an actual threat to be vanquished.

The droid started into a sequence Anakin recognized from the many times he had fought with it. It was a strategy that combined the balletic movements of his predecessor, Darth Maul, with the simple, brutal down strokes that he himself had favored. He crouched, holding his lightsaber above his head, to meet it.

The blow was jarring, but not as hard as he'd remembered and expected. He used his lightsaber to push the blow back and knock the droid off balance, then arched his back and flipped into a standing position. Smoke was coming from the droid in two places. Not enough to stop it, but enough to slow it.

He moved in on it.

The smoke started to curl up around it, an insubstantial flesh creeping along its metallic bones. It seemed suddenly ugly, beyond the ability of Anakin's mind to endure, this ghost from his past life. Somewhere in his mind, he heard the soft metronome of mechanical breath.

At the edge of his consciousness, he felt Luke's approach, but he took no note of it. This was his fight and his sin to purge.

"Father."

Anakin took a swing at the droid. It met the blow… then its saber flew through the air, its blade disappearing as it went past him.

The appendages were still waving, the smoke still creating a form.

Anakin swung his lightsaber high, slicing the head from the mechanical shoulders. The droid fell, a pile of scrap metal. The sparks and smoke rose from it in a stinking cloud. Anakin ran on it, hacking at it blindly until he felt a hand on his shoulder.

A natural hand.

"Father."

Anakin stopped suddenly.

He looked at the droid in front of him. It was a mess of melted circuits and wires. That was all. The smoke no longer looked like a form, if it ever had.

He took a deep breath. "I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't think about them. I should have realized they were still here."

"It's my fault!" Dritali called down. She flipped herself easily over the rail on the catwalk, and landed cleanly behind Luke. "I shouldn't have turned things on without knowing what they would do."

"That's true," Luke said, not taking his eyes from Anakin. "But I'm not worried about it. Dritali, will you go back into the library and get the next load ready to come up?"

Anakin thought Dritali might protest, but she didn't. She just turned her large, dark eyes on him. "I'm sorry," she said. "And thanks for helping me. Again."

"I'm sorry you needed to be helped."

She disappeared down toward the Temple library.

Luke led him to the chairs beside the broken table, and they sat down. "Are you still all right, Father?" he asked.

Anakin closed his eyes. "Clearly, not as all right as I'd implied."

"Why did you keep attacking? Are they still dangerous when they're in two pieces?"

Anakin smiled. That felt good. "No. Not dangerous."

"Well, I think it might have been. I think it might have had some sort of self-destruct. A lot of Imperial droids did."

"Luke… "

"I'm supposed to report 'aberrant behavior,' Father. So I'm fairly certain that it had a self-destruct."

"Luke, you--"

"I knew I shouldn't have left you alone here. Dritali knew she shouldn't be flipping switches. And you know you should have been able to break off the duel once your opponent was immobilized."

"Yes. I'm sorry to put you in this position."

Luke smiled. "There's a tree on Dagobah… "

"I know the place."

"I failed a test there. It ended up with your helmet rolling in the dust. It hit my foot. It felt that real."

"I see."

"The mask exploded off. It showed me my own face."

"A warning."

"A failure. But just a test." He gestured at the smoking droid. "Like that. A test."

"There's a difference, Luke. You saw your face as a warning. But it was my face under there."

"And it was mine, at that moment. What happened, Father?"

"Ghosts," Anakin said. "That's all I can offer you."

"That's all right," Luke said, giving him a sunny grin. "I have pretty good reasons to believe in ghosts."

"I suppose you do."

"Then shall we get back to work?"

Anakin nodded.

He followed Luke downstairs, and they spent the rest of the afternoon boxing and copying files. It was dreary work, but Anakin was glad of it--it was work with a purpose. At the end of the day, they had boxed perhaps twenty percent of the library, which was good work, and Luke finally agreed to let Republic droids do the rest of the moving. For the time being, the collection was going to be moved to the Senate dome, which was relatively untouched. They would have to find time to re-furbish the Temple itself at some point, at least to create a sheltered and controlled area.

Unfortunately, there were other jobs waiting before Luke could request help with that.

As the sun set over Coruscant, they emerged from the house. Anakin looked once over his shoulder as they passed the rear hall. The windows were blocked, but he knew the chamber was there, its maw open, its ghosts looking out at him.

He would have to face those ghosts again before he was through.

Face them and defeat them once and for all.

But for now, the house would return to its place in the past, and Anakin, knowing his weakness, would go forward into the future.