The desert had been quiet for seven days.
Too quiet.
The kind of quiet that meant the planet was holding its breath. Not resting—just waiting to scream again.
Owen felt it in his bones.
After the Tusken raid, he stripped every usable part off the corpses himself. Cycler rifles. Bone-plated bracers. Reinforced scavenger vests. The kind of brutal makeshift armor that wasn't pretty but would take a blade. With HK-51's guidance, they retooled the homestead's defenses with what they had—not military tech, but raw, functional killing tools.
They didn't build traps.
They built a last stand.
They bought more ammo from a black-market vendor in Anchorhead—Luke helped carry the crates. Owen welded spare plates onto the walls. Beru stitched shock pads into vests scavenged off dead raiders.
Luke got a new helmet.
Nothing fancy. Just reinforced durasteel, weathered and gray. It was too big, but he wore it anyway.
---
When HK-51 saw the red blip, he didn't sound an alarm.
He didn't need to.
He simply turned his head, processed the kinetic pattern, and delivered the report:
> "Identity confirmed: Reva Sevander. Status: Inquisitor-class Force user. Threat: Critical."
Owen dropped his wrench. His jaw clenched. The muscles in his forearms tightened like cables.
Beru exhaled slowly. She slid the safety off her rifle.
Luke said nothing.
HK continued.
> "Distance: Five kilometers. Velocity: Combat stride. No transport. No stealth protocols. Conclusion: frontal assault expected."
He turned to Luke.
> "Tactical opportunity: bait engagement strategy. Use child as lure. Close-range detonation protocol recommended."
Owen looked at his nephew, his face a war mask of hard-earned survival. He didn't want to ask the boy to do this.
He didn't have to.
Luke nodded.
> "I'll do it."
---
They cleared the front hallway. Cleared the clutter, reset the fuel lines, and locked the back doors. HK placed three shaped charges in the walls, designed to explode inward—not to collapse the house, but to concentrate destruction at the doorway.
HK handed Luke the trigger.
> "Instruction: Detonate when visual confirmation is achieved. Priority is injury, not vaporization. Disabling is sufficient."
Luke nodded again.
Then he stepped to the door, weapon holstered, knife secured, eyes steady.
The wind had picked up. It howled across the dunes now like it was warning them of what was coming.
They didn't listen.
---
And then they saw her.
She didn't arrive like a shadow or a whisper.
She came like a storm—shoulder cracked, arm bloodied, eyes burning with unfocused rage. Her lightsaber hissed as it dragged behind her in the sand, spitting embers with every stride. Her pace was too fast for a wound that deep, too furious for thought.
HK's optic glowed brighter.
> "Statement: Subject is compromised. Predictable. Ideal."
She saw Luke.
And she screamed.
Not a war cry.
A curse. A shriek of hatred that didn't sound human.
She sprinted forward—blaster fire from Owen's ridge post zipped past her. She dodged the first, blocked the second with her saber, but didn't stop. She only had one target.
The boy.
---
Luke turned and ran into the house.
She followed.
Boots slammed into the entry deck. Her saber lit up the hallway like a bloody strobe as she drove herself forward, sparks flying off the durasteel walls.
She didn't notice the charges. She wasn't looking.
She was seeing only red.
Only him.
And then—
Luke hit the trigger.
---
The explosion didn't sound like thunder.
It sounded like a wall collapsing inward on its own lungs.
The charges detonated in sequence—first the center wall, then both flanks. A ball of fire and debris sucked into the corridor and slammed her backward with the force of a speeder crash.
She hit the floor hard enough to crack the concrete—her saber clattering from her hand as the ceiling above her split open.
Flames roared outward. The shockwave blew the front hatch clean off its hinges, skidding across the sand like a disc.
Owen ducked behind the greenhouse frame.
HK, unfazed, monitored the telemetry.
> "Status: Confirmed detonation. Target viability… uncertain."
Smoke poured from the front of the homestead.
And then—
The roar.
Ragged.
Wounded.
But alive.
---
Reva burst from the smoke like a creature torn from hell's ribs.
Her cloak was gone.
Her hair clung to her face in sweat and blood. Her armor was blackened and cracked across the chest, one pauldron hanging by threads. Blood ran freely from her mouth, nose, and left shoulder—her arm limp at her side.
But her lightsaber still burned. A jagged, flickering crimson.
And her eyes… they burned hotter.
She didn't speak.
She didn't posture.
She just screamed—and charged.
---
HK-51 fired first.
A heavy slug aimed dead-center. She deflected it with the saber—but the impact staggered her, forcing her to roll into cover behind the vaporator.
Beru's shot followed. The bolt struck Reva's shoulder, ripping through the armor and flesh beneath, painting the vaporator with arterial spray.
Owen hit her in the thigh with a stun bolt. Not enough to drop her, but enough to cripple her stride.
She kept moving.
Bleeding. Limping. But faster now.
Driven by hate.
---
Luke stood on the porch.
He aimed, breathed in, and fired.
Reva caught the bolt midair with the Force—and hurled it back at him like a thrown dagger.
It came fast. Too fast.
Luke's body dropped instinctively.
The bolt scorched the wall behind him—a near-impossible dodge.
HK logged the reflex.
> "Observation: Force sensitivity detected. Fascinating."
---
She reached the courtyard center.
And HK was there.
---
The droid lunged first—bladed arm slicing horizontally, meant to disable, not kill.
Reva spun under the blow, brought her saber up—but HK had already fired a stun round at point-blank. The concussive charge struck her in the ribs and blew her sideways into the dirt, where she tumbled, landed hard, and roared.
She launched herself back with a Force push, slamming HK into the stone pillar at the courtyard's edge. Sparks flew from his spine mount. One optic flickered.
But he didn't fall.
He sprinted forward, blade-first.
She met him with a roar.
---
The two collided in a blur of metal and flesh, firelight casting long, jagged shadows.
HK slashed low—Reva jumped, flipped, twisted. Her saber screamed as it connected with his upper arm, carving through half the joint, melting servos and shearing off his shoulder plating.
HK fired a shock dart into her hip.
She screamed, convulsed—and stabbed forward.
The blade pierced HK's abdomen. Wires sizzled. Oil sprayed across her face like arterial blood.
> "Status: Partial dismemberment. Structural compromise... irrelevant."
He activated his backup servo—and smashed her with his bladed elbow.
Her jaw cracked audibly.
She fell to one knee.
Beru tossed a grenade.
Owen fired another bolt—Reva caught this one too, but her control wavered. The shot hit her side and seared through her ribs.
---
She was wounded.
Slashed. Bleeding. Bruised. Armor barely holding.
But she fought harder.
More savage. More primal.
> "HE TOOK EVERYTHING FROM ME!" she shrieked. "HE KILLED THEM! HE—HE—HE MADE ME WATCH—"
HK fired again.
She rolled under the shot and threw a stolen Tusken knife at his optics. It scraped one lens—but didn't breach.
Then she charged.
---
They clashed again.
Saber against blade. Steel against wrath.
HK's right leg was severed at the knee during the exchange—Reva cleaved through it with a spinning slash.
HK fell hard, but didn't stop.
He stabbed upward—the blade buried itself deep into her left thigh, severing muscle and bone.
Reva screamed—truly screamed—and fell backward, clawing at the dirt.
---
She couldn't stand.
But she still tried.
Every motion was twitching agony. Her saber was lost somewhere in the dirt, her breath wheezing through blood. Her left leg was twisted at a sickening angle. The stump of her right arm smoked where HK's blade had severed it earlier.
But her eyes still blazed.
She crawled an inch. Then another. Nails clawing the sand, dragging her ruined body like a dying animal refusing to die.
HK limped after her, oil leaking in steady pulses. Half his chassis hung open, metal ribs exposed. One optic flickered, but the other still glowed hot red.
He stepped behind her.
> "Directive: Finish threat. Minimize risk. End conflict."
She rolled to face him, teeth stained crimson.
> "They were children…" she rasped, sobbing. "And he butchered them. I saw him. I—I was just a kid..."
Tears carved lines through the dirt on her face. Her lips trembled.
> "And now I can't even kill his spawn…"
HK straightened.
His servos whined.
> "Clarification: Not spawn."
He paused.
Leveled the blade.
> "Heir."
> "And this is your inheritance—"
"Death."
He drove the blade down.
Straight through her chest.
A spasm.
Then stillness.
Her eyes stared upward.
Then slowly closed.
And HK-51, half-crushed, leaking fluid, sparked and muttered his final words to her as she died.
> "Final remark… should've stayed down, meatbag."
---
The courtyard went still.
Dust rose in lazy spirals around the scorched earth.
The wind returned, tugging at the ruined cloak wrapped around Reva's broken form.
Owen sat down hard in the sand.
He didn't speak at first. He just stared at the corpse. Then at the saber beside it—still glowing faintly, even detached from her hand.
> "By the Twin Suns," he muttered. "What is it with freaks showing up trying to kill us in the middle of the damn night?"
He picked up a shattered bit of armor and threw it into the dirt.
> "Damn Jedi, damn Inquisitors, damn Obi-Wan, and damn this cursed rock of a planet."
He stood, limping slightly, blood seeping through a cracked shin guard.
> "We should've moved to Naboo. I told Beru. Naboo. Peaceful. Pretty. Not a desert. People die in bedrooms over there, not in their vegetable patches."
---
HK-51 collapsed onto one knee, his internal gyros whirring as systems failed one by one.
> "Status: Mission complete. Threat: dead. Secondary threat: sand. Still everywhere."
He pitched sideways into the dirt and powered down.
---
Beru helped Luke to his feet, her hands steady but her brow furrowed.
Luke looked pale, scorched, eyes wide and strangely calm.
He glanced at the saber lying beside Reva's body.
It still buzzed faintly. Beautiful. Lethal.
Beru followed his gaze.
Then she smiled.
> "Well… look on the bright side."
Everyone turned toward her.
> "We've got a million-credit antique now."
She nudged the corpse with her boot.
> "And hey—this is way more fun than going to town, don't you think? Family time, farm defense, mysterious psycho lady with a glow stick..."
She threw her arms out like presenting a theater act.
> "You'll never forget this evening."
Owen stared at her.
Luke blinked.
Beru just grinned, wiped her hands on her apron, and went to get a shovel.
> "Everything happens for a reason. That's what the old folks say."
---
Owen walked over to the corpse. He kicked the lightsaber closer and crouched down. The hilt was scorched but intact.
> "This thing's worth more than everything we own put together."
He picked it up and looked at the body.
Naked. Torn. Shattered beyond recognition.
> "Who was she?" he muttered.
Beru shrugged from the porch.
> "Some crazy lady."
---
They stripped the corpse.
Took the armor plates.
The saber.
The utility belt.
Everything that could be sold or melted down.
Then they dragged her body out past the perimeter fence—left it face-down in the dunes.
They didn't burn it.
They didn't bury it.
They just let the desert take it.
The carrion birds were already circling by morning.
---
Luke sat alone with the saber later that night, the weapon resting in his lap like a puzzle he wasn't yet ready to solve.
He looked up at the stars.
And whispered:
> "Who am I… that they keep coming for me?"
It had been weeks since the fight.
But the echoes still clung to the stone.
The scorched section of wall where Reva had burst through remained visibly darker than the rest of the sandcrete—no matter how many times Owen pressure-washed it. A single dent in the outer paneling of the vaporator tower still glinted in the afternoon light, marking the exact spot where a stray saber throw had missed Luke by inches.
And yet, in the shadow of destruction, something new had taken root.
---
Three new high-yield vaporators stood beside the old tower, humming low and constant—each one triple the depth of the originals, punching into deeper aquifers below the salt flats. The newer units weren't pretty. They were bulkier, Imperial surplus from a Mining Guild outpost up north. But they worked.
And they worked hard.
Moisture output had nearly quadrupled.
Their piping had been rerouted through reinforced cooling tanks under the surface, flanked by steel pressure valves maintained twice daily by B1 droids.
---
The droids.
There were twenty in all now—refurbished, reprogrammed, and repainted in desert-tan hues with matte finishes. No longer squeaky and comedic. These were slow-moving but loyal—competent enough for patrols, hauling, and occasionally mounting a static E-Web cannon with eerie precision.
They marched in semi-randomized loops around the perimeter, their rifles cradled across plastoid chests. Their gait was still awkward, but there was coordination now. Purpose.
And they weren't alone.
A T-series tactical droid—a long-faced command unit with a dark gray frame and glowing yellow photoreceptors—stood at the gate, arms behind its back. It didn't move unless it had to. But it watched. Constantly.
It had been tasked by HK-51 to oversee logistics: moisture output, defensive rotation, resource storage, and the newly commissioned subsurface excavation project.
---
That excavation had become the homestead's true evolution.
HK had scanned the salt bed weeks prior and flagged mineral inconsistencies beneath the southern slope—possibly copper, or iron. Maybe more.
The Lars family had used part of their earnings from Reva's scavenged gear to purchase a Mining Guild-class laser drill, along with small tracked digger units programmed for tiered extraction and tunnel mapping. It was primitive by industrial standards, but on Tatooine? It was the start of something unheard of.
Already, they'd begun digging out an underground vault—part mineral shaft, part bunker, part hydroponic test chamber.
It smelled of coolant and ambition.
---
And in the middle of all of it, Luke sat alone on a scaffold, tightening the seal on a condenser cap.
His sleeves were rolled up to his elbows. Grease streaked across his cheek. A half-worn B1 welding harness sat beside him, and a fresh scar marked the line between his thumb and index finger—where he'd cut himself on a sharp clamp the night before and didn't bother to bandage it.
He didn't speak much anymore.
Didn't complain. Didn't ask questions.
He worked.
He trained.
He listened.
And his eyes—
They were different now.
Harder. Sharper. Focused.
He'd seen too much for a boy. But he wasn't just a boy anymore.
---
This was no longer just a farm.
It was a defensive installation.
An economic engine.
A war-burdened homestead that bled water from the ground and knew how to kill if it had to.
And beneath the sand, a future was being carved—one drill charge at a time.
---
Obi-Wan stepped out of the dunes with the wind at his back and dust in his beard. His cloak whipped behind him, threadbare and sun-faded. The sand clung to his boots like guilt.
He had expected silence. Maybe a cautious smile from Beru. A wary glance from Owen. A glimpse of the boy he had once promised to protect.
Instead, he saw a compound under construction.
Walls rising in layers of welded scrap and durasteel. Cables running between new vaporator units like veins feeding a living machine. Droids moved in synchronized loops—some patrolling, others hauling crates of minerals or piping into the sub-level tunnels. The hum of machinery was constant. Purposeful. Unrelenting.
The Lars farm wasn't a sanctuary anymore.
It was a fortress.
And it wasn't waiting for help.
It had moved on.
---
Obi-Wan slowed.
Something in his chest ached—not just guilt, but distance. A life he had chosen to carry from the outside, now pulling away from him entirely.
He didn't see weakness.
He saw progress.
Hard-earned, violent, and necessary.
And then Owen saw him.
He stood near the outer gate in a flak vest reinforced with salvaged bone plating. A cycler rifle was slung over his back, a pistol holstered at his hip. His arms were crossed, but not idle—tension lived in his shoulders now, the kind bred by too many nights where survival came down to trigger discipline and a ration count.
He didn't shout.
Didn't wave.
He just walked.
Straight toward Obi-Wan, like the wind didn't matter.
Beru followed a moment later—wearing a repurposed blast vest, sleeves rolled. Behind her limped HK-51, one optic glowing, his frame scorched but restored. The light of his systems blinked in slow, steady rhythm like a heartbeat made of data.
They stopped five meters from Obi-Wan.
There was silence.
Then Owen said, flatly:
> "You left us with corpses, Kenobi."
Each word landed like a hammer on rusted steel. Not loud—but impossible to ignore.
> "You're not a Jedi. You're a coward with a blaster and a past no one wants."
Obi-Wan tried to speak. Opened his mouth.
Closed it.
His gaze dropped to the sand.
To his hands.
Familiar. Worn. Useless.
> "I came back to see if you were all right," he said.
The words sounded small.
Like they didn't belong here anymore.
Owen laughed—once. No humor. Just exhaustion and scorn.
> "Now you ask."
He turned slightly, motioning with his chin.
Obi-Wan followed the gesture.
Turrets rising from mounted braces.
Droids sorting crates of plasma tubing.
A B1 unit welding a blast plate over the old garden.
> "We're better than all right. We sold her gear—armor, saber, everything. You'd be surprised what a dead Force-user is worth these days."
> "That saber alone bought us three vaporators, a mining drill, twenty B1s, and a command unit smarter than half the idiots running this system."
Obi-Wan's brow furrowed.
> "Her?"
HK's vocoder ticked, emotionless.
> "Designation: Reva Sevander. Inquisitor. Force-sensitive. Deceased. Slain in defense of Subject: Luke."
Obi-Wan staggered.
The wind picked up again, tugging his cloak sideways.
> "Reva…" he whispered. "She came here?"
Owen's eyes burned.
> "Yeah. And we handled it. Without you."
> "She came screaming like a lunatic, saber lit, armor cracked, dragging half her guts across the yard—and tried to kill my boy."
He pointed behind him, toward the scaffolding where Luke stood now—watching. Helmet under one arm, a tool in the other, face shaded by a sun-hardened brow.
He didn't wave.
He didn't smile.
He just stared.
Beru stepped beside Owen.
Her voice was calm. Kind. Unshaking.
> "We don't need you anymore, Obi-Wan. I think we did. Maybe once. But not now."
She turned her gaze to the hills, where drilling equipment glowed faint orange from cooling tanks.
> "We're building something real. Something we can pass on. This isn't about surviving anymore. It's about lasting."
She looked back at him.
> "You were waiting to die. We're done waiting."
---
Obi-Wan looked down again.
His fingers twitched. Not from nerves—but from habit. A sabersman's muscle memory. But his blade was long buried. Just a tool he carried now like a relic no one wanted to touch.
He gave a slow nod.
> "I understand."
He turned to walk.
Then paused.
> "She wasn't evil," he said. "Reva. She was broken. Like the rest of us."
No one replied.
HK's voice was flat.
> "Correction: She's broken and dead. That's enough."
Obi-Wan exhaled. Low. Final.
Then walked back into the dunes.
His boots left tracks behind him.
But no one followed.
And he didn't look back.
Not once.
---