Would you expand on that Palpatine is Rey’s grandfather AU? How was it like before and during Rey and Kylo’s childhood? How was Kylo and Anakin’s relationship? Where is Luke? Was Anakin part of his and Leia’s childhood? How was Leia working with the Rebellion if it wasn’t something as obvious as what it is in the movies? What happened to Han once Darth Vader found him and the kidnapped Kylo? What happens after Palpatine's death?
listen, someone else has to write rey palpatine and kylo ben being angry codependent siblings under the unbroken Empire because I want it too much but also have 10,000 other projects I’m trying to finish
(that said, let me lay out the plot in excruciating detail because I have already put entirely too much thought into it)
So, setting—it’s the darkest of dark timelines. Palpatine becomes Emperor, Anakin goes to the Dark Side and Padme dies, but instead of being spirited away to Tatooine/Alderaan, Luke and Leia are raised by Anakin, under Palpatine’s watchful eye. Essentially, they’re trained from birth to be Sith, with the expectation that they’ll join/replace Vader as the Emperor’s chief enforcer when the time comes.
It’s a weird childhood, because on one hand they’re raised in the lap of luxury on Coruscant, with a powerful and notable father and the Emperor’s favor---but on the other, they’re fully expected to become fascist murder machines. (It doesn’t help that through most of their childhood, Anakin is still possessive and angry and difficult to communicate with. He doesn’t like talking about Padme, and he hates how often Luke and Leia remind him of her, but he’s terrified of losing the only part of her he has left. It makes for a lot of fraught dinner conversations.)
Luke and Leia are still them, though, and they know---the Force is with them, of course they know---that the Empire is wrong and their training is wrong and their father is wrong and everything is wrong. They drink up any news of rebellion, of Jedi, and plot between themselves, promising that if they ever had the opportunity, they would run away and join the Alliance.
(They’re young, and being a rebel sounds exciting and romantic, and also like something their father would hate. But it doesn’t go away, and as they grow older, as their training becomes serious, as their father starts sending them on missions of their own---the plans grow serious too, taking shape, becoming real.)
When other teenagers run away from home, their family might enlist the neighbors to help look for them, or maybe call the local police.
When Luke and Leia disappear from Coruscant, the whole Imperial Armada is put on high alert. General Tarkin and Lord Vader personally oversee a sweep of the Core and Mid-Rim, and the Emperor himself releases a holo begging that they be returned. (That’s the lie told, that the Rebellion kidnapped the future of the Empire, the brave Knights Skywalker.)
Kylo and Rey don’t know much about it---the four years that elapsed between Luke and Leia’s disappearance and when Vader found them. But they know they weren’t kidnapped. That Luke and Leia Skywalker ran, and fought alongside the Alliance---that it took all the military might of Tarkin and Vader combined to smash their forces, and scatter them to the galaxy.
Afterwards, Luke disappeared off the edges of the map (there are rumors he’s alive, gathering Jedi, finding temples, but Vader never finds him and Vader looks like a man possessed.) Leia is dragged back to Coruscant, seemingly repentant and ready to resume her place at Lord Vader’s right hand.
Also, four months pregnant.
Leia Skywalker’s son has many names, one for the Emperor’s use and another for his Grandfather and another that his mother calls him in secret. (You are a Skywalker and a Solo, Leia tells him, so often that Kylo hears it in his dreams sometimes. Never forget that.)
The Lady Reyvan Palpatine appears when Kylo is nine, and the confusion when the Emperor introduces his “granddaughter and heir” to the assembled leadership is profound. There is a great deal of speculation afterward as to her actual parentage, but every test turns up the same result---she is the genetic granddaughter of Sheev Palpatine, and she has a Midichlorian count similar to Anakin Skywalker’s. No one has the courage to ask for more on the subject.
(Kylo mostly was annoyed that he suddenly had to share his mother and grandfather’s attention with a squirming baby.)
Kylo and Rey grow up adoring Anakin. He learned his lesson with Luke, and time has mellowed him, he’s much better suited to being grandfather and teacher than father. Rey loves Leia like a mother, and thinks of Kylo as a brother, and for a while, they’re actually all happy.
Happyish, anyway. There’s still an Empire and Death Star and rebels that have to be crushed underfoot, lots of death and oppression. Regular, evil empire stuff.
However, when Kylo is seventeen, he’s kidnapped.
Well, “kidnapped” if kidnapping involved your mother waking you up in the dead of night and leading you through the back alleys and empty streets of Coruscant, to where a beat up freighter is waiting at an out-of-the-way dock. “Hey kid,” the Captain says with a grin, but his eyes are wet. “Sorry about the nose, I was honestly hoping that gene would skip right over you.”
Kylo gets exactly five minutes of family reunion before it all comes to pieces. Leia gets left behind, fighting off guards, and Kylo gets kidnapped by his long lost father (and his---wookiee uncle, all right then) and taken to the Alliance.
He and his uncle---the human one, the impossible Jedi---both feel it through the Force when his mother is executed.
They feel their father/grandfather’s hand on the blade.
This is what Kylo never tells Rey, because he can’t find the words, can’t find the courage to say them aloud---he liked being with the Alliance. He liked his father, and his uncles; he’d liked the soldiers and the pilots and the spies, who all introduced him as Kyber’s son, because that was his mother’s codename. (My mother was a spy? Kylo asked, and his father laughed. Kid, your mother was the spy.)
He’d just liked them.
And after the fourth time the Alliance had to abruptly move because Darth Vader was on Kylo’s trail, it had broken Kylo to stand before all of them and say, you have to leave me behind, you have to go. he won’t stop until you do.
(When Vader found him sitting on an empty crate in the middle of an abandoned temple on Yavin IV, he extinguished his lightsaber, rested a heavy hand on Kylo’s head. How is he? Vader had asked Kylo, and Kylo knew he meant Luke.
How is my mother? Kylo had asked, and it was the first time Kylo hated his grandfather.)
Rey is waiting there when he returns, sitting on his bed and kicking her heels against the frame. She stops, when she sees him, and then she launches herself into his arms. I miss her too, Rey whispers, and Kylo’s chest seizes. But I’m glad you came back.
For a while, things are normal again. Vader trains Rey and Kylo in the ways of the Force. Vader starts sending Kylo out on solo missions. Palpatine teaches Rey how to be heir to the Emperor, though she’s still very young and Kylo’s sure the Emperor won’t die until exactly when he’s ready to. No one talks about Leia, or Luke, or the rebellion, or anything.
Kylo is twenty-four when he kills his grandfather.
In hindsight, it was inevitable. The student must always kill the master, etc. But it doesn’t feel inevitable to Kylo, not even when Darth Vader has been growing slower with each passing year, when the pain of the suit, old burns, old wounds, sometimes keeps him from leaving his chambers at all. Darth Vader is tired of living, and he says so, when he tells Kylo to help him take his helmet off. I miss your grandmother, he says, and Kylo wants to howl, I’ll miss you! You can’t leave me here alone! You already took my mother, you can’t take---
Kylo holds his grandfather’s hand and listens to his rattling dying breaths, until there aren’t any more. Then he takes his lightsaber and plunges it through Darth Vader’s chest, so that he’ll have something to show the Emperor.
(This, if you were wondering, is the second time Kylo hates his grandfather.)
Rey is nineteen and the Empress-in-Waiting when she falls in love.
(In her defense, this was an accident. Mostly an accident. Captain FN-2187 was just---very handsome, and kept making jokes, which no one except Kylo has done with her ever. He’s almost as fast with a blaster as she is with a lightsaber, and they prove it once, by getting ambushed during a diplomatic visit on Alderaan. So Rey falls in love, she doesn’t know what else to do.
This is treason, Eight-sevens whispered the first time they kissed.
Okay, Rey breathed, feeling too full of light, bursting with it, and dizzy. We’ll be traitors together.)
When it starts, it starts slow. The Emperor begins forgetting small details, bits of intelligence. Then meetings. Names. Faces. Rey feels like she’s trying to catch a hundred extremely fragile porcelain statues before they smash on the ground. She loves her grandfather, but---it is desperately hard to hide the Emperor’s illness with one hand and begin assuming his responsibilities with the other, and she begins to hate him too.
Which is exactly when Kylo comes back from four months suppressing rebel activity in the Outer Rim.
and....well.
