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Rating:
Teen And Up Audiences

Archive Warning:
No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:
Gen
Fandoms:
Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original
Trilogy, Star Wars: Rebellion Era - All Media Types

Relationship:
Luke Skywalker & Darth Vader

Characters:
Luke Skywalker, Anakin Skywalker | Darth Vader
Additional Tags:
Father-Son Relationship, Drug Withdrawal, Body
Horror, Implied/Referenced Torture, Hurt/Comfort,
the skywalker family tragedy now in technicolor,
remember those sith chemicals palpatine helpfully
pumps his apprentice's bloodstream with, i'm sure
withdrawal from benzos made of magic hate energy is
really fun

Language:
English
Collections:
Vader's Hyenas
Stats:
Published: 2021-10-13 Words: 11,589 Chapters:
1/1 Comments: 117 Kudos: 814 Bookmarks:
181 Hits: 5,724

Cartography
husborth
Summary:
Darth Vader, months ago,
surrendered to the Rebel
Commander Luke Skywalker. After a
campaign to free the attaxium-rich
moon of Kierlbräst, Luke finds that
his father isn't exactly in his right
mind.

Notes:
I really enjoyed writing 11k of Darth
Vader losing his mind in colorful
fashion, but I really feel like I totally
could've wrung more material out of
the concept of Sith Chemical
Withdrawal, so I would totally revisit
this just to wring more out of it.
Because I don't imagine the
withdrawal process from Chemical
Made Of Hate that Vader's been
taking for two decades is a fast one,
there's a least a week or two more
of this total garbage state of Fucked.
This is a goldmine of the content I
care about. As it were, this was for a
friend.

The Sith Chemicals as a concept are

a profoundly weird one-off bit in the
Wookiepedia about Palpatine giving
his apprentice some weird ass Sith
bullshit for "vitality." So it was a
canon thing, once, stabled neatly in
Vader's exciting population of
"horrific abuses to the body, done to
me by my boss." This is an excuse
to write that, and Vader defecting to
the Rebellion is an excuse for Luke
to be there for it without there being
far more prominent health concerns
such as "got lightnininininged the
fuck to die" which is a severe
condition I didn't really want to deal
with when what I really wanted to
focus on was Vader going batshit.
So don't interrogate the why's or
how's of this specific AU too intently.
It's just another one of those
"Vader's near his sonboy, for
reasons" and we'll just leave it
there. We will just have to leave it
there. Also, don't notice these
medical procedures. Just don't. I'm
not a doctor. Everything that's
inaccurate is because this is a weird
dude in space, definitely, and also
the author is in possession of the
bare minimum intelligence.

(See the end of the work for more

notes.)

Kierlbräst was a middling little moon—rocky and cold,

a desolate expanse of purple-gray rock and gray-gray
sky shooting out as far as the eye could see—but
miles beneath its rocky surface were thick belts of
attaxium, the key metal in the center of hyperfusion
powercores. Theoretically it was under the legal
dominion of the planet it orbited, Cortolla—in the
briefing there'd been a description of a bloody history
of occupation, all motivated by power-seekers
salivating at the prospect of cheap, quality attaxium
to light hyperspace engines to the next conquest. The
ill-fated Zygerrian Empire, toppled by Republican task
forces compromised of eager Jedi Knights, the former
Imperial Mandalore, toppled by a combination of
forces too complicated for Luke to even begin to
unravel, then to the Republic, an early Separatist
spoil of war, then to the Republic again, just months
before the Republic shifted into the Galactic Empire.
It was a story repeated in a thousand different
variations on a thousand different worlds. The
Rebellion had been running guns and ammunition and
bodies to Cortolla for years now, the local system cell
fostering and feeding a number of different militant
liberation organizations on the ground all over the
planet, and finally that effort had erupted into all-out
warfare to finally burn the Empire's fingerprint off of
Cortolla. Grainy holofootage reels echoed Cortollan
fighters on the ground crying out izbecki herr
Cortollai, and though Luke didn't speak the local
language, he'd heard enough desperate and jubilant
cries for freedom to figure what it essentially meant.
A thousand different bloody histories meant a
thousand different rallying cries.

It was to be a two-pronged effort; Cortolla's freedom

fighters would retake their home planet, and Rebel
High Command would designate a special attack force
to destroy and ransack Kierlbräst's Imperial mining
facilities, freeing the slaves who worked the attaxium
mines in the process, most of whom were wookies.
Leia had tapped Chewbacca to help with organizing
the Kashyyk Rebel cells to process all of the freed
slaves in the aftermath; Kashyyk was one of the
Empire’s most profound casualties, a planet ripped to
shreds and a population hacked off and spread across
the galaxy as the Empire’s free laborers, but as such,
they were, together, one of the Rebellion’s largest
and most passionate demographics. They’d been the
foot soldiers that built the Rebellion that the rest of
them inherited now. We follow the fighting spirit,
Chewbacca had said, once. It would be good, for
Chewbacca, to help organize the relief. Kierlbräst's
attaxium had been negotiated to be shared with the
Rebellion in return for over a decade of its support,
and Command was eager to see the Empire ripped
from the face of Kierlbräst, as a tactical and personal
mission—and in the chaos of the three months
following the public discovery of Darth Vader's
defection to the Rebellion, there would never be a
better time to strike. Imperial forces were spread
thin, fracturing into pieces at the lowest ranks of the
Imperial army; stormtroopers, it seemed, were by
and large more willing to face defecting to the
Rebellion or facing a court martial for fleeing the
army altogether than to meet Darth Vader on the
other side of the battlefield. Luke grimly supposed
that was fair enough, because the one and only duel
he'd had with Vader had quickly become one of the
worst moments of his life.

All of the last three months had been the Rebellion

taking advantage after advantage after advantage,
hitting the Empire everywhere they knew it would
hurt the most, while the Imperial military floundered,
trying to figure out how to win battles when Darth
Vader wasn't leading them, trying to figure out how
to lead stormtroopers who didn't want to follow when
it wasn't Darth Vader leading them. The Imperial
military had a population that eclipsed Tatooine's
nearly seven times over, an internal culture that
varied by rank and service in ways that were
inscrutable to Luke, who hadn't grown up in the
Empire, much less around its military—but, clearly,
one of its staunchest butchers changing sides had
shaken it to its core.

It was simultaneously the most thrilling, terrifying,

and exhausting time in Luke's life—they were gaining
crucial ground, and even with half the forces and a
quarter of the equipment they had the Empire on the
backfoot. For the first time in his life, he had his
father by his side, actually on his side, putting all of
his considerable power and destructive force to work
for the Rebellion—and as many headaches and
sleepless nights and screaming matches as that had
been, and would continue to be, Luke would take
every moment he could get. There'd been weeks of
sleepless nights at the makeshift detention facility
Vader had been transferred to following his initial
surrender, with Luke sitting in on every session,
feeling like a living lie detector, some brand of Jedi
security theater. Oftentimes he'd rub his prosthetic,
miserably wondering why they thought that—if Vader
truly wanted to kill them all—Luke could do anything
about it. It'd been hellish, a gray cell and a gray
examination table, Force-nulling cuffs for Vader that
he could've ripped through with brute strength alone,
listening to a mechanical baritone rumble about
ordering the Empire to burn homes and cities and
carving through innocent people because the Emperor
desired terror-as-power, the proposed trap for the
Rebellion that lay in wait in the Endor system, the
second Death Star the Emperor had commanded. A
litany of horror and the strange, dull way Vader
recounted it all.

There'd been a window where the Empire wouldn't

have missed Vader, who was nearly a mythic figure
even within his own holdings, and a mythic figure
with a demonstrated tendency to disappear and
reappear on the Emperor's will. Vader’s notorious
eclectic behavior and witchy tendencies worked with
them, for once, but inevitably that window was
brutally short. Vader’s surrender wasn’t a secret even
the Rebellion, that traded in and was founded on the
power of discretion, could hold for long. They had
raced against the clock to get as much of a handle on
the situation as they could, because whatever would
happen after would be wildly, wildly unpredictable.
After that—as the Empire held the proverbial iron to
the fire—the scramble to strike, to utilize those
fractured internal Imperial politics and sensitive
intelligences, became overwhelming. Luke had been
on four battle-torn planets in as many days, jetting
around the galaxy supporting liberation efforts with
the power only a Jedi could offer. The terms of
Vader's defection—and subsequent detention—had
been negotiated hastily, and would likely be revisited
at a later date, but for the moment they involved
Vader becoming something of a special task force all
himself, assigned, essentially, to seek-and-destroy
missions, taking Imperial bases that were too well-
fortified for a traditional battalion. Darth Vader as a
prisoner of war had excited the Rebellion, but Darth
Vader, the Rebellion's personal beast of burden,
excited almost no one—except, of course, Luke. And
some days Luke wondered just how crazy that made
him, but most days, Luke was too tired to wonder at
all.

For a while, they'd been on other ends of the galaxy,

their only communication the hesitant, small bond in
the Force that existed between them, scattered
feelings and senses. In the Force, Vader had been
closed off, well-shielded, reaching out only when Luke
reached first. But now they were both in the same
rubble, on the same moon, on the same Kierlbräst—
and Luke could feel him, just from the way the world
seemed to freeze when Vader inhabited it. It almost
convinced him that it was all real, the sharpness of it,
the ice. It reminded him of Hoth, and how all of Hoth
had been almost too sharp to understand, too real.

With the Force, he sensed the line of that cold, its

energy—like a star, when it burned so hot it was cold,
like sunstroke, when the body got so overheated it
began shivering—and followed it out of the hollowed-
out, smoldering mine base to its source, a dark ridge
carving out a place against a darkening sky. Vader
stood at the base of it, his respirator echoing soundly,
like a smudge of charcoal on a purple-blue bruised
world.

"It's been a while—Father," Luke said. The wind

almost ripped the words out of his mouth, in the gust
that whipped against him, but when he angled it so
the spine of the rock cut the wind for him, the roar
and the bite of the chill were lessened.

"My son," Vader greeted, and the glint of the dull

light shifted—Vader had inclined his head. There was
the crunch of rock, and if Luke strained, the low hum
of motors, and then Vader was on one knee before
him. There was something intensely ritualistic about
the gesture; he had knelt before Luke, once, when he
had formally surrendered, and Luke had taken it as a
rather courtly gesture of sincerity, but in the private
of the night and the distant smoke from still-
smoldering rubble, it seemed like something Vader
had done more often than mere dramatics would
imply. It struck Luke as significant, but he couldn't
pinpoint why.

Luke shifted. "There's, ah, no need for that, Father."

Vader dipped his head—leather and metal creaking as

he bowed even lower—and then, slowly, he rose,
towering again over Luke. It seemed to take more
effort than it should have, but the specifics of Vader's
oblique armor eluded Luke even now. He knew, at
least, from feeling Vader’s hands, that he had
durasteel prosthetics for both, and he knew that
during the interrogations, Vader had gotten so
agitated about mentions of his armor that they’d had
to shut it down for a day and a half.

"I sensed you when you entered the system," Vader

rumbled.

"I'm glad I didn't surprise you," Luke said.

"There is nothing I do not sense. The Force heels to

me, and I to it. You would not have surprised me."

Sure thing, Luke wanted to say, but—for all the

speaking they had done, not much of it had been
casual, and quite a good deal of it had been
unpleasant. Luke loved his father, against all odds,
but he had no idea how to speak to him, and it wasn't
like anyone else really knew, either. A lot of the time
it even seemed like Vader didn't really expect to be
spoken to, so maybe even he didn't know.

Luke was exhausted, thanks to days of hard fighting

and traveling afterwards, so he settled on the ground
with his back against the rocky outcropping,
stretching his legs out in front of him. He squinted up
at the white-speckled sky. "There's a guy from
Ryloth, he was a mechanic on Hoth," Luke said,
talking around the fact that his friend was dead, and
dead because of the Empire, "that studied astronav at
one of the big schools on Corellia. He gave me one of
his old map books. He said if he were in the Galactic
North, he could get just about anywhere, no
navcomputer required."

"It is not excessively difficult," Vader said. "Provided

you have the right teacher."

"You can do astronav?" Luke asked, lifting his head.

"In your head?"

"It is a necessity in my—line of work," Vader said.

"Who taught you?"

Vader shifted. "I taught myself."

Luke snickered. "The right teacher, then."

Vader's breath cycled once, and then twice. "I know

the stars closer to the Rim more precisely, than those
of the Core. I am comfortable in that Galactic
position. But I am proficient Coreward, as well, by
necessity."

"That's cool," Luke said. He gestured to the

Southwest sky. "What's out there?"

Vader turned, and was silent for a long while, before

saying, "Truthfully, my son, that is the direction of
the Tatoo system."

"Of course it would be."

The Force slithered about Luke, cold, but in a sense—

nearly leaking heat from Vader, like he held the heat
inside of his chest, like one gold thread of lava
through all the black. It pressed against him, nearly
physically, checking for pressure points, checking for
injuries—it was as harmless as Luke had ever felt the
Darkness, and he could almost see it, the bloody
holes where Vader had ripped out its teeth so it would
flow more gently. Luke could almost smell it, the
blood, and every breath he took tasted like smoke,
and there was the gritty itchiness of sand in the
corners of his eyes, and hot enough that hell had
frozen over, and Luke shivered despite himself. If he
closed his eyes, he would start hearing crunching
bone, and children screaming, he knew—he had felt
this before, Vader's intensely strange way of looking
him over, though it wasn't typically this harsh, this
loud. It was almost clumsy.

Soon enough, it retreated, leaving Luke gasping for

breath, somewhere between heaving and shivering
violently. "You can just ask how I am," Luke gasped
out.

"That will never be pleasant, my son," Vader said. In

the Force, he was—mournful. But there was a strange
shadow to it. "You should rest."

"Not yet," Luke said. "How are you faring, Father?"

"I am efficient at that which I do," Vader said.

The mournful feeling turned into a muffled sense of

apology, and then, all at once, the air around them
was suffused with warmth, layering itself around
Luke's shoulders like a heavy fur cloak, the kind of
warmth that sank into his bones and then warmed
him through and through. It was—nice, nicer than
Luke would have expected the Dark Side to be wholly
capable of, but then again there was that strange
core of Light that flickered deep within Vader, and
maybe, perhaps, this wasn't something Vader had
learned to do as a Dark Lord.

As if to answer his question, Vader said, "A lifetime

ago, I trained a student."

Luke sat up. "An Inquisitor?"

"A Jedi," Vader said, which only prompted more

questions for Luke, but he held his tongue. "She was
often—cold. I learned quickly how to alleviate it."

"You trained another Jedi?" Luke asked.

The wind picked up for a brief moment, barely

swaying Vader's thick cape. "A story," he said, "for
another—for another day, my son. For another time.
When the stars quiet."

Luke's mind buzzed with desire—the promise of real,

firsthand knowledge of what it had once been to be a
Jedi, and real, firsthand knowledge of who Anakin
Skywalker had been before he chose to give up that
name, and the faint, ghostly glimmer of hope that
whoever Anakin had trained once, they were still
alive, and maybe they wouldn't mind if Luke wanted
to talk to them. It was achingly lonely, being the only
person in all the galaxy—including the man himself—
who seemed to give a damn about what had
happened to Anakin Skywalker. Luke wasn't about to
force anyone to care about someone with a list of
victims that included the populations of whole
planets, but the idea that there might be someone—
somewhere—who already did gave Luke a faint hope
that it wasn't as lonely a life as it felt.

"When the stars quiet?" Luke asked.

"They are epicenters of the Force," Vader said,

distantly. "They scream, like they are alive. They
howl like the wolves on Malachor. It is ceaseless."

Luke blinked. The Force rang an alarm, but what it

was warning Luke of, he didn't know. The Force
around Vader rippled, knotted, furled and unfurled
and then ice grew on the rock closest to him, freezing
water reserves Luke hadn't even realized were there,
even as the blanket of warmth around Luke only
intensified in temperature. Intensified nearly
uncomfortably, like sitting too close to a flame, like
the light of double noon.

"Father," Luke said, warningly.

"You do not understand, my son," Vader said,

turning, one hand tightening into a fist. "You do not
understand the immensity around you. What you
stand to lose. Your rebels—they cannot fail."

Luke frowned. "I don't think you can preach about my

rebels failing when three months ago you were
slaughtering them gleefully."

Vader slammed a fist against the rock, the action so

sudden and violent that Luke flinched. With a dull
moment of clarity, Luke understood that Vader's
prosthetic hands must have been both incredibly
heavy and incredibly durable, because when Vader
pulled his fist away, there was a cracked crater in the
rock, and his black gauntlet was nothing more than
scuffed and dusty.

"You will die if they fail!" Vader bellowed. "Or then it

will be not death—it will be a fate worse than death.
It will be the fate that makes you beg for death. It
will—it will be—what will it be? Immensity. It will eat
you alive, my son. He seeks you. He shows me."

"The Emperor," Luke said, softly, because the Force

rippled with oily unease, and—unbelievably, fear,
blind, animalistic, irrational fear, like caustic acid,
strong enough to make Luke's eyes water.
Unbelievably, because Vader was the very image of
fear, but then there was only one person in the
galaxy Vader could possibly fear, because there was
only one point in the galaxy farther and darker than
Vader himself.

"He seeks you," Vader said, ferociously. "Across the

stars, my Master seeks you. He is ceaseless. There is
no light that touches my Master that is not destroyed.
He is the end of all things, the death of all hope. He
shows me what he will—he shows me, my son."

Luke stood, slowly, like Vader was a wild animal he

could startle—but the Force crackled with danger, so
Luke thought he may very well could. He held out a
careful hand. "Father," he said, evenly, "are you
alright?"

"I am ceaseless," Vader answered, "and efficient in

that which I do."

"I was asking if you're alright," Luke said.

Vader was silent for a long moment. "By what metric

do you inquire."

"I'm trying to understand the extent to which you're

being you, the extent to which you're serious, and
whether or not you need immediate medical
intervention. Do you feel alright?"

"By what metric is such a thing," Vader said,

savagely. "I feel the Force screaming in warning. I
feel my Master clawing at my mind, endlessly, across
all these stars. The danger is urgent, and it is
present. It is coming towards you, ceaselessly, and
you are concerned about me."

Luke raised his hands. "I was just asking. You don't
feel well, is what I'm saying. There's something off,
here.”

"Of course there is," Vader practically snarled.

"Where'd you leave your ship?" Luke asked, suddenly.

The rapid conversational shift did as Luke hoped it

would, and threw Vader on the backfoot; Luke could
nearly feel his father's scrutiny, as Vader turned
Luke's words over in his mind. He was looking for
something, nearly hunting for it, but whatever it was,
he failed to find it. The whisper of Vader's mind was
much louder than Luke had ever known it; it pressed
around him in the Force, like the eyes of anooba
snapping in the night, the keen and starving eyes of
an impeccable carnivore. It was how Vader looked at
everything—keen, and starving, never less intense
than carnivorous. He was always looking for
something.

"It is a distance West of here," Vader said, finally.

"So what are you doing all the way out here?"

"Privacy," Vader rumbled, after a moment. There was

a pungent, intense feeling—if Luke didn't know any
better, he would have called it shame. Vader was
normally well sequestered behind protective layers of
the Force, the majority of his internal feeling drowned
out by hot and heavy rage like a hurricane swirling
about him, but Luke could read him clean like a book,
then. The loudness of it, the immediacy of his
presence.

"From what?" Luke asked.

"My taskmasters," Vader answered, shortly.

Luke dipped his head. He was aware the Rebellion

had commissioned several agents with more or less
corralling Vader, as best as anyone truly could—Luke
hadn't formally met them, but one of them was a
grizzled old clone trooper that Artoo had liked a lot,
that Luke had barely gotten a moment to wave at.
"They know you're here, right? You're not… violating
any terms?"

"They are aware," Vader intoned.

Luke couldn't tell if he'd struck a nerve or if he

hadn't, but there was something important in that
admission, he knew. "I just don't want anything to
happen to you," he said, honestly.

Vader stilled. The Force lightened, rapidly, that

catastrophic darkness—that wildness—easing, sharp
edges and the smell of metal and fire fading to
something not quite soft, but certainly softer. But still
hungry, in a soul-deep way; desperate, nearly, to find
that not-quite-softness, to keep it. To hold onto Luke
himself with a vice grip. That fear Luke had sensed
was for Luke.

Luke used his outstretched hand to take one of

Vader's. Lifting it up, though Vader resisted not at all,
it was even heavier than Luke had thought it would
be. "I'm not going anywhere," he said, firmly. "Let's
walk out towards where you've landed. I'll walk with
you. Just to stay close."

Vader's hand rose, achingly slowly, and then brushed

Luke's face—Luke startled, but steeled himself, and
refused to flinch. Vader's hands then, gently—stiffly,
still, and Luke idly wondered if Vader's prosthetics
were working correctly—took Luke's face in his hands,
and stumbling fingers explored his face, equally
careful and unforgiving. I know there's definitely
something wrong now, Luke thought, confused, but
he was also touched, in a lot of ways, by Vader's
clumsy attempt at gentleness. Vader swept his
thumbs underneath Luke's eyes, traced the lines of
his nose with an index finger, thumbed again down
his cheekbones—in repeating patterns, Luke realized,
like Vader was mapping his face out by touch. Maybe
he was.

"My sight fails me," Vader said, answering Luke’s

wandering thoughts. Again, there was that offness to
his voice—that shadow, but it was so hard to pick up
on anything with a modulated voice. But the Force
around them was choked with a grief Luke could
barely breathe around. "I cannot see your face
clearly, my son. But it is all that I desire."

"You seem a little sentimental," Luke said, swallowing

against a thickness in his throat. All I ever wanted, all
I ever dreamed about, was my father saying that to
me, did you know that, did you, Luke wanted to say,
but he wasn't sure what was wrong with Vader, yet.
Wasn't sure what the man was prepared for, prepared
to hear. "I'm a little worried about that. You've got
me a little worried, Father. Why don't we start
walking?”

Vader roughly drug a palm down Luke's cheek.

"Worry for a thing like I. For a thing—a thin g like I....
He will destroy you, young one. His words are poison.
His presence is breathtaking. I cannot let this
continue. I cannot stop it. Tell me you will run. Fly
into Wild Space and let this undeserving galaxy rot in
every—be brave, and do not look back."

Luke reached up, and looped a hand around one of

Vader's wrists, where Vader's hands still idly thumbed
his cheekbone, reluctant to let go—and if it was how
Vader was seeing his face, Luke maybe understood
that reluctance. As odd a sensation as it was, Luke —
liked, seemed to be too small a word, for the
tenderness he never thought he’d feel before.

"I'm not running away," Luke said, firmly. "And the

Emperor won't touch me, Father. Have a little faith
that we can defeat him, together. A little hope, a little
faith."

"It is not so simple. I see this in my meditations. He

shows me," Vader said, his fingers stretching upwards
to the ends of Luke's hair. "I should see—would that I
could—you. This is a poor.... substitute. I cannot feel.
I cannot feel your—but I... am a good navigator.
Would that I could, I would look at you, my son. Truly
see you, at last.”

Luke tried to stave off the dizzying, improbable joy

that rose in him by focusing on the absurdity of
standing there, far from a smoldering mine and the
jubilant celebration of victorious soldiers, Darth Vader
feeling his face intently. Don’t get overwhelmed now,
Luke told himself. It’s absurd. This is all absurd. Think
about what he’s saying. "The Emperor shows you? Or
—the Force itself?"

"Sith Master and Sith Apprentice are connected,

permanently, mind to mind," Vader said. "The Master
forges the bond when he wishes, and the Apprentice
endures it. It cannot be severed until the death of the
Master. The Master alone controls it. In my
meditations, he wishes—retribution, through this
bond. Retribution on you, my son. You must run.
There is no other choice."

"That's—you can't cut it off?" Luke asked. He felt

more than a little out of his depth, handling a
decidedly unbalanced Sith Lord, discussing the finer
points of the Sith psychic arts. He would—he would
wing it, the way he always did, but the Emperor
having an internal, unstoppable connection to Vader's
mind seemed like a severe violation, of an esteemed
fellow Sith Lord, and as poorly as it seemed to bode
for Vader's privacy, it had serious implications for
Alliance intelligence. There was something heinously
wrong, some infection Luke was digging at.

"He sees nothing," Vader answered. "Not from me. I

have never hidden from my Master in such a fashion.
It is taxing. It is not how this is done. That is why you
must run."

"Not in a million years, Father," Luke said. "We do it

together, right? Just like our walk. We're doing that
together. Are you ready?"

Luke headed them off vaguely West, trusting that the

Force would guide them; but it was strange and off-
putting, to walk beside Vader. They hadn't done much
walking in the detention center, so Luke was unused
to how small he'd feel, next to Vader's bulk. Stranger
still—Vader was unsteady, pitching oddly, weaving
strangely among the rocks. He would stop for no
reason and then start in an entirely new direction,
and Luke had to call out to him with the Force,
because Vader was no longer responding to Luke's
voice unless he was squarely by Luke's side. His
words became disjointed, his conversation even more
inscrutable than before—and, to Luke's surprise, a
good deal of it slithered into Huttese. The voice
modulator stripped any accent from it, but it was,
absolutely, the Tatooini rural dialect of Huttese, the
same one Luke had grown up speaking. When it was
not in Huttese, and snatches of Basic, it was a gut-
churning, ominous growling that gave Luke chills to
listen to, like howling wind, like dying screams, the
guttural noises animals made when they were in too
much pain to think. But it had a pattern and a lilt, so
Luke thought it was at least a kind of horrible
language. The Dark crowded Vader ravenously, when
he spoke it, and Luke thought it was maybe related to
the way of the Sith, but he didn't ask, too focused on
trying to keep Vader from falling over.

"Can we revisit the part where I ask you if you're

feeling alright," Luke grunted, when Vader's metal
arm crashed into Luke's shoulder.

"This is the desert," Vader said.

"It's not. We're on Kierlbräst. It's rocky and cold, but

they get enough rain for these grasses. Not a desert."

Vader’s vocoder blatted out an untranslated noise as

a thicket of static, and Luke watched, in grave awe,
as the clutch of grass nearest Vader withered and
died in seconds, becoming brown and brittle
underneath the curious attention of the Dark Side of
the Force. "The grasses," Vader rumbled.

Alarm shot through Luke like a bolt of lightning. "I

need to know if we can make it to your ship, or if I
need to contact someone," Luke said. "Father, it's
urgent, and I need an answer.”

Vader moved his weight from side to side, as if he

were getting his footing, adjusting his balance. "I am
not certain."

"Alright," Luke said, softly. “Do you have a medical

droid, onboard your ship?”

“Droids,” Vader said.

Luke wrung his hands. “What about—do you have a

commlink, on you? Is it programmed with the ship’s
console code? Can I see it?”

From behind the strap of his belt, Vader pulled a

small, white-glowing communicator, and held it out.
Luke took it, and then, promptly, Vader stumbled
forward, metal slamming against metal, and then hit
the ground on his knee, the vocoder bleating static.

Luke knelt beside him, hands hovering—he wasn’t

sure where was safe, or painless, to press his hands,
to hold Vader up. Vader buckled forward and one of
his palms slammed against the ground, the computer
on his chest flashing an ominous series of red lights.

Luke depressed the button, rolling it around. There

were only two programmed comm codes—one of
which Luke recognized as his own—and Luke rang the
one that was unrecognizable to him, and then a blue,
blurry Emdee unit flashed back at him.

“I guess the Force is with me, sometimes,” Luke said.

“Hi. I’m Luke Skywalker. I found my father, I’m sure
you know him, but he’s—I’m not entirely sure what’s
wrong, but he’s disoriented, and he can’t stand
upright. I don’t think I can get him back to his ship on
my own. Are you his assigned medical droid?”

“I am Emdee Eight,” the droid said. “Permission to

track your location, Luke Skywalker?”

“Permission granted,” Luke answered. “This commlink

has a tracer in it? What am I saying, of course it
does. Yes, permission granted.”

Emdee Eight cut the connection quickly, and Luke

blinked—they were rather brisk, for a droid, but it
wasn’t particularly like droids were always friendly.
Medical droids were programmed with a certain level
of personable attitude, for the sake of their patients’
comfort, but Luke supposed that didn’t always mean
medical droids couldn’t be a little bit more brusque.

Luke had more important concerns, at any rate.

“Would it be more comfortable to lie down?” Luke

asked, and finally, he braced an arm underneath
Vader’s, taking a small fraction of his weight.

“I have surrendered,” Vader said. “I have—

surrendered.”

“You did. That was months ago.”

“Months,” Vader repeated. He listed to the side

opposite Luke, and Luke tried to hold onto his arm,
keep him upright, but Vader rolled with the motion.
His shoulder armor rattled against the gravel, and
then Luke pushed him all the way over, so Vader was
flat on his back, legs tangled in his cape.

Luke spread his hands on the flashing chest

computer, squinting, looking for any kind of miniscule
labels for whatever those lights actually meant. “I
can’t read any of these. Father, I don’t know what
any of these mean,” he said. “Can you—tell me?”

“I do not know what they—what they are,” Vader

said. “I do not see them. I do not use them.”

Luke’s frustration spiked. “You don’t—you don’t

know? What in Farfalla’s Diamonds are they there for,
then? That’s useless in ways I can’t—can I use the
Force, to look you over, the way you did to me
earlier?”

“As you wish, my son,” Vader said. “All that you

wish.”

“I want a clear answer, Father. A yes or a no.”

“I gave you an answer,” Vader growled.

Luke sighed. “You told me I could do what I wished.

It’s not about what I want, it’s about what’s too far
for you. If you don’t want that, I can help you, while
we wait, it’s just—”

“Do it,” Vader said.

Luke lifted one of Vader’s hands, and then folded his

own around it, a physical connection between the two
of them—having felt the sensation, Luke thought he
could recreate the act decently. He closed his eyes
and steeled himself, and then with the Force he
brushed Vader’s mind, finding the hot, boiling areas
where it was inflamed, around points of pain; but it
was too much, too soon, because there were a
thousand points for a thousand pains. There was a
hideous tearing at his thighs, his arms, a liquid agony
pooling across his skin, stabbing at his face and in his
chest and in his guts, a pounding headache like a
sledgehammer against his temples and a livid fever,
thinking like oil on glass, rapidly and out of control
and something else, something—

When Luke came to, it was merely seconds later, but

he was on his palms and vomiting into the dirt. His
body ached like one all-over bruise, and his head
hammered, his pulse racing and dipping like it was
dogfighting. “Why are you so hungry,” he gasped out,
heaving again and bringing up nothing but bile. That
phantom sensation, that something else—he hadn’t
realized it was hunger, until he’d said it. “You’re
starving.”

Luke squeezed his eyes shut, breathing in deep,

trying to center himself—tears leaked out of the
corners of his eyes, burning in the cold. “I don’t,” he
said, raggedly, “I don’t even know where—where
you’re hurt.”

There was a sinking feeling Luke had that made him

think that, perhaps, his father wasn’t injured at all;
that there had been a resignation in Vader’s mind
that Luke had sensed, that all of that pain had felt
well-worn and old, that as horrible as Luke had found
it, that was simply how Vader lived. Luke screwed up
his face, hissing against the remembered feeling of
something piercing the flesh on his face, the hot,
swollen skin around it. The remembered feeling of
breathing with lungs that felt full of water, the
twisting nausea, decades old hunger, and then,
rippling through it all, a heavy, soul-deep weariness,
a desperation for sleep, it all felt like a faded
holophoto. Fingers had run over it a thousand times,
fraying the edges. Used to it might as well be written
on the back.

Luke pushed himself upright, wiped his mouth

roughly with his sleeve, and sat back on his heels.
“You get—intravenous nutrients, right? You still get
hungry?”

Shame rippled through Vader, brushing against

Luke’s folded knees like lapping waves. “Yes. It is—
strange. It is—ceaseless.”

“I don’t blame you,” Luke said. “I’m sorry. That was

invasive. I didn’t—expect. I’ve never done this
before.”

“Apologize not,” Vader said.

Luke scrubbed his hands through his hair. “I guess

it’s a wait, then.”

It wasn’t much longer, before a shuttle touched down

with the roar of engines and hot weals of wind
whipping at Luke’s face. The shuttle was a good deal
larger than Luke had expected, and it took an
agonizingly long time for the ramp to hit the rock and
for Emdee Eight to rattle down the ramp.

“Luke Skywalker,” the Emdee greeted. “Any

noteworthy and serious changes in condition?”

“He’s been a lot less responsive,” Luke called.

“Father, your medical droid is here.”

“Droid,” Vader said. The Force whipped and lashed

out at the ground on Vader’s other side, cracking the
stone. “No. No.”

“Relax, relax,” Luke murmured, lifting Vader’s hand

and squeezing it. "I'm not leaving. I'm not."

The Emdee unit shuffled down the ramp with a

hovercot trailing behind them, and then led it and
lowered it down on Vader's other side. In a swift
motion the Emdee had pulled it under Vader with a
practiced ease, despite Vader's size. The Emdee
tapped a few buttons on the hovercot and it rose, and
they guided it to the ramp. Luke sensed, before it
happened, the long and low swirl of the Force that
promised carnage, and he pulled on his connection to
Vader, breathing into it, Father, I'm here, and I won't
let anything happen to you.

Vader stilled. The Force receded like the relaxing tide.

"My son," he said. "My son—I do not deserve—my
child, taken from me. My Masters, taking my… my
son. What—where—this is the desert. It must be.”

"He does, in fact, seem disoriented," the Emdee said.

Luke thought she was almost amused.

The Emdee pulled the hovercot through the entrance

of the shuttle, and down into a hall in the ship's belly
that seemed to serve as an emergency operating
theater. It was long and white and the ceiling was low
enough that Vader could not have stood, and the
nearby bacta was horizontal and pressed against the
wall, nestled in thick black cables and color-coded
wires. It was a grim-looking little place, with a lot of
medical equipment shoved into a space that wasn't
entirely capable of fitting it; and it felt miserable, in
the Force, like fear lived and crawled in the walls like
an infestation of desert spiders. Anakin’s fear, Luke
realized—an inescapable, heavy dread.

The Emdee transitioned Vader to the padded

examination table in the center—which was, kind of
hilariously, too short for him—and then immediately
plugged an interface port from their mechanical wrist
into the chest computer. So maybe at least a droid
can make some sense of it, Luke thought.

"Where do you need me?" Luke asked.

"My patient dislikes me very much," the Emdee said.

"I am unsure why. It makes performing my
functioning very difficult, Luke Skywalker. This is as
close as I have been able to get to him. I would like
to ask that you keep him calm so that I may perform
my functions. Can you do this, Luke Skywalker?”

"I can try," Luke said.

"What has my Master planned," Vader rumbled.

"What has he—no, no, it was not supposed to be—"

Vader broke into a loud, bellowing string of Huttese—

Luke winced, when he recognized it was one of the
Exaltation Creed, the ceremonial words of worship of
the Hutts, learned and taught on all Hutt-ruled
worlds. Luke remembered learning it, his uncle
teaching him with a sorrowful twist of the mouth and
hard eyes. I’m sorry, son, I’m sorry. But everyone
has to learn, because if you don’t know it when you
need to, they’ll shoot you for the disrespect, it’s not
right, but that’s just the truth, he’d said. Those words
sat heavy in the back of Luke’s skull —it’s not right,
but that’s just the truth, the grave acquiescence to
the hell around them, that if you didn’t properly
grovel to the Hutt Empire and the rulers that
considered themselves gods and kings both, they’d
leave your corpse in the gutter. In an out-of-body
way, Luke thought it was kind of ironic, to be
listening the blackened right hand of the Emperor
bellow flatteries to Hutt rulers like the two were
interchangeable, that all of Darth Vader’s Imperial
jingoism fell apart under pressure; but mostly, Luke
thought it was horribly, horrifically sad. His gut
twisted, again, when he realized what grammatical
case Anakin was speaking in. Huttese was a
separated language, with different grammatical cases
indicating societal caste—and it hit Luke, all at once,
that the only Huttese his father had spoken in his life
would’ve been the case of slaves. Luke knew where
his family came from, knew it in his bones, grieved it
in his chest; but he hadn't been sure how much Vader
remembered, or if it was still ever something Vader
thought about. Luke supposed he had his answer.

"I want to remove his armor," the Emdee said. "Not

all of it. Enough to access an injection port. Enough to
draw blood. You are like he is, Luke Skywalker?"

Luke squinted at the droid's glinting viewports. "I'm

his son."

"You possess the powers he does," Emdee Eight said.

"The Force? Yeah. Yeah, I can help."

Emdee Eight moved to bring out a clear plastoid

breathing mask, hooked to an external ventilator.
"Helm first, Luke Skywalker."

"Father, I'm going to take your mask off," Luke

repeated. "Do you understand?"

"I sensed her," Vader said. "She was alive. She was
alive. She is alive—where is she—”

Luke brushed Vader's mind with the Force—there was

a dull, distant kind of recognition, but the tunnels of
Vader's mind burned and withered at once, frothing
with agony and grief and rage. Tumultuous, a rot
living deep beneath. "He's—not all there," Luke said.
"I think he knows it's me. On some level. I’m
hoping.”

Luke lifted the helm, revealing a sprawling mess of

gold-brass sensors, and, beneath them, mottled scar
tissue, white, purple, red and furious. Vader jerked,
and Luke shushed him quietly, and then hooked his
hands around the mask itself, and pulled slowly. The
mask dug itself in—Luke hazily remembered the
sensation of sharp, stabbing pain in the face, from his
poor attempt at sensing Vader's misery—and then it
gave way, and the Emdee swept in to fix the clear
mask around Vader's mouth.

Luke flipped over the mask in his hands, realizing,

with some kind of intense feeling, that he was holding
an integral piece of what had made Darth Vader the
terror of the galaxy, and on the back of the mask
were red-lit lenses, silver panels and bloodied needles
that matched wicked-looking holes in his father’s
face. He had seen his father’s face once before, in the
detention center—so very briefly—and he had seen it
all before, the welts of red-purple scar tissue, the
half-melted cartilage and deep-set eyes framed by
nearly black shadows, milky slate blue eyes and gray
pupils, thick with cataracts. It seemed hollower now,
thinner, with new cracks in the skin around his mouth
and eyes, leaking sluggishly hot red blood that
gathered in thick faults—something in Luke’s chest
thudded hard, painfully. Vader wasn’t the only one
who didn’t know the face of some of his only living
family very well.

“Father,” Luke murmured. “It’s good to see you,

Anakin.”

“Anakin,” Vader rasped. “That was my name. That

was my... name.”

Luke dipped his head. “Yes. Yeah, it—yeah, it was.”

Vader’s face twisted, but Luke didn’t see the

expression for long, because the Emdee unit pulled
the hefty collar from around Vader’s neck, and then
barked out hasty orders for Luke to sit Vader up so
they could wrangle off the durasteel pauldron. It was
a lot more difficult than Luke had thought such a
thing could be, because the pauldron was massively
heavy, but eventually Luke was able to use the Force
to knock the thing to the ground.

“That can’t be comfortable,” Luke said, after the clang

of it hitting the durasteel deck faded. “Can it?”

“I do not know,” the Emdee answered. “He is

moving.”

Vader had started to buck upwards, groaning—a

haunting rasping sort of noise, without the voice
modulator. Luke pressed a hand against his chest, to
ease him down. Luke had no illusions that Vader
could have crushed him if he wanted, if he was at his
normal strength—but Luke could sense his fatigue,
could almost see the strength running out of him and
spilling out onto the floor. In his mind’s eye, he saw a
different operating theater, a silver table and a group
of droids, the whirring of saws and the obscene ridges
of a spread rib cage, and blood running out of him.
Luke squeezed the bridge of his nose, trying to rip the
image out of his mind, but he didn’t think he’d made
it up. It seemed to just crawl into his mind, nestling
like shrapnel. They ended up restraining him, to pull
back the armorweave and access the injection port in
his chest. As the Emdee moved to flush out the blood
draw port in Vader’s neck, Vader twisted, and Luke—
realizing what was about to happen before it did—
flicked his breathing mask off of his face with the
Force. He hadn’t needed to, because the only thing
Vader heaved up was air and a little spit. Emdee
shifted him back down—Luke felt Anakin’s confused
panic spike fast enough it made him dizzy to be near
it, so he crossed quickly and, without thinking, laid a
hand over Vader’s forehead.

It burned hideously to the touch, but, more than that

—Vader stilled entirely, stilled completely. “My
Master,” he rasped.

“No,” Luke said, his gut twisting, blood running cold.

“No, no. Your son.”

“She was alive,” Vader gasped out. “She was alive—

my Master, you have left her—it is like fire. It is like
fire.”

He means my hand, Luke realized, and he lifted his

hand, guilt strangling his chest. He hadn’t been—
thinking. But the Force whipped around Luke’s arm
and pulled his hand back down, desperation and pain
driving him. Luke wondered how often anyone
touched Anakin, secluded as he was; or, if anyone
ever did. Between the movements, Emdee slipped in
and drew blood from the implanted silicone port in
Vader’s neck, filling several tubes at a rapid pace.

“It’s me,” Luke said. “Your son. Anakin’s son.”

“That was my name,” Vader said, dazed.

Luke closed his eyes, just for a moment. His chest

hurt so badly he was almost surprised that, when he
opened his eyes again, there wasn’t a blade there,
running him through. “Do you remember where it
comes from?”

“No,” Vader rasped. “No—yes. No. It was—my name

—from my Master. I knelt to him, and he made me…
anew. There was red. Red, red—where is it?”

“It’s actually an older story,” Luke said, his eyes

tracing the fluttering Emdee unit, as they dipped
between blood tests. Emdee Eight plugged an IV drip
into the port situated in Anakin’s chest, no doubt
picking up on the sharpness of Anakin’s bones against
his skin—or, at least, Luke hoped they had. They
bustled about, listing off high blood pressures and
rapid pulses and high temperatures, in the attempt to
discover what, actually, had gone wrong in Vader’s
body.

“Tell it to me,” Vader murmured.

Luke thumbed one of the carved ridges on Anakin’s

forehead, watching with fascination—with glee, with
horror—as Vader sighed, and his eyes fluttered shut,
as the Force buzzed with ache and relief. He was
trembling, Luke noticed, beneath all that armor.
Trembling, and his arms spasmed, leaving the
durasteel prosthetics to thump hard against the cot.
But mostly he noticed how much that one light touch
commanded all of Vader’s attention, so the pulsating,
rotting anxiousness that thrummed through the Force
could fade, now that Vader wasn’t so directly focused
on Emdee Eight, or the equipment that cloistered
around them.

Luke leaned down a bit, to make sure Anakin wasn’t

straining to hear. He wanted Anakin to hear it—
maybe more than he should, motivated by some kind
of eagerness, that as ethereal as Vader was to Luke,
they still shared a home. “You’ll start remembering it
as I tell it, I think. Everyone—everyone where we’re
from—knows this story. The Hutts, they had slaves to
do the cooking, and the cleaning, and the washing,
and the sweeping, they had slaves for everything.
You know, they get lazy. They’re not meant for the
desert. Not like us. And the worst job, the absolute
worst one, in all the palace, is feeding the anooba.
Not even the Hutts’ hired taskmasters want to do it.
The pens smelled like dogs and piss and they were
barely trained, and they liked to bite.”

Vader shifted, beneath Luke’s hands. His skin was so

hot. Luke couldn’t imagine what he was seeing, with
a fever that high. “I know this story. I remember.”

“I told you, everyone does,” Luke continued. “But,

you know, no one wants to feed the dogs. They’re
rail-thin and hungry, and they want to eat so badly
they’ll eat the hand that feeds, too, you know.
Because no one ever feeds them. They only really get
to eat when someone dies, and the corpse gets
dragged off. But one of the bondsmen that swept the
halls of the Hutts’ palace, they say he got a devious
little idea, and he started taking his rations out to the
dogs. And he’d swipe from the kitchens, too, and take
it out to the anooba, and he did it so often the
anooba started realizing that if they ate him, they ate
the only person bringing them any food at all,
because he did it over and over. He gets lashes, for
swiping from the kitchens, and he gets hungry, but
he keeps doing it. And then one day, when the
slavedrivers decide they’ve had enough of his
stealing, they call the dogs on him. but they won’t
attack the bondsman. The bondsman is the only one
that’s ever kind to them. They attack the guards, and
they feast. And the bondsman’s name was Ananke.
That’s—that’s where it comes from.”

“I have not heard that story in many years,” Vader

said, quietly.

Luke bent down and pressed a kiss above his hand, to

Anakin’s head, and felt a twist in his chest when
Vader shuddered. “It’s a good story,” Luke said. “One
of my favorites.”

Ananke, technically, meant friend of dogs, or friend of

beasts, depending on what hemisphere of Tatooine
you were in, but in Mos Eisley it was always friend of
dogs. The grandmother that Luke had only ever
known as a gravestone, however, had named her son
Anakin, adding the diminutive to the end of the
name. Little friend of dogs, was the full meaning.
Luke wondered, sometimes, what his grandmother
had been like, to have gone out of her way to do that,
but as a child those thoughts had been followed with
the warmth that came from knowing that his own
parents had quite literally named him with the only
Huttese word for love, that loving little names were a
tradition in a family that had been torn apart by time
and circumstance and slavery. He was the only one
who could appreciate the strangeness of it all. It was
lonely, out there, with the fractured pieces of the
family he almost had, and the fractured pieces of the
family he still had left.

“You may—call me… Anakin,” Luke’s father

whispered. “If you wish. As you wish.”

“It’s nice to meet you, Anakin,” Luke said, quietly.

Anakin fell out of lucidity after that; he dry heaved for

a long time, wracked with shudders and spasms,
screaming his already thin voice hoarse at shadows,
screaming names Luke didn’t recognize, pleading with
something that wasn’t there to stop. Luke used the
Force to snap down the table’s restraints, after
Anakin lurched forward and clawed at his face with
his hands—they were saved from the added worry of
a facial wound from the prosthetic’s durasteel edges
thanks to acute timing and luck. Get it out, get it all
out, he has done something to me, get it out, he’d
been babbling. By the time Emdee Eight had
completed an analysis of Anakin’s blood samples,
Anakin had worked himself into a knot of panic and
fury intense enough that he had fallen slack against
the table, eyes blown wide, the only sign that he was
aware whatsoever being the occasional slam of the
Force against a wall, or when the Force would draw
ragged claw marks into the steel, in swirling,
impossible arcs. The temperature near Anakin, too,
fluctuated madly, going from frost gathering on
durasteel and transparisteel to it steaming off
seconds later, metal groaning as it expanded in the
heat and contracted in the cold rapidly. Back on
Tatooine, Luke had seen any number of bantha calves
get stressed to the point where their minds simply
stopped working, and they collapsed, stiffened, hearts
racing beyond the ability to do anything about it. That
was what Anakin looked like, with his nearly grayed-
out pupils fixed on an invisible point, eyes wide as
anything —no wonder he was trying to feel my face,
Luke caught himself thinking. I don’t think he can
really see at all. It would explain a lot of the strange
movements of the Force, near Anakin—how it seemed
to flow like lava, expansively, pressing against
everything around it. Anakin was creating maps, in
his mind, all the time.

“Please tell me you can sedate him now,” Luke said.

“He’s just—confused, and in pain, Emdee. If it’s safe
to sedate him, I really think we should. It’s pointless
to put him through this.”

“Luke Skywalker,” Emdee Eight said, a holoprojection

of cramped Aurebesh and flicking numbers lighting up
from a projector rooted on her chest. Her viewports
studied it intently. “This toxicology test is highly
abnormal. I believe this is the root of the current
issue. There are traces of toxins that I am not
programmed to identify, and I am not certain it is
safe to give him even the mildest sedative in my
inventory. I am currently accessing the holonet and
searching relevant toxicology databanks for
information. I would like to take secondary samples,
including a saliva sample, to narrow my search. But
the traces of toxin I have uncovered are
unconventional, to say the very least. It does not
resemble any chemical type I have been programmed
to recognize.”

“That’s great news,” Luke said, sourly. “I love great

news. Emdee, do you know where—everyone else
stationed on this vessel is?”

“I have dispensed automatic warning messages of the

situation, as is our established protocol in a medical
emergency,” the Emdee said.

Luke dipped his head. “Great. Um, good. So, he can’t

be sedated? Not even a chance?”

“I would not risk it at this time,” the Emdee said.

“There is a lot happening with this patient that I am
unaware of, and he is not in a state to provide his
own medical history. I can download what data I can
from the central interface, but there is a lot of data to
perform analysis of. It would seem that the device
logs its readings at a constant rate. Until I have a
clearer image of what chemicals are still present in
his system, I cannot recommend any more be added.
It will all take time, Luke Skywalker.”

Luke dipped his head. “Okay. That’s—okay. I can do

that. I can do that. Sure I can.”

Luke dug out a folding chair from one of the storage

racks, and then unfolded it next to Anakin’s side. To
keep Anakin’s temperature down without a fever
reducer, Emdee lowered the cabin’s temperature, and
then kept ice packs and cool cloths under his armpits,
and over his head, because though the armor
apparently came with an internal environment, with it
removed to the waist and the clunky controls on the
belt disconnected, it wasn’t functional. While Emdee
puzzled back and forth on toxicology screens and
running analysis on the data the central computer
collected, Luke dug up flattened pillows and sheets to
tuck under Anakin’s torso, in an attempt to make him
more comfortable on the stiff cot. Luke left him
restrained, because Anakin seemed to go from eerily
pliant to desperately trying to claw to freedom in a
near instant, and in a moment of startling clarity,
Anakin snapped the cuff around his left wrist with the
Force and lurched for the snarled, rope-like scars
where the stump of his right arm met his prosthetic,
and dug his fingers in deep, trying to rip his arm out
of the prosthetic port itself in grand bloody fashion.
Not again, not again, you will not do this again—my
Master, please, he’d been saying. Luke had nearly
gotten a couple of his fingers crushed by Anakin’s
metal hand, prying it away from the bloodied gash
where he’d tried to rip his prosthetic arm off in an
attempt to break out of his restraints. I am not there,
you cannot take from me, he’d gasped out. I will kill
you, I will kill all of you, I will peel your skin from
your bones—even fire grows cold—I will bring my
heel on your spine, crush you, crush you. At some
point, during that, Luke became aware on the edges
of his senses that there were other people near the
ship, and at a point the Emdee slipped away to
update them, no doubt, on what was occurring.
Chemical withdrawal was the dubious descriptor she
had decided on, but withdrawal from what chemical
remained rather up-in-the-air. It was during this
stage that Luke’s touch lost its calming effect from
before, because Anakin only raved further about his
master, his all-seeing power, alternately his guiding
and brutal hand. Everything seemed to lead back to
that mysterious presence that was so profound Luke
could almost sense him occupying the room, just the
passing smell of burning oil, and an odd kind of
humid coldness that laid heavy on the skin.

Somewhere between it all, Luke found himself wrung

out and tired, and he felt awful for it—awful in the
way that made it feel like there was oil coating his
skin—but when Anakin crawled out of the depths of
his own mind because the dry heaving had started
again in earnest, Luke was grateful. He could, at
least, brace an arm against Anakin’s broad back while
he heaved uselessly into his breath mask. Not even
bile would come up, so occasionally Luke would take
a fast, fast moment to wipe spit out of the inside of
the mask, and then fix it back to Anakin’s face. But
the exhaustion seemed to ground Anakin, and the
florid hallucinations and ramblings faded to a choking
sadness, but Anakin was aware enough to wrangle
some of that emotion closer to himself, instead of
letting it pound the Force like a hurricane. When Luke
held him, he shuddered again, and Luke let himself
rub a hand over a patch of corrugated skin graft,
heart thumping hard when Anakin was sometimes
mindless enough to lean into it.

The scars on Anakin’s back were thicker, and heavier,

and more painful-looking, the cracked skin over his
shoulderblades separating and weeping blood every
time Anakin leaned forward to heave. It was the kind
of scar tissue that made Luke’s gut churn, not
because it was hideous to look at—on a place like
Tatooine, he’d grown up seeing all sorts of brutal,
healed-over injuries, and he spent his life after
Tatooine on the frontlines of one of the galaxy’s most
brutal wars to date—but because he knew pain like
that was catastrophic. He’d pulled pilots out of
starship crashes and burning cockpits with their flesh
roasted down to the bone, in so much pain they
forgot their names and their language and even how
to scream, so they’d choke on their own spit and gasp
out hoarse noises. But he’d never met anyone who
had been burned as badly, and over so much tissue,
as Anakin had. The worst part—over them were vivid
pink scars, long and sharp and horizontal, scars Luke
recognized from the electro-whips preferred by
slavemasters on Tatooine. Implicitly, he knew, that
they weren’t from Tatooine, because although his
knowledge of his father’s life was fuzzy at best, the
years between his father and Tatooine were more
substantial than his years on Tatooine had been, and
with burn scars like Anakin’s, there was no way
evidence of that treatment would have survived. The
scars were too young. He'd gotten them after, and
Luke didn't want to think about where. He’d never
met anyone with burns as bad as Anakin’s, and he’d
also never met anyone who had been flogged on top
of those scars—Luke knew, intimately, just what kind
of brutality his father was not only capable of, but
happy to inflict. Luke knew, intimately, what his
father could do even to the people he had a vested
interest in protecting. But there was something
utterly obscene, about layers of scar tissue and skin
that was weeping blood, skin grafts that fixed in
badly and bones that were too prominent, and masks
held in place by austere needles and lash scars like
canyons carved into someone’s flesh. There was
something so obscene to it that it brought Luke
nearly to tears if he thought about it for too long.

“You must run, Luke, you see,” Anakin rasped,

crashing back down after a round of heaving. There
had to be something that could at least take the edge
of the nausea off, because truthfully Luke didn’t think
Anakin could be conscious much longer. He wasn’t
entirely sure how Anakin still was, even—and a large
part of him desperately wanted Anakin’s body to give
out, and slide into unconsciousness, because then at
least he wouldn’t be trapped in some waking
nightmare.

“I don’t see, actually,” Luke said. “I don’t want to

argue with you, Father, not when you feel like this. I
just want you to rest.”

“That is when I see it,” Anakin said, eyes glassy.

Luke scrubbed his face. “The things that the Emperor

shows you?”

Anakin coughed a bit, and then winced—through their

bond, Luke had been able to sense, through Anakin’s
confusion, that all the dry heaving had led to his
abdomen feeling whittled out and sore. There was a
lot of medical technology implanted in his gut, most
of which Luke didn’t know a thing about—he would
have to fix that, after this. There was so much he
would have to fix, after this. But no wonder, that
Anakin was wincing. Luke had been vomiting in the
dirt after sensing that level of agony for half a
second.

“This is his doing,” Anakin rumbled.

Luke let his hand fall to Anakin’s shoulder—Anakin

jumped, a bit, and resettled. “What do you mean?”
Luke asked.

“I do not know how… you can bear to touch. I do…

not understand, my son.”

“Well,” Luke said, swallowing, “when I was a kid, I

didn’t have a mother or a father. But what I did
know, the second I knew my own name, was that
they had loved me, because I knew that they had
named me luke, and I knew what that meant.
Huttese was my first language. And now I have my
father, and I still know what that means. I know that
you’re only here, with us right now, because you
chose me. I think that’s worth believing in.”

“We should have… named you —friend of dogs.”

Luke leaned his head down, and brushed his cheek

against Anakin’s shoulder. “I think I like the name my
parents picked for me,” he said. “You keep going back
to the Emperor, and what he’s showing you. Tell me
about it.”

“He desires you… as his new apprentice,” Anakin said.

Luke snorted. “Best of luck, to him, on that.”

“It is not… a joke, my son. Do not dismiss his threat.”

Luke shook his head. “That’s the thing, Father. I’m

not. I’m really not. I just know that I have you, and
Leia, and Chewie, and Artoo—and Han, when we get
him back. I have people I’m fighting for. I’m not
giving up on them, no matter what the Emperor tries
to give me, or what he tries to do to me. I know it’s
nothing to joke about. I’m just—confident.”

Anakin’s gray eyes fixed on him. “Confident?”

Luke grinned, just a bit. “You know what everyone

says about flyboys. Fight enough dogfights and
nothing really scares you.”

Anakin huffed. “They say that about pilots,” he said.

“They always… have. Something about the flying—
makes you brave. You fly well, my son.”

The feeling warming their bond was pride, helpless,

deep pride. Luke ducked his head. In another
lifetime, he might have been able to say I learned
from the best, but this was a sadder lifetime, with
sadder words to be said about it. “I try,” he said.

“It is your name, too,” Anakin wheezed. “The flying. I

would have… given you the stars. Given you the
galaxy.”

“I just wanted a father,” Luke said.

It looked like Anakin had something to say, to that,

but then he was lurching forward again, compelled by
his empty stomach to throw up anything in it. Luke
braced a palm flat against his back, thumbing
Anakin’s leathery skin, murmuring the kind of things
Luke remembered murmuring to the bantha calves of
the small herd they used to have, when they were ill.
They’d always had banthas, growing up—bantha milk,
bantha wool, and calves were good to trade, and their
neighbors had a bantha bull penned out south and
they traded water for breeding access. Easy, easy,
you’ll see the suns again, Luke would croon, to weepy
calves digging their hooves in the sand, wailing in
discomfort.

When Anakin was done, he slid backwards—and

before he caught his breath entirely, he gasped out,
“Your mother chose that name. Your mother chose
that name, for—for me. We had… we had… she chose
that. Because I had said it, in our, in our—wedding…
vows.”

“Oh,” Luke said, intelligently. It felt like he’d taken a

vibro-pulse shell squarely to the chest.

“So very like her,” Anakin mumbled, and his eyes

fluttered shut.

Luke cupped Anakin’s shoulder, thumbing a long,

straight surgical scar sewn into the flesh there—it
seemed that Anakin’s body had finally given up on
the idea of consciousness, exhausted beyond the
pale. It wasn’t really sleep, that Anakin was getting,
just fruitless unconsciousness, a body dug so deeply
into overwork that it had to fight its way back to the
concept of rested. So very like her, he’d said. Luke
idly wondered what his mother would have said,
about Luke, his weird stories from a small farm
lightyears away, a title he didn’t feel like he’d earned
yet, the grim acquiescence of a lifetime lived under
greedy empires and the father he was still sitting
beside it all. The courage that maybe didn’t come
from strength of conviction or internal peace, but the
reckless kind that came from years of full-throttle
flying into hostile skies against an Empire with
quadruple the manpower and triple the equipment,
knowing the chances he was about to die were higher
than the chances that he wouldn’t, barreling through
turns and spins so fast his X-Wing threatened to
come apart and still thinking it’s got to be faster than
that, it’s got to be faster than that, or Leia’s going to
be furious at me for dying, and she’s already lost so
much. For a moment he wanted nothing more than to
meet his mother so badly the desire would’ve taken
him out at the knee, had he been standing.

After a while, Emdee Eight jolted upwards, out of the

data analysis trance they had seemingly fallen into. “I
have not discovered the precise nature of the
chemical in question,” they announced, “but I have
discovered evidence that he was dosed safely with
other drugs in the timeframe that he would have
been taking it. I believe this is the only information I
am going to be able to attain, Luke Skywalker. I will
proceed with further treatment.”

“I guess that’s as close to good news as we can get,”

Luke said.

“I believe the nature of this chemical defies scientific

reasoning,” the Emdee said. “Your irrational natures
may make more sense of it than myself.”

The smell of burning oil clogged his throat. What’s the

point of anything the Emperor does, Luke thought,
savagely. It hadn’t entirely registered in his mind,
everything the Emperor had done to his father, the
way his father had begged for just the memories of it
to stop—but when it did, Luke thought he may never
hate a man more than he hated that one.
“Understood, Emdee,” Luke said, softly.

“I believe my patient is positively affected by your

presence, and so you may stay,” the Emdee unit said.
“I have informed the rest of the crew of the situation.
They are onboard, if you require their assistance in
any fashion. A new course is being plotted to the
medical frigate, star traversal designation Voyager.”

“I’ll come with you,” Luke said, immediately.

The droid dipped its head, so to speak, motors in the

neck whirring. “Acknowledged, Luke Skywalker.”

This is going to cause some trouble, Luke thought to

himself, because he probably wasn’t supposed to be
here in the first place, and there’d be a ripple effect
where he was missed. But Command couldn’t care
too much. They felt better when he was the one near
Anakin, anyway.
As it were, Luke sat in the soft darkness, listening to
the Emdee unit move about, changing the IV bag,
measuring out doses of drugs Luke didn’t know the
name of. At some point his own exhaustion caught up
with him, and nearly against his will, he slipped
forward until his cheek was pressed against Anakin’s
bare shoulder, and slithered into a dreamless, tired
sleep, the sleep left for the weary. But it was a
satisfying rest, too, for reasons Luke didn’t really
know.

Notes:
Luke is really possibly and genuinely
the most Guy. Like of all the guys,
that one's definitely, you know, the
Guy. That one. Most important one,
for sure.

I hope you all enjoyed this weird

foray into strange Star Wars
fanfiction. It becomes stranger and
stranger the more I write.

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