Chapter Text
Three of Vader’s most prioritized targets were on that ship. He chased them down in his TIE Advanced, having micro-jumped after them after they had skipped to the nearest planet to try and escape him. He knew the officers on his Star Destroyer weren’t smart enough to recognize a micro-jump when they saw one—nepotic, incompetent fools, all tossed onto him by his Master, not that he had ever had the chance to object—and wouldn’t follow. It didn’t matter. His crew were useless even if they were smart enough to come as backup, and Vader could handle this on his own.
He shot a tide of laserfire after the disc-shaped ship, which turned like a dirty 500-credit piece spun on a table. They escaped with hardly a scratch, but Vader at least had the satisfaction of feeling the passengers’ spikes of alarm inside.
They had jumped just above a tan planet with deep red streaks, one Vader did not even know the same of, its illuminated surface contracting the blackness of space. He swooped after them and began lining them up again, the Force guiding him to their every move.
There was the soul of the princess, whose spitting anger was easily recognizable to him, after he had invaded her mind on the Death Star. It had been miserable for them both.
The spirit of the boy who had destroyed the Death Star and guided by Obi-Wan was beside her. Vader did not yet have a face or name to tie to the identity, but he was male, young, barely trained, and powerful. His emotions bled all over the place like an overfilled cup held by a clumsy child. The Force thrummed around him with the promise of great destiny that intrigued Vader on some level, but it mattered little when the boy barely knew anything of the Force and would be dead before his potential could come to any further fruition.
And the last two, far more muted than the first pair, were the ones who had attacked Vader above the Death Star trench while he had been focused on the boy. There was nothing remarkable about them in the Force, but he knew they were the ones flying the ship, and he had to admit they had skill.
Each of them had played an integral role in the destruction of the Death Star. After Vader’s Master had seen the reports, he’d placed a new order in Vader’s long list of commands.
[Hunt down the Rebels responsible for destroying the Death Star and eliminate them.]
Wiping them out in one moment would bring some relief to him. A little less pressure from the mechanisms drilled into his head, driving him to complete every task his Master placed on him like a yoke on a bantha.
Vader sensed the ship’s next move and fired again. He felt a spike of alarm from the boy. For a moment it disrupted the Force around Vader, the boy’s skills tangling with Vader’s own and tugging the ship free from its destined doom. It was an impressive show of potential in the Force, especially against Vader’s might, but it was of no matter. They were racing deeper into the planet’s atmosphere; soon their evasiveness would be limited to a dive. If they could get to the surface, they might be able to hide and scramble scanners, but they would not.
The shuttle arched downward, beginning the descent Vader had predicted. He chased after it, his TIE rumbling slightly around him at the strain, but it would withstand. He let loose another streak of blaster bolts; the ship made impressive maneuvers to dodge, but several collided against the shields.
The ship returned fire, franticly blasting behind itself to try and chase Vader off. Vader spun the TIE – the durasteel groaned around him in objection – expertly dodging every single charge. He sensed a spike of frustration from the boy and allowed himself a rare smile in malicious amusement.
He was about to strike again, when the Force tremored around him. Immediately cautious, Vader’s hands paused over the firing controls, as the boy’s frustration withdrew and curled in on itself. Like a chaotic solar system falling into the order of gravity, the boy’s feelings became centered, focused, refined. Then its attention returned to Vader with a dangerous calm.
Vader gathered the Force around himself, but he had conquered countless Jedi before. This boy would not get the upper hand, even if it was impressive instincts and a painful waste of potential.
Vader sensed the very moment before the boy fired, traced his own response through the Force’s guidance over his controls like fulfilling a pattern already set, dodging –
There was a sudden connection right into the core of Vader’s mind. It was like an arrowbolt that went directly through his mental shields and hit the very heart of his being. But it did not lash out; before he could even interpret it, it tangled with his own Force presence, reading him, syncing to him, countering him. He sensed traces of the boy’s mind within it, locked in some kind of trace, and could only be baffled as to how the barely-trained child had managed to do it, when there was a great BANG to his left.
Alarms immediately screeched and the TIE veered off course before Vader wrenched the controls to balance it. The screen told him that he’d been struck. He had been distracted, and even the Force had not warned him – no, the boy had somehow seen how Vader would dodge and countered it.
The TIE rattled and Vader knew smoke was trailing behind it. It had been a good shot. The tan-brown surface of the planet grew closer, and the ship veered further away from Vader’s own. Vader knew it would be useless to pursue at this point.
The fall would not kill him. As always, he would survive, and he would get back up, and no matter how much abuse he suffered, he would continue to hunt down his targets.
Relentless, whether he liked it or not.
-
“Part of me wants to be mad at you for dragging us out here and getting my ship damaged,” Han said thoughtfully, hands on his hips as he stood outside the Falcon, eyeing the new dents and scorch marks. “But most of me is amazed you actually managed to take down Vader.”
Luke strode down the gangplank, hiking his bag further up his shoulder as he went, Like Ben had taught him, he was keeping his feelings open…best he could, anyway. But they told him enough. “Don’t celebrate just yet. He’s not dead.”
Han looked over and eyed Luke warily; Luke saw him notice the bag Luke carried, as well as Leia behind him with a heavy blaster slung over her back.
“And where do you two think you’re going?” Han drawled. “I thought we were just looking at some old Jedi ruins you heard about.”
“Vader’s that way,” Luke told him, pointing out into the woods. The planet was forested, its trees a deep brown while their leaves were a dull red, and oddly stopped at the same height about thirty feet up. The tops of the trees were near-flat, perfectly parallel to the rolling hills below that were covered in tan grass.
Han looked in the direction Luke pointed. At least from this angle, they couldn’t see smoke rising into the sandy-colored sky, or any other indication of Vader’s crash site.
Han leveled a slightly annoyed but overall resigned look at Luke. “Force-jumbo?”
Luke grinned at him. “Force-jumbo.”
Han turned a more aghast look at Leia. “And you want to go towards him?”
Leia raised her chin. “This could be our chance to take him out. We had a rough landing; his will be worse.”
“If he did survive the crash – which, I would say no way for anyone else but Vader – then we should probably avoid him,” Han argued, hands rising to his hips.
“I’m not passing up this chance, Han,” Leia said firmly. “He could be injured. We have to seize it.”
Han’s expression became more pleading as he looked back at Luke. “You’re seriously alright with hunting down someone – even Vader – to take them out while they’re injured?”
Luke shuffled in reluctance, his grip tightening on the band of his pack. “I know it’s not great,” he admitted, “But this is Vader. He’s the fist of the Empire.” He gave a regretful smile to Han. “Besides, I’d rather face him head-on than let him come up on us while we’re inspecting the ruins.”
“Or,” Han suggested, “We could just cut our losses, say ‘Good on us for surviving!’ and go home.”
Leia began to stride down the gangplank again, passing Luke and strolling out onto the grass. “Wait here if you don’t like it. I have a Sith to kill.”
Luke followed after her, giving a shrug to Han as he walked by.
Han sighed in surrender. “Chewie!” he called up into the Falcon. “Keep the engines warm, will ya?”
Chewie called out an affirmative from within.
Han sighed again as he turned and started following after the two lunatics he’d somehow ended up saddled with. “Something tells me we’re gonna need to make a quick exit…as usual.”
-
The TIE’s crash wasn’t too far a hike and they got there in under an hour. The smoke in the air and disrupted foliage seemed to darken the world around them as they got closer, building a sense of foreboding with each step, even besides the growing coldness Luke felt in the Force. Large steaming hunks of durasteel plates were scattered through the woods, scorching the tan grass to black. The TIE had obviously been crumbling even before it had collided with the ground. Most people wouldn’t have survived the descent, much less the impact. But Luke could feel Vader’s presence the same way he could feel the winds of a coming sandstorm on a Tatooine night.
“What do you sense, Luke?” Leia asked, her voice tight and her grip on her blaster white-knuckled.
Luke exhaled slowly, focusing, stretching out for the Force as Ben had taught him. Luke could do it easily, and the Force responded like a welcoming song, but he always felt like he wasn’t doing it right, since he no longer had Ben to guide him.
Still, he reached out. And he still felt that great beast he’d sensed over the Death Star, like brushing his hand against the hindleg of a massive Krayt Dragon. If he closed his eyes, he could imagine its obsidian-black scales, its massive rippling strength, its mouth large enough to swallow his entire X-wing whole – or four X-wings, actually. But unlike before, the nebulous dark dragon didn’t turn its red-gold eyes on him with hatred. Rather, it merely breathed. Asleep.
“I don’t think he’s conscious yet,” Luke said. He opened his eyes, having not even realized he’d closed them.
“It’s so creepy that you do that,” Han muttered from behind him. “Do you watch when I’m awake and asleep on the ship? That’s kind of crossing a boundary, kid.”
Luke smiled sheepishly. “Only when I check. I promise I don’t do it much.” He would never admit how he’d started to sense how Leia would wake in the middle of the night from nightmares, and how Han spent long hours tossing and turning with conflicting feelings.
Han muttered, but they all grew quiet as they saw the TIE ahead through the trees. Leia raised her blaster and strode forward.
The crash site reminded Luke of finding ruins or bones in the sand dunes. At least three trees had been blown through their trunks, their crumbled and fallen pillars framing around the TIE itself. Much of it was blown in every direction, but there was enough of the base skeleton to see the original shape. One of the wing panels had been torn off during the fall, but the other was still attached, if lopsided and shriveled. The capsule itself was dented and bumpy as a rotting fruit, much of its outer layer ripped off to expose the wiring underneath, and the dark circular viewport was cracked.
Unlike the bones of Tatooine, the veil of death was fresh here. It sent shivers down Luke’s arms.
“This was a bad idea,” Han muttered behind him. “Please tell me you two have come to your senses and want to leave now.”
Leia didn’t even bother to respond. Luke and Han watched as she marched forward, directly into the black ground of the crash site. She grabbed a large broken branch from a crumpled tree without miss a step – nearly as tall as her and thicker than her arm – before clamoring up onto the TIE and jamming the branch into the TIE’s hatch.
“She’s crazy,” Han breathed.
Luke firmed up his shoulders and then followed her. He hopped up onto the TIE and positioned himself next to her before joining her in trying to push the branch to pry the TIE open.
“You’re crazy,” Han said, watching the two of them with his mouth agape.
“At this point, we kill him before he wakes up and kills us,” Leia ground out as she heaved her weight against the branch. Luke’s hands stung against the wood, but he bit his lip and kept pushing. “And if we die trying, then at least we went down fighting.”
“I’d rather live,” Han argued.
“Then better our odds,” Leia snapped.
Han was quiet for a moment. Then he muttered, almost petulantly, “Never tell me the odds.”
He climbed up the TIE, wincing at the ruined metal, until he was right beside Luke. He cursed as he found his footing, but when he did, he grabbed the branch and added his strength.
“I’m crazy,” he gritted out, and then, with the three of them working at it, the TIE popped open.
The hatch crashed down onto the ground loudly, and all of them winced, realizing that sound might be their doom in waking up the Sith Lord they were trying to kill. But Luke sensed no stirring in the Force. He peered into the darkness and felt like he was looking down an icy chasm, the very air lingering below a force of cold and darkness.
They all heard it at the same time.
The breathing.
It was not the breathing they had heard on the Death Star, or in the recordings the Alliance had shown them. It was slower. But unmistakable.
They were all very still for an indeterminable amount of time.
It was Leia who snapped them out of it. “Luke?”
“Still asleep,” Luke said, barely more than a whisper.
Luke heard Han swallow, and then the smuggler slowly, carefully drew something out of his pocket, as if afraid a sudden move would draw attention to them. Luke didn’t even fully look Han’s way, afraid to pull his attention from the nothing he was staring into, but then he heard a click and a light shown from Han’s hand. A glowrod. Of course Han, always working on his ship, would have one on hand.
The light didn’t break the darkness much, but it did reveal a silhouette. A smooth circular helmet, like the illuminated edge of a shadowed planet.
Wait…Luke spied something, underneath the slope of the helmet. The Force suddenly tugged at him, like it had tied a fishing line onto his heart and was now giving a tug.
Suddenly devoid of fear, Luke stepped forward and dropped down into the cockpit.
“Luke!” Leia cried, real alarm in her voice.
“I’m alright,” Luke reassured her, raising a hand to pacify her. TIEs were different from X-wing cockpits. When Luke climbed into his ship, he felt nestled. A little crammed, but also burrowed, like a pit droid folded up and tucked into its place. Despite the TIE having more space, it somehow felt more claustrophobic, like the ability to stand up a little but not all the way just made him more aware of his restrictedness.
Luke paused, adjusting to his new surroundings. A control panel was to his left in front of the viewport, with sticks and knobs vaguely familiar to his own X-wing controls. Other buttons and panels lined the walls. There was some kind of fabric tangling near his feet, but in front of him, slouched against the wall, was the massive slumped bulk…of Vader.
Luke’s throat went dry. This was the man who had killed Ben. He had tortured Leia, championed the brutality of the Empire, and been the spearhead of the Purge of the Jedi. This…man, if that’s what he was, was the Sith Lord of every dark nightmare of every being in the Galaxy. He had been a seasoned warrior for longer than Luke had been alive.
This was the man who had killed Luke’s father.
The man Luke had vowed to kill in turn.
Yet…this felt wrong. Luke had imagined facing Vader someday, after he had learned the ways of the lightsaber, fighting with honor and justice. And Luke knew the Galaxy wasn’t perfect, had known what Leia intended when they’d set out for this TIE, but…Luke still didn’t know what to do. Vader wasn’t even aware he was here, wasn’t even facing his direction, the helmet pressed away against the wall of the TIE.
Luke’s indecision made him vulnerably to distraction, and his eyes caught on exposed wiring revealed on Vader’s back. The back half of Vader’s left shoulder guard had been blown off, leaving the mechanisms underneath out like tangled hair. Luke was curious despite himself. He carefully reached forward and pulled the cape back, exposing a hard metal panel. It rose and fell along with Vader’s breaths. A closer look revealed that most of the wiring looked like prosthetics.
“He’s more machine than man, now,” Luke remembered old Ben saying.
Lots of beings in the Galaxy had prosthetic limbs, especially if they were in the dangerous business of intergalactic travel, but Luke hadn’t realized how much Vader had under that armor. His whole arm was mechanical, and for this panel to be here…
Wait a moment.
Luke drew closer to Vader, for a moment forgetting the deadliness of the man he was beside, to look at the panel. This was like a droid panel. Luke had seen panels like this a hundred times before, it wasn’t even that different from the one on Threepio’s back. This was the place where owners – particularly ones that weren’t very tech-savvy – could plug in new commands. Many droid were voice-responsive, but almost all of them required some physical tinkering for certain orders, like official transfer of ownership or power inputs or memory wipes.
But Vader can’t be a droid, Luke thought in shock, his fingers hovering over the panel, unsure of what was before his very eyes even now. I can sense him in the Force, right here!
Luke had a bad feeling about this.
“Luke,” Leia whispered, and Luke looked up. She had crouched down against the edge of the TIE, her hands gripping the rim of the cockpit as she peered inside. She’d swiped Han’s glowstick and held it in one hand, while Han hovered behind her, clearly debating if he should wrench her back. “What is it?”
Luke swallowed. “It’s a control panel,” he told her. “…For a droid.”
There was a long pause as Leia and Han both absorbed that information.
“Aw, hells,” Han muttered.
“So it’s true,” Leia said, but she sounded doubtful. “Many people have claimed Vader is a droid. He’s pulled off so many impossible things, some people say it’s the only explanation.”
“It’s not an explanation though!” Luke whisper-hissed back. “He – I can feel him. In the Force! I can feel him right now! Heck, why would a droid need to breathe?”
Vader’s breathes echoed around them pointedly.
Leia looked back and exchanged glances with Han.
“Maybe he’s like that old Separatist general from the Clone Wars,” she suggested. “General Grevious. They say all that was left of him was a sack of organs, his brain, and his eyes. The rest of him was all droid.”
Luke shuddered a little at the thought. What a horrible existence.
“Look, we can inspect him all we want later,” Leia whispered harshly. “Just – let’s get this done. Do it with your saber, or move aside so I can come down and do it myself. Make sure you’ve got it lined up right. We have to kill him in one blow.”
Leia’s words were harsh, but they trailed off Luke’s mind like water on stone. He looked back at the panel. One of the switches seemed almost to be glowing, a whispering filling his ears.
He reached for it.
“Luke!” Leia hissed.
“I just want to see something,” he heard himself say distantly, and then twisted the knob.
A hologram came to life before him, dimly illuminating the TIE. It took Luke a moment to register what it was displaying.
Vader.
A blurred figure of a indistinct man floated in the center, but only in head and torso. The man’s arms and legs were entirely mechanical, the hologram projecting little notes and options to explore more detail on each of them. But Luke quickly identified the difference between the physical mechanics…and the software.
He felt his stomach drop to the floor. Luke had seen variations of slave chips that triggered if a slave did a certain action or left a certain location, and droid programming that directed them into obedience. Vader seemed to have some horrible mixture of the two, intertwined into his spine and heart, climbing up his neck and digging its fingers into his head like an infecting root system.
Luke covered his mouth with his hand, feeling sick.
He was no master at engineering but he’d always had a knack for it. Though he couldn’t totally follow what this was, he got the gist of it, the aim.
Vader was a person. But he had no free will. He hadn’t for…who knew how long.
“Luke,” Leia whispered again. “What is that?”
“It’s…some kind of control system,” Luke gasped out, his voice hoarse. “Like a droid’s. I…I don’t think he can disobey an order, when given from whoever’s in charge of this.”
The Emperor, Luke’s mind supplied, the mysterious figure that seemed so distant and so present at the same time, his shadow looming over everything, so rarely interacting with anything directly now but somehow his ripples always seemed to be in control.
Luke looked up at Leia in horror….only to see that her expression had turned calculating. She was looking at him, but her eyes were distant, and he could see a million different thoughts going through her head.
Now he had a bad feeling about this, too.
Han, though, rubbed a hand over his face and looked out onto the forest. “You’re telling me Vader, one of the highest-ranking beings in the Empire, the Commander of the Imperial Navy…is a puppet?”
“I – I don’t know,” Luke said helplessly, looking back at Vader. He didn’t know what to feel about this. Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru had always taught him to be forgiving of slaves; slaves had to do all sorts of horrible things to survive, whether at their master’s behest or driven to it by the abuse of their situation. But how was Luke supposed to pair that with Vader? He stared at the Sith, a mesh of a man and machine, wondering how much of him was perpetrator and how much of him was victim.
Luke felt like he was a child again, sitting at the dinner table with Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru, dealing with his first hard subjects and realizing that the Galaxy was complicated.
“Luke,” Leia said, drawing Luke’s attention again. He looked up at her; her expression was serious. “Can you…immobilize him?”
Luke blinked, furrowing his brow. “What?”
“We could take him prisoner,” Leia argued. “Think of what information we could get out of him – and he’d be an invaluable hostage, too.”
“Are you insane?” Han shouted, and Luke startled a bit at the change in volume. Han barreled on. “You want to take Lord Vader as a hostage?”
Leia shot Han a scathing look. “Yes, Han, because that’s how war works. Hostages are part of tactics.”
Han stared at her like she’d just said she wanted to try an amphibian-focused Hutt diet, and Luke might’ve laughed if he didn’t feel incredibly awkward that they were choosing now of all times to get into one of their spats.
“Lord. Kriffing. Vader,” Han enunciated. He flicked his hand with every word. “The man has a laser-sword! He chokes people! With his mind!”
Luke looked back at Vader thoughtfully, eyeing the control panel. He didn’t think any technology could control the Force, as far as he knew. So Vader was Force-choking people all himself, right?
“I know, Han, I was held prisoner by him!” Leia was arguing back. “Believe me, I’ve seen what he can do. But believing the Empire is invincible is the first step in letting them win. Despite everything, Vader’s just a man.”
“Or we could just kill him,” Han shot back. “Kriff, isn’t that what we wanted to do two minutes ago? Let’s go back to that plan.”
“This is a better opportunity – “
While the two of them continued to circle around, Luke decided to actually make some progress. He might as well learn a thing or two, right? He peered at the holo display, skimming over the prosthetics. They actually didn’t seem very advanced, like he might’ve expected for someone as important and presumably wealthy as Darth Vader. They were strong and durable, but had practically nothing in recent comfort advancements.
Since there wasn’t much to see with them, Luke instead turned his attention to the software bits. Usually there would be some kind of password, key, or other identification method for a droid’s control panel. But Luke nudged one of the knobs and it just…let him through.
There was a name of ownership at the top of the data readings, and it wasn’t Sheev Palpatine. It was Darth Sidious, whoever that was. Luke frowned severely at it; obviously they were a Sith Lord, which was bad news, but it was hard to imagine even a Sith Lord above Vader.
Under Sidious’s name, there was a long list of commands:
[Never harm your Master.]
[Always obey Darth Sidious.]
[Serve the Empire.]
[Destroy the Rebels and any seditious beings.]
[Purge all Jedi.]
[Hunt down the Rebels responsible for destroying the Death Star and eliminate them.]
The list went on, even being repetitive at some points, some specific regarding planets and people, others more vague. There were small symbols beside them that displayed priorities and dates. Some of the dates went back roughly twenty years – that was the start of the Empire.
Luke flexed his hands nervously. Vader had been subject to all this…for twenty whole years?
He’d been a slave for longer than Luke had been alive.
Had Ben known about this? No, he couldn’t have. It didn’t make sense.
“Oh, Anakin…”
The words echoed in Luke’s ears, impossibly distant and silent and yet he swore he could feel the breath of them against his head. The voice was filled with immeasurable sorrow and grief, awash with fresh understanding and horror.
Ben? Luke tried to call in the Force, but heard nothing else.
Luke firmed up his focus. He could figure this out, get answers somehow, and learn exactly how much Vader was in control. If Vader was truly a slave…then maybe Luke could free him, and then they could go take out this ‘Darth Sidious’ together. Luke wasn’t sure he could ever forgive his father’s murderer…but he had to know the truth either way.
There was an option near the top of the display to add new commands. It seemed too easy, but Luke selected it. Immediately it made a textbox for him to write in a new command. Fiddling with the control panel was a little tricky, but Luke eventually typed something in. He just wanted to test it, not actually do anything crazy…well, maybe a little crazy.
He wrote [Do not kill people.]
He wasn’t too surprised when, when he tried to enter the command, an error display popped up. But oddly, it did not offer any kind of password option or key. It just said [Error,] the screen otherwise entirely blank.
“Luke, back me up here – “ Han started to say, and then cut himself off. “Wait, Luke, what are you doing?”
Luke winced a little. Maybe he’d gotten a bit too engrossed. “Um…”
“Are you tinkering on Darth Vader?” Han asked with more incredulity than even Leia mustered sometimes.
Luke cringed again. “…Kind of?” he admitted.
Han stared at him in flabbergasted horror, and then hid his face in his hands and groaned in wordless mortification.
“What’d you find out?” Leia asked, ignoring Han in favor of leaning down again and peering at the display Luke was fiddling with.
Luke wasn’t sure where to begin for a moment. He decided on saying, “Well, apparently he’d subservient to someone named ‘Darth Sidious.’”
“Darth Sidious?” Leia repeated in confusion, trying out the name. “I’ve never heard of him. He’s gotta be a Sith Lord though, right?”
Han groaned louder. “The Jedi and the Sith Lords, don’t you start going on about them too, Leia.”
Leia turned to Han with a firm look. “Look laserbrain, pick and choose your smuggler’s legends, but my father knew Jedi back in the war. Bail Organa was no fool.”
“Your worshipfulness, I’m sure your pop did, and fancy weapons and ancient magic tricks are neat and all, but it can’t be that – “
Aaaaaand they were back to bickering.
“It doesn’t look like I can put in new commands,” Luke cut in before they could really get going.
They both cut off and turned to him, quiet now.
“Do you think he could be sliced?” Leia asked after a moment.
Han snorted. “Yeah sure, get that R2 unit up here and let him try.”
Luke tried not to laugh at the thought. Artoo would love to get to hack a Sith Lord.
“What would we even put in him?” Han asked, exasperated. “’Please don’t kill people’?”
Luke grinned. “That’s what I tried!”
Han shook his head. “Of course you did.”
“Put us as his new owners,” Leia said flatly, and both Luke and Han went quiet. Her serious tone completely broke their attempts to lighten the mood.
Han turned to her, mouth hanging open. “You want to what?!” he squeaked.
“Yeah, I’m with Han on that one,” Luke put in.
Leia shot Luke a glare that said Not helping.
“It’s a start,” she argued, crossing her arms. “We can figure out what to do with him after. Interrogation, hostage, prisoner for execution later – we can keep all these options open if we control him.”
“Sure, we’ll throw him in storage with goldenrod,” Han spluttered.
“He’s not,” Luke said, suddenly intensely furious, “a droid.”
They all went quiet again for a moment. Luke wasn’t sure why he felt so angry on Vader’s behalf. But Vader was an opponent, an enemy, a tyrant, but…even those things deserved respect.
“Luke,” Leia said, and her tone was gentle even as her next words were harsh, “Vader’s service to the Empire has caused millions of beings to be enslaved. I know it’s not ideal, but leashing him is the lesser evil, here. This is war. We can’t completely keep our hands clean.” Luke saw her purse her lips in his peripheral vision even as he glared petulantly at Vader. “It’s not enslaving him. We’re taking him prisoner and holding him in the best way we can. We won’t own him.”
Luke really didn’t like this topic. He loved Leia, and knew she wasn’t completely corrupted by her hatred like so many other Rebels. Hells, he’d seen her tear into Rebels that took it too far, she constantly railed against unnecessary cruelty against Imperials or collateral damage to civilians. She championed the honor and integrity of the Rebel Alliance.
But he saw her point. You couldn’t be too principled in war. You couldn’t win without killing, couldn’t save lives without losing others. Luke hated to think about it, but that was the exact call he’d made when he’d fired those torpedoes into the Death Star.
One million, five hundred and fifty-six thousand, two hundred and ninety-six lives lost…at his press of a button.
Was he a one-man Death Star, in that way?
Leia had refused to tell him how many people had died. First she’d tried to deflect, then she’d told him he didn’t want to know.
He’d found out anyway.
Still, what choice was there, after the nearly two billion lives they’d taken on Alderaan?
Luke knew that if Leia had the choice, she’d kill Vader quickly and cleanly, just as they’d planned. But she had to think of leading the Alliance, of plans, of saving more lives. And if that meant dirtying her hands, she didn’t hesitate.
Luke understood all of this. But it was still hard. He avoided thinking about it more than he wanted to admit. But then it popped up in his face, like now.
He shook his head. “Look, I don’t think I even can make changes to him,” he tried to argue. “There’s some kind of guard I can’t make sense of. See, even when I try – “ He went to the ‘Add Master’ option and typed in all three of their names, just to show her, “ – it doesn’t work.” He pressed the button and the error message showed up. “There’s no password or key or anything. I can’t make sense of it.”
Leia leaned down into the cockpit so far she was close to fall over, peering at the error message as if trying to read a small-text ancient language. Luke let her, even as the pop-up disappeared, leaving their names still in the entry box.
“Oh, well, too bad,” Han said with a large shrug. “Can we just kill him now?”
And then, like a serpentine sketto lunging up from the sands, suddenly Vader was awake.
It went from a moment of camaraderie to oh shavit before an eye had the chance to blink. One second Luke was almost comfortable with the deep, rhematic breaths of the resting strength of the Sith Lord, and the next he was pinned to the TIE’s wall like a massive talon of a bird of prey had decided that, though he was pretty scrawny, he’d do for dinner. His body slammed into the metal, his head swimming sluggishly as it was knocked back and forced to the side, his chest and neck and limbs and everything crushed against the wall like he was squashed by a trash compactor that was specifically molded for his body – or two sizes too tight. The wind was knocked out of him as he wheezed desperately to recover a breath, his chest straining to press just a millimeter against the unrelenting pressure and gasp in a gulp of air.
He vaguely heard Han and Leia cry out, but his vision sparked with white spots and his thoughts fizzled out.
Then the deep voice rumbled in like a storm, like thunder that could tremor in the distance and then suddenly walk up to you and pin you down with a thumb.
“You should have taken the chance when you had it, Rebels,” Vader said, slowly rising from the other end of the TIE. He had a hand braced against the wall, but there was no lack of strength as he rose and rose until his head nearly reached the hatch. He turned his death head’s mask toward Luke, a hand extended in the air, raised to hold Luke down without even a touch. Coldness radiated from that hand, and from the blank eye shields behind it. “Now you will die out of mere foolishness.”
Luke could barely even register the words. He gritted his teeth and, with sheer determination and a splitting headache’s worth of effort, barely turned his head to glare forward at Vader.
Even the air, the remaining dust and debris from the crash, seemed to flee away from Vader. The damage to his suit didn’t seem to slow him down at all; the exposed wiring just looked like a branch that had gotten stuck on his cape rather than an open wound. Everything around them, the very space between them, radiated with polished strength, with frightening power. A hurricane with deliberate consciousness.
Vader peered at Luke for a moment of consideration. “The pilot who destroyed the Death Star…” Vader observed, and Luke felt that horrible dark presence almost cradle him for a moment. Though Vader did not move, Luke had the impression of hands grasping his chin and tilting his face side to side like a slaver making note of their wares.
It made him sick.
“I expected more,” Vader said, a whiplash in time with the words as that passingly careful examination cracked into dismissal. “This is the student Kenobi brought along? Jedi younglings have put up more of a fight. Your feat at the Death Star was mere luck. Your potential is misspent. You are nothing.”
I’m the son of Anakin Skywalker!! Luke wanted to shout, but his throat could barely open enough for breath. He was a great Jedi! And I WILL avenge him!
But he just gave a pathetic gasp. Even with all his effort, he could barely manage a senseless syllable, much less a defiant declaration.
I can’t die like this!! Luke thought furiously. Crushed by Vader like a bug? Failing to avenge his father, avenge Ben? After everything, it couldn’t just be over. He had to put up more of a fight!
The Force whispered to him, singing beneath Vader’s durasteel power like a bird fluttering through bramble. It chittered excitedly to Luke, and then skipped off to Vader, chirping urgently in that direction. Desperately Luke turned his attention to it, trusting it, and it prodded and pecked more insistently, urging him on to something small. A small kernel of light, shining and sparkling. He just had to grasp it.
“Kenobi’s legacy dies with you, boy,” Vader said, and his lightsaber suddenly snapped into his lowered hand.
He took a step towards Luke and Luke lunged in the Force – blindly, fumbling, seizing whatever it was the Force wanted him to take.
There was an odd sensation of a key clicking into place.
Vader froze with a jerk, his breath hitching.
The power pining Luke gave out abruptly, and he crashed onto the metal ground, gasping for air. He heard Vader’s breathing continue. There was a cheerful automated chirping noise.
Luke looked up, his eyes watering and head throbbing, but he knew he couldn’t afford to give himself any time to recover.
A green holo-display floated between Luke and Vader. The text faced Luke.
[New Masters entered,] it calmly declared. [Luke Skywalker, Leia Organa, Han Solo.]
Luke stared at it blankly. What? How - ? Did the command panel on Vader’s back require some kind of Force touch to work?
Did Luke just actually pull that off?
What the - ?
A deep, sarcastic laugh broke Luke out of his spiraling thoughts. His head shot up to look at Vader, standing across from him. The helmet of the Sith Lord was facing the sky as the laugh echoed around them, ringing in Luke’s ears.
“Clever boy,” Vader purred, sounding amused, as those impassive eye shields lowered to look at him. Not furious, not angry, not vengeful. His mask was impossible to read as it glimmered in the dim light. “It seems our destinies are more intertwined than I thought.”