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“Returned, you have.”
“I said I would complete my training.” To what purpose, he isn’t sure. Luke sounds impertinent, but Master Yoda does not acknowledge it.
Yoda hobbles back into his hut; Luke follows.
R2 whistles he’ll head back to the ship.
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They meditate together. They’ve barely spoken more than a dozen words to each other since his arrival. There is no need for talking with the Force. Luke knows what Yoda thinks of him. (He has not seen or heard Obi-Wan.)
Luke runs through the swamp alone. He avoids the cave.
He failed at Bespin. He paid for it with his hand, lightsaber, and Han; nearly Leia and Chewie. But for the first time in his life, he has the truth.
Obi-Wan and Yoda failed him. They knew. Twisted as it is, at least Vader told him who he truly is. More than could be said for his masters or Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru.
He jumps into the higher branches of a tree and pauses.
They must have known too. How many times did Uncle Owen uneasily say Luke was too much like his father? More than they feared him running off and becoming Anakin Skywalker; they feared him running off and becoming Darth Vader. He can’t say he blames them.
For the first time since Tatooine, Luke feels resentment towards his uncle and aunt. He wants to yell at all of them: for coddling him, for lying to him, for letting him run off.
Instead, he leaps to the next tree; or tries to. In his anger, he is not concentrating and misses what should be an easy branch to reach. His hands slip and he falls to the ground, hard. He’ll be sore later, but he is grateful he can at least feel.
His left hand is scratched and bloody from the rough bark. His right hand is unmarred.
He lies back and stares up into the thick tangle of trees and vines. The Force has given him a cruel irony: his father wants him, when Luke will have nothing more to do with him. (And after searching his whole life for Anakin Skywalker in the stars.)
Luke rarely, if ever, thought about his mother. There was no adventure in dying in childbirth, and as child, it was all he craved. Who was she? How does someone fall in love with the man who becomes Darth Vader? Was it even love?
He realizes now her death was probably another lie. She might be alive, but the Force overwhelmingly tells him she is not. (He hates the certainty that accompanies it.) He will not cling to her – he has learned his lesson.
A light rain begins to fall; the dank heat of the swamp begins to dissipate.
Luke gets up and continues running.
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After Yavin, the oppressive feeling Luke had at his back was for more than simply being the pilot who destroyed the Death Star. The Empire had a price on a terrorist’s head; a father wanted his son.
After Bespin, the relentless pursuit does not follow. The father’s given up.
It puzzles Luke, but when he is not on Dagobah, he tries not to think about it. He can’t let Leia see, although he suspects she already knows too much. (He doesn’t ask how.)
He and Yoda speak more: the mysteries of the Force still seem remote to Luke, but he tries to let his confusion go.
They still do not speak of Vader; Obi-Wan does not join them.
There is no reason to fear the swamp after dark, but Luke chases the invisible sun back to Yoda’s hut. He has run past the cave what feels like hundreds of times now, not revisiting it once.
Something tells him tonight is different. The fear and doubt that pervaded the cave last time remains; he has no choice but to go in unarmed.
Although Luke is protected by Dagobah’s thick fog of the Force, he can sense the other man’s presence, systems away, as if they were standing feet from each other. It is not a pleasant feeling.
As he pushes forward he realizes: last time, the fears and doubts were his own. Now they are his father’s.
He comes to the spot where he found a masked specter before. It remains, almost unmoving, breathing loudly, in stark contrast to the life teeming around it; a vision of his father’s isolation. Luke feels a surge of pity and sorrow.
His father is trapped; trapped in the suit, trapped as Vader, trapped as the Emperor’s own. His father does not pursue him because he is his son. He will not willingly take part in giving him over to the Emperor, to become a creature of misery and destruction as Vader is.
The Emperor and his empire. It always comes back to him. Luke’s old hatred and indignation comes rushing back, but it feels different: at once sharper and sadder. (At least something his uncle and aunt instilled in him remains.)
Luke reaches out to the suit. It is not the real thing, but the vision is the shape his father takes in his mind and Luke needs something to reinforce what he finally understands.
As he lays a hand on its arm, it dissolves to nothing.
When Luke returns to the hut, Yoda says, “Time it is, to consider your new lightsaber.”
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The new lightsaber has a different quality to it. It balances naturally in Luke’s hand in a way his previous blade did not. It is wholly his own; unconnected to Anakin Skywalker’s legacy.
He knows what Yoda wants him to do with it. Luke begins to suspect he will never speak to either of his teachers directly about his father. It is to be a part of his training: accepting, as they have, that Anakin Skywalker fell and rose Darth Vader.
Luke accepts it, but cannot stop there, old stubborn streak coming back, in spite of months of carefully closed-off emotion and training.
The cave is wrong. Luke will not follow in Vader’s footsteps; there is something left of Anakin Skywalker in the wretched armor.
First he will help save Han and then he will save his father.