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The rebel princess’s expression promised murder when Vader came to collect her from his shuttle’s brig. It was not unwarranted. Vader had, after all, taken her prisoner, encased her lover in carbonite, and sold him to Jabba’s bounty hunter. At her age, he would have cheerfully disemboweled someone for less. The Wookie growled up at him from where he was assembling a still-complaining C-3PO under the watchful eyes of the guards. Vader ignored them all. The girl was the only one that mattered.
“What have you done to Luke?” she demanded, just as haughty as she’d been when she’d still had a planet to rule.
“You already know the answer. You can sense it.”
Her gaze grew distant. She squeezed her right wrist, grimacing as though it had been her flesh he’d cut through. He was right then. Luke may had fallen far, but he was not yet out of reach. With the princess as a tether, Vader could still reel him back in.
“You will assist me in locating him.”
The princess narrowed her eyes dangerously and raised her chin in a way which reminded him, achingly, of Padmé. He’d been seeing her everywhere lately, first in their son’s face and now this girl’s.
“You can not seriously think, after everything you’ve done, that I would ever help—”
“You prefer him to fall to his death then?”
Her nostrils flared as she attempted to stare Vader down. There were no guarantees here. The princess was, after all, the same person who allowed her planet to be destroyed rather than betray the rebellion. Still, Luke had run headlong into an obvious trap the second he had sensed she was in danger. His son deserved someone who would do the same.
There was not an inch of give in her body, but Vader felt it in the Force the moment she made her decision. He opened the cell and she swept past him into the corridor.
“Well?” she demanded, turning back.
Vader gestured for one of the guards to follow and quickly overtook her.
“Who were your parents?” Vader asked as they made their way to the cockpit.
The princess kept attempting to pull ahead, no easy feat considering his stride was nearly twice the length hers. He easily kept up with her each time she quickened the pace. They were not quite at running yet, but it was getting ridiculous. Talking would slow her down, making it easier to study her and determine who, exactly, she reminded him of.
The girl shot him a withering look. “Bail and Breha Organa.”
Obviously. “And before that?” The Organas had never pretended their daughter had not been adopted.
“I don’t know,” she ground out, slowing just enough to catch her breath.
“They were Jedi,” Vader said with absolute certainty.
He couldn’t recall anyone being pregnant near the end of the war, but that didn’t mean anything. He’d been far outside the loop of temple gossip and he wouldn’t have been surprised to hear that every knight had a dozen by-blows scattered across the galaxy. They’d been discouraged from emotional intimacy, not sex. All the better to seed the next generation of Force sensitives.
“You are strong in the Force.”
There was a slim chance the Organas had stumbled, unsuspecting, into adopting a Jedi’s spawn. Considering the dangerous games they seemed to have enjoyed playing, it had likely been very deliberate. An ally’s child, perhaps, or one scavenged from the temple crèche? What had they planned for her? She was obviously untrained.
“I am no Jedi,” she said as they stepped into the cockpit.
Vader gestured for her to sit in the co-pilot’s seat and settled behind the pilot’s yoke. “You could have been.” The Jedi of old would have said her lack of training at twenty was a waste, but he knew from experience that it was never too late to start. “Skywalker is reaching out to you. Close you eyes and reach back. Trust in the Force. Let it guide you.”
She glared at him for another moment before grudgingly complying. Her eyes closed and her expression smoothed out as she breathed slowly, in and out, in and out. She was no Jedi but someone had taught her to meditate. Good. That would make things easier.
“Luke,” she murmured. The connection between the two of them thrummed. “He’s under the station,” she said, almost dreamily. “Cresh Sector garbage shoot.”
Vader fired up the engines and lifted off. He did not relax, he could not, not until the boy was in custody, but his shoulders loosened.
Her eyes snapped open. “Hurry!” she ordered as though Vader had been the one resisting and delaying them at every turn. “He’s slipping.”
Vader poured on the speed as they swooped below the station, then slowed sharply as they approached Cresh Sector. It would not do for them to fly past Luke in their haste.
“There!” The princess pointed at a tiny figure clinging to an antenna in the distance.
Vader veered in Luke’s direction and slowed further. “Go to the emergency top hatch and prepare to bring Skywalker aboard,” he ordered the trooper.
“Yes, my lord.” The trooper clicked his heels and set his blaster down at the base of the access ladder in the rear of the cockpit before beginning to climb.
It was tricky maneuvering the ship into position. Too close and they risked crushing Luke against the hull of the station. Too far away and they would not be able to catch him when he inevitably lost his hold on the antenna. The princess clutched her armrests in a white-knuckled grip, but Vader’s hands were loose on the yoke. The Force was with him. He would rescue his son. He would not fail. Not this time.
The warning light on the control panel flashed twice and turned a steady red as the trooper opened the top hatch. “I am in position, Lord Vader,” he reported over the intercom. “I have the target in my sights.”
“Good. Bring Skywalker to me.”
In the cockpit, Vader and the princess waited in tense silence. After a moment, raised voices and the sounds of a scuffle tumbled down the access tube. Luke followed it a few seconds later, hitting the deck with a painful thump. The open hatch warning light shut off and Vader allowed himself a single, slow exhale of relief. The boy was safe, but there was still much to do.
The girl was out of her seat in a heartbeat. “Luke,” she cried, rushing towards him as he lay groaning. The trooper jumped down from the ladder a second later and assumed a guard position over them.
Vader resisted the urge to join them. Hands tight on the yoke, he steered them away from the station before setting a course for the far side of the system away from where his flagship waited. Only once the autopilot was engaged did he rise.
Luke sat huddled on the deck with the girl pressed tight against his side. He shook with pain and exhaustion as he cradled the stump of his arm against his chest. His expression was oddly vacant as though he could not grasp what was happening or else had found it so overwhelming that he retreated to some distant corner of his mind. Side-by-side, the two blazed in the Force like the twin suns of Tatooine. The glare the princess turned on Vader was unmistakably Padmé’s.
Vader’s breath caught. The respirator forced it loose.
They had argued about it once, Anakin and his wife. He, with his ear pressed against the swell of her pregnancy straining for the telltale sound of their child’s heart, had declared they were having a girl. No, a son, Padmé had insisted. It seemed they had both been right.
Vader unclasped his cape. Kneeling, he settled it across Luke’s still-trembling shoulders. The weight seemed to force Luke back to himself as he attempted to pull away.
“Son,” Vader said reprovingly, tucking the cape around him tighter.
“Father.” Luke’s shoulders sagged, resigned.
The trooper gasped. Leia recoiled. “Father?!”
“Do not blame him, daughter.” Vader rose. “He didn’t know any more than you did.”
“No, no.” Leia shook her head frantically. Her disbelief and horror bled into the Force. It seemed to be a pattern with his children. “Luke,” she pleaded, as though he could make this better or at least less true.
“I’m sorry,” Luke whispered, he head hanging low. “I didn’t—” He shook his head. “Ben said—” He swallowed hard. “I didn’t know.”
“And yet you have both sensed it, the connection you share with me, with each other.”
“Connection!” Leia surged to her feet, practically shaking with rage. “You tortured me! You cut Luke’s hand off!” Her anger felt less like Padmé’s and more like his used to; justified yet building to something terrible and destructive. “How dare you!”
Luke hauled himself shakily to stand beside his sister. “We’ll never join you, Father. Never.” He raised his chin defiantly and there was Padmé again. She hadn’t wanted to join him either, but someone had to. There was no fixing his mistakes otherwise.
“Rebel scum,” the trooper tried to crowd them up against the bulkhead, “you’re not here to join anyone.” He probably thought he sounded intimidating rather than foolish and misinformed. Vader ignored him.
“You will join me. We share a common purpose.”
Leia scoffed. “I seriously doubt that.”
“Do you not wish to destroy the Emperor? Have I misunderstood the purpose of your little rebellion?”
Leia gasped sharply as she grasped what he meant. She wasn’t the only one. The trooper looked from Vader to her and back again before lunging for his blaster.
Vader caught him easily. “Then what,” he snapped the man’s neck and dropped him on the deck, “exactly, is the problem?”
His children could continue to resist all they liked, but it hardly mattered. They would join him eventually. For now, they were safe, contained, and in his custody. He’d foolishly given Leia’s lover away, but he still had the Wookie for leverage. Vader would remove the shuttle’s transponder, kill the remaining guards, and take them someplace secure before making the necessary repairs to Luke’s hand. He would train the children and then, together, they would destroy his master and bring peace to the galaxy. Together. As a family.