Chapter Text
“Han,” Luke said, “I really don’t think that’s going to help.”
Without glancing up from the mess of metal scraps that had, only a few disastrous minutes ago, been the Force Box of Doom, Han snapped, “Can’t make it worse than this, can it?”
Luke was about a hundred and fifty percent sure that “Box of Doom” wasn’t the correct terminology, but Ben hadn’t even had time to teach him how to make things float, let alone cover the proper name of obscure boxes that reeked of fear and shot out lightning bolts of disaster. Some of the scraps were still smoking, tiny funeral pyres of common sense from the last time Han had “had an idea”.
“That’s what you said about shooting it,” muttered Luke. A tiny growl echoed beside him.
“Shut up Chewie, you shot at it too,” snapped Han. “Ow!”
It was a testament to…something…just how big a piece of metal Chewie had thrown at Han, considering that Chewie himself was now knee-high. Well, knee-high to Luke at least. Well, on a level to where Luke’s knees should’ve been.
Another mission failure, Luke reflected glumly, and what a failure it was. Chased by Darth Vader, lost in the ruins, and then zapped into toddler? And where even was Vader now? Maybe they had lost him in the maze of passages…and yet...
“Han, I think we should go,” he said, glancing worriedly at the ceiling. It had probably met all sorts of safety standards…a thousand years and five minutes ago. Now it groaned along the scorch marks of blaster bolts and de-aging lightning bolts. How Han had managed to avoid getting hit when they’d arced wildly out of the chamber Luke attributed to the luck of fools.
“Luke, this has got to be some weird sort of machine that did this to you and Chewie and we gotta figure out how to reverse it!”
Danger, confusion, lies, whispered the part of Luke that had never fit, never belonged. Be on your guard. Uncle Owen had never liked it when Luke expressed these feelings, liked it even less when Luke acted on them. On Tatooine, Uncle Owen had just been Uncle Owen, stern and strict, but strong. A man whom Luke had never seen surrender to the slow desperation of being only one bad harvest away from disaster. And while he’d never liked it when Luke said something was going to happen before it did, he’d always believed him. Among the Rebellion, when he told stories of his family, he always got the sense that Leia didn’t approve of Uncle Owen even though she never said it. The stories of her own father spoke of a gentle man, cultured and kind, who always listened. Wedge scoffed at the “inherent folly” of trying to keep a Skywalker tied to the ground. Han though…Han reminded him of Uncle Owen at times. Not the sarcastic humor, but the gruff almost-but-never-quite-cynical demeanor, the absolute loyalty…even in the face of things he could not understand. In that, Han reminded Luke sharply of the Uncle he missed sharply.
So, when Luke suddenly spun to face the door and hissed, “Han, someone’s coming!” he was not surprised when Han instantly dropped the smoking scrap metal and went for his blaster. Chewie hefted another scrap of metal, being currently somewhat smaller than his weapon. Luke fumbled for his lightsaber, but his hands were too small and his body too uncoordinated. All three spun to face the only entrance to the chamber and waited. Silence fell and doubt crept into Luke’s mind. Maybe he hadn’t…
A young man, no older than Luke, stumbled around the corner. A young man with dark blond hair and yellow eyes who wore only a long black cloak. The three friends gaped at this strange new arrival and he, in turn gaped at them. Luke wasn’t sure which looked more suspicious, a human adult male with a blaster and two toddlers (one human, one Wookie, both lacking clothes) or a young human male dressed only in a large black cloak. And all of them in the ruins of an ancient temple on a deserted island of an off-limits planets in an obscure corner of the galaxy. Then things happened.
“Where is he?” shouted the stranger.
“Uh,” said Han.
The feelings in Luke’s head exploded and without knowing what he was doing or why, he flung out his pudgy baby hand and pushed. Han and Chewie were flung backward as the ceiling collapsed in a rain of debris and rubble.
Luke himself was inexplicably dragged forward. He landed…gently?…near the stranger, dazed but not injured. A quick glance back showed the erstwhile ceiling now occupied the middle of the large chamber, completely blocking him off from his friends. Starlight streamed down from the gap, dust in the air catching the pale light. Clattering stones still rang in his ears; Luke couldn’t even hear his friends.
”Han! Chewie!” he screamed, stumbling over to the pile of rubble. This day just couldn’t get any worse…
“Young one, do not hurt yourself.” The stranger moved forward. On wild, raw instinct, Luke scrambled away.
“Your fear is strikingly complex, for a child.”
…Right. He wasn’t in the body of an adult, whose motives for being here would be presumed to be criminal. He was currently a toddler, not a Rebel about to be shot or arrested. Luke practically vibrated with tension. It wasn’t just that being de-aged made him shorter, 21 years folded down to fit inside the body of a three-year-old. Everything was different. His hand-eye coordination was off, as was his balance and even his ability to think logically. He knew, he just knew that if he was in his proper body, he could’ve solved this problem, found a way, found a way to help Han. Now all he seemed able to do was jitter with tension and frustration. At any moment, he felt like he could burst out into tears. No wonder children cried, he thought gloomily. They had no stronger way to affect change over their worlds.
In addition to this, something about this stranger seemed vaguely, horrifyingly familiar. Somehow, he knew this man he had never seen before and he didn’t trust him.
Pretend to be a kid, Luke thought frantically. You’re not a Rebel pilot about to be arrested or shot. Pretend to be a kid. What would a young kid do?
“Stay away from me!” he cried out. “My uncle said not to talk to strangers!”
“I presume he also told you to stay away from off-limits planets,” the young man said, crouching down beside him.
“I don’t know what that means,” Luke lied.
“Lie,” said the man simply.
“No it’s not.”
“Yes, it is.”
“Is not.”
Frustration flared in the man’s blue eyes. Blue? Had they always been blue? “I will not continue this childish exchange, young one. Come with me.”
“No! My friends need help!”
“Friendship is a lie you must shed to achieve your true power,” snarled the young man.
Okay, who in the galaxy said that sort of thing to a child? “You’re a bad man,” Luke snapped. “My friends are important!”
“Important?” repeated the man. “Those are big words for a…three year old.”
Oops. “No they aren’t,” said Luke, channeling Han’s obstinacy and Leia’s argumentativeness for all he was worth. “You just don’t know kids very well.”
For some reason, these words triggered a flood of absolute rage and the man snarled, “My child was stolen from me!”
What? What even…”You’re scaring me,” Luke said, trying to remember how he’d seen the world when he was little. Simple, he thought. Good, bad, scary, comforting.
“Master your fear. Your anger gives you strength,” said the stranger. “Why limit yourself, Luke?”
The entire galaxy went quiet then, save for the beating of Luke’s pulse in his ears and an awful truth whispered in the Force.
“Vader,” he breathed.
Another beat of silence, and then…
“Skywalker,” said the handsome young man who apparently was the most frightening person in the galaxy. It wasn’t fair, Luke thought numbly. He was everything Luke wanted to be, tall, strong, sure of himself. And everything Luke didn’t want to be, feared and defined only by his power and the cruelties he inflicted with it.
“How?” choked Luke.
Vader spoke again, stepping closer to Luke. “Whatever your fool smuggler did to cause this, his stupidity has served me well.”
“Han’s not stupid,” Luke snapped, backing away. Though Leia would probably not agree when she learned Han had unintentionally freed Vader of the suit that represented his only weakness…
“He came back at Yavin,” Vader said, moving forward another slow and sure step.
Rage boiled in Luke. For Vader, who didn’t know the first thing about friendship, to use Han’s clearest moment of bravery and loyalty like that…
A sneer split the man’s face, twisting it into an ugly thing. Now it was no difficult thing to see the death mask in his eyes. “You will find I do know the first thing about friendship and the last thing about betrayal, young one. You will learn that lesson too, if you continue to cripple yourself with your friends.”
Behind them, the pile of rubble separating Luke from his friends shuddered. Chunks of rock tumbled from the top of the pile; for the first time, Luke could hear his friends’ cries of “Luke!”
Luke ran. Toddler legs weren’t great for running for one’s life, but toddler size was great for squeezing through tight spaces. If he could only make it to the rocks, to the top of the pile…
“Luke!”
Hands seized him, snatched him straight off the floor and Luke instinctively lashed out. His feet connected solidly with Vader’s bare arm. Shock rippled through the Force. Shock, sensation, the touch of another against whole, unscarred skin, wonder….Vader’s grasp loosened. Luke kicked out again and again. It hurt more than he anticipated when he hit the floor, but one did not grow up on Tatooine without learning to deal with pain and children, Aunt Beru had always said, were resilient. He was up and running again in a moment. Unfortunately, that moment was all it took for Vader to recover from whatever shock had arrested him. Luke felt rather than saw movement behind him, knew that if he was caught again, Vader would never let him go.
“Han!” He yelled, not caring how desperate his voice sounded. And Han, as always, was there. More rocks dividing him from his friends tumbled aside as Chewie’s still-tiny form emerged from the top of the rubble. Wookies, Luke thought fervently, are amazing. Blaster fire zipped over his head as Han leaned through the gap, forcing Vader to ignite his lightsaber—where had he gotten that from—and deflect the fire. Strangely, none of the deflected blasts came anywhere close to Luke.
Luke made it to the rubble and climbed for all he was worth, scraping small hands and knees raw on the stones. Behind him, Vader gave a roar. Rage, fear, desperation buffeted against Luke. He was getting away, again…
The rock Han was leaning against slipped and his shot went wide as he fell back through the gap. The stones under Luke shuddered, slipping away from him. The entire pile was shifting, moving. Vader. Vader was doing something with the Force to eliminate the obstacle that was Luke’s only chance to get away. Chewie, the only one still on his feet, gave a roar of his own and reached for a scrap of metal almost as large as himself. He could not hope to lift it. Work, Luke thought desperately. This has to work. The only chance they had now was to distract Vader and run like hell.
Somehow it did. The rubble lifted smoothly in Chewie’s hands and sailed straight for Vader’s unmasked face. The lightsaber cut a smooth, almost lazy arc as it sliced through the rubble. Luke had time for just one thought, I’ll never get so good with a lightsaber, before the scrap exploded in fingers of familiar lightning.
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Luke came to with a groan. Every centimeter of his body ached…but…he sat up and stared down at himself. There were the correct number of centimeters of his body present.
“Easy, Kid,” said Han from his side. “You’ve had a busy day.”
Luke laughed, part in fond memory, part in sheer relief. “Chewie? Where’s Chewie?”
A soft rumbling answered him; he turned his head to see Chewie, once again his giant self, slumped across the rec bench in the Falcon’s main hold. Wait…they were in the Falcon?
“What happened to Vader?” Luke demanded.
Han shrugged. “Don’t know, Kid. It was as much as I could do to get you and Chewie out…Chewie wasn’t as affected by the change back as you or Vader for some reason. Maybe we got lucky and he’s buried under the rubble still.” Han raked a hand through his hair. Good, Luke should’ve thought, but couldn’t. He wondered if he could ever think of Darth Vader again without recalling the words “my child was stolen from me.” That had to have been a lie, to get Luke to drop his guard. A clever lie, that was all…but the Force which had sung with truth after truth the entire day…hadn’t whispered, lies lies.
Han broke through his thoughts by ruffling his hair. “You made a cute kid, kid. Always an adventure with you, isn’t it?”
“I don’t see how you can call this one my fault,” Luke protested. “You two geniuses are the ones who shot the thing!”
Han and Chewie only laughed.
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Vader stood still, staring up a sky full of stars yet still utterly empty, for his son was gone. Again. The suit hung heavily on him, tight, restrictive, suffocating. Metal limbs ached where they met flesh.
So…that had been his son as he had looked when only a child.
He was still standing there, on a ruined temple on a deserted island of an abandoned planet in an obscure corner of the galaxy when the Stormtroopers arrived, still haunted by the glimpse of a might-have-been.