Chapter Text
The boy cowered before him, trembling, ashen, right wrist clutched desperately under his left arm. But his eyes, wet with tears and wild with pain, stayed fixed on Vader. He was still - mostly - lucid. Still able to listen and comprehend what Vader was about to tell him.
“There is no escape,” he intoned. “Don’t make me destroy you.”
The threat was empty, but Luke did not know that yet. He still had enough of his wits about him to inch to the very edge of the gantry, as though clinging one-handed to a strip of metal over a seemingly endless drop posed less danger than Vader did. But Vader allowed him the illusion of safety, even extinguished his lightsaber.
The chase was over and he had, after so many years, finally won.
“Luke,” he coaxed, and relished the sound of his son’s name, spoken directly to the boy for the first time. “You do not yet realize your importance. You have only begun to discover your power. Join me, and I will complete your training.” He reached for Luke, eager to see his words spin into reality. He was so close, so close, to finally having everything he deserved. “With our combined strength, we can end this destructive conflict and bring order to the galaxy.”
Luke spun away, out to the furthest point of the gantry, and called back through clenched teeth and a haze of pain:
“I’ll never join you!”
Vader barely heard him. The boy was still young, so young, and so tragically misled. He would see, at last, how the Jedi had lied to him - about his power, about his family, about everything. “If you only knew the power of the Dark Side. Obi-Wan never told you what happened to your father…”
Never told you that your father is here, standing before you, saved by the Dark Side alone. Never told you that the Jedi ripped your family asunder and the Dark Side will piece it back together…
“He told me enough,” Luke snarled, looking up at Vader with bright-eyed bloodlust. “He told me you killed him.”
“No.”
The Force shivered around him in anticipation. Luke must have sensed it, because dread was already crawling across his face even as fierce pride clutched at Vader’s heart.
“I am your father.”
At last…
Luke’s eyes grew even larger, impossibly wide on a bruised and bloodied face. “No,” he moaned, “that’s not true.” Once again his jaw clenched against the pain Vader sensed lashing into him from all directions. “That’s impossible!”
Vader had expected anger, even grief, but he would not tolerate denial. Not from someone as strong as Luke. “Search your feelings,” he commanded. “You know it to be true.”
And Luke did know. Vader could sense the first tentative beginnings of a bond stretching between them, could sense Luke’s dawning understanding and disbelief and horror. The howl that twisted the boy’s face into a rictus of grief was as animalistic as the one torn from his own lips twenty years earlier when Padme had died. But unlike the grief he had carried with him since then, this wound in Luke’s psyche could be healed - would be healed - and together they would reach unimaginable heights.
“Luke, you can destroy the Emperor,” he continued - encouraging now, as a father should be. “He has foreseen this. Join me, and we can rule the galaxy as father and son!”
This was all, all he had ever wanted. This was everything he had worked for every moment of every day for the past two years. And after a lifetime of slavery, after two decades without his wife, he was entitled to at least one thing to call his own.
He reached for Luke, ready to claim him at last.
“Come with me,” Vader commanded. “It is the only way.”
Luke looked up at him and the wild, desperate light in his eyes settled into something calmer. Something stronger.
Acceptance.
Vader realized a second too late what it meant, as Luke fell back, away from the gantry, away from his father, into the endless city core.
His heart, his dreams, everything he dared hope for the both of them, fell with his son.
The few seconds of stunned disbelief cost him, and when he cast out desperately, angrily for Luke in the Force ( he had worked too hard for too long to lose the boy to death, not now, not ever ), he had fallen too far. The best Vader could do was slow the tumbling free-fall and direct Luke's body towards a waste collection tunnel. He did not know enough about the city’s inner workings to know where it would lead - a collection centre or elsewhere - until a flash of fear burned bright across the newly-formed bond.
The sensation of falling again, terror that might have been Luke’s or might have been his, a sudden stop.
Wind and tears and pain .
Luke had caught something. Under the city, dangling, with only one hand to cling to whatever lifeline he had found.
He could still be rescued.
Vader could still win.
He left the carbon freezing chamber without stopping, barely noticing the destruction he and his child had wrought. An aide fell into step beside him, and if the man noticed that Skywalker had not been taken prisoner, he was wise enough not to comment.
“Bring my shuttle.”
Vader took two more steps and then he was falling, the floor gone and his vision dark. Terror seized him, an absolute certainty that Luke had lost his grip and was falling to his death on the gas giant below.
If he was indeed the Chosen One, why had the Force seen fit to rob him of his loved ones over and over and over again? If he was about to sense his son’s death, would the Force at least grant enough mercy to finally allow him to die as well?
And then his feet hit solid ground with a metallic clang and a tremor that seemed more psychic than physical. He straightened, blinking slowly as his vision cleared, casting his senses out for some sort of attack or malfunction in his suit.
He sensed…nothing.
No danger.
Only Luke, and the realization filled him with a sudden, fierce hope. Still alive, then. Whatever he had felt had not been Luke losing his grip, which meant–
Vader looked around, finally recognizing his surroundings. He was back in the carbon freezing chamber, back at the top of the steps where he’d first seen Luke approaching–
–and Luke stood at the bottom of the steps looking up at him. His bruises and gashes were healed, his face clean and free of blood. The glow from the heat sensors in Vader’s lenses extended down both of Luke’s arms to show two hands where there should have been only one, held in loose fists by his sides.
Luke was here, he was uninjured and whole, and he was impossible.
And for the first time in a very long time, Vader had no idea what to do.