Chapter Text
When the idea first came to Luke, he thought for a little while that he was going crazy. For one, his father had the social graces of a wounded krayt-dragon and no tolerance for any kind of what he termed ‘Luke’s adolescent foolishness’, as well as little discernible regard for his own comfort. Luke can count on one hand the number of times his father has admitted feeling pain or distress, in the whole four years they’ve been together. Not to mention it is an impossible idea to even begin finding an individual fit for such a task. One couldn’t exactly put out an advertisement for this sort of thing on the holonet:
Wanted, one companion, preferably female, for Dark Lord of the Sith. No limits regarding age or race, but gods forbid they wear their shoes on the sofa. Must be good with children and large Force-sensitive males prone to frequent tantrums.
Jedi need not apply.
It gave Luke a snigger or two, in private moments when he was absolutely certain, thank you very much, that his father was on the other side of the galaxy, far, far away. Like he is now, enforcing the Emperor’s durasteel will on the defenceless population of the galaxy. Luke scowls, and pushes the thought away. It’s not his father’s fault, he tells himself. It’s the Emperor that drives it all, that forces his father to play his role as the bloody fist of the Empire. But in the last four years since he came to Imperial Centre, the lie tastes more and more sour every time he tells it to himself.
Luke hobbles out of his bedroom, feet bare and burning, swollen and red. There are guards on every level of the building, but on Luke’s request, his father does not allow them into the apartment. Vader has only been allowing Luke to stay home alone in the last year; before then, he had been minded by a series of stone-faced, white-clad Stormtroopers. Which had been awkward, to say the least. At least two troopers watching him do his homework, walk to and from the shower (wrapped in a towel and blushing beet red), make himself dinner with the aid of their kitchen droid. Luke’s current situation is infernally preferable.
It also means he can do this.
Luke opens his bedroom window, takes a good look outside, before pulling out the jammer that disables the force field around their apartment in this particular spot. Then he hauls himself out of the window, up onto the roof, sighing in relief when his painful feet touch the cool duracrete surface.
His companion is already there. Padmé Amidala shimmers with the soft blue light of the Force, sprawled on the flat peak of the roof. Luke lies down beside her. His mother turns her head and smiles at him, although it dies rapidly on her pretty face when she sees his blistered feet.
“It’s fine,” Luke says wearily before Padmé has a chance to speak. “Don’t nag me about it.” His mother’s eyes are sad.
“It’s the prerogative of all mothers to nag their sons,” she replies, and brushes Luke’s hand with her own incorporeal blue-tinted one. Luke shivers. It feels a little like being touched by electricity, but cold at the same time. “This is Sheev’s handiwork, I take it?”
Despite himself Luke smiles. It’s always funny to hear his mom call the Emperor by his first (and stupid-sounding) name. Luke dreams of saying it to the Emperor himself, and then kneeing the despot in the ‘nads for good measure. “I’d say good guess, but it’s not like it could be anyone else.”
His mother curses in old Nubian, the soft, melodic syllables a sharp contrast to the meaning of the words. Luke grins despite his pain. “Mom, Dad would have me on double katas for a month if I said even one of those things,” he points out. “You’re being a bad influence again.”
All Padmé does in response is laugh, and Luke’s worries slowly fade away as he stretches out on the roof. This has always been their place, Luke and Padmé’s, ever since Luke’s father took him from the wilds and desolation of Tatooine to the bustle and noise of Imperial Centre. He has always felt Padmé with him, although it wasn’t until he came to Imperial Centre that she appeared to him. Most people would have been surprised to learn that the soft, comforting presence he had felt nearby all of his life was the spirit of their dead mother, but somehow Luke felt as if he’d always known it was her, even long before he knew her name.
Father would kill him if he knew Luke regularly climbs up to the roof, but then again, Father would be aghast to learn Luke frequently speaks to his mother, and that despite many attempts on Padmé’s part, Vader himself is unable to perceive her.
(Luke watches, mute, as Padmé shouts at Vader across the room, “Anakin, Anakin! I’m here! Why won’t you look at me? Why won’t you see me –” while Vader himself lectures Luke on the dangers of illegal street races, blissfully unaware of his dead wife shrieking at him.)
Padmé no longer tries, but still Luke will occasionally see her drifting around their apartment, and on the brief occasion Luke’s father sits down with him, she often drapes her opalescent, azure form over his shoulders, linking her hands over his heart, resting her cheek against the side of his helm. She can never stay long, in the face of the sheer Darkness of Vader’s presence, but all the same, it warms Luke that she still tries. And although Vader never notices her, Luke himself is accustomed to pretending he sees nothing at all, when his mother’s luminous form wanders past the sofa or waves goodbye to him when he goes to bed at night.
“What was Sheev’s excuse this time?” Padmé’s voice breaks the silence. Luke huffs.
“‘You fail me yet again, young Skywalker,’” he mocks, attempting his best impersonation of the Emperor’s wheezing voice. “’Are you the son of Darth Vader, or the child of some lesser man?’ He wanted me to bleed a kyber crystal, but I couldn’t do it.”
His mother slants a speculative glance at him. “Couldn’t, or wouldn’t?” she asks keenly. Not for nothing was this woman one of the finest Senators to ever grace the Senate, Luke thinks fondly, or queen of an entire planet at age fourteen.
“I… allowed him to believe it was the former,” he says evasively. “So he had one of the Red Guards strip my boots off and beat my feet with an electro-whip. It’s not too bad,” he adds, sensing his mother bristle in furious indignation. “I can use the Force to heal them later, and I have that some of that good salve leftover from back when I got burnt last year.” He feels his mother’s mood lighten.
“When your speeder exploded on the last stretch of that dreadful race –” Luke swats at her in the general direction of his mother’s insubstantial arm.
“That’s the Annual Underground Championship to you, Mother,” he teases. He never calls her Mother, unless it’s in jest. She’s always just Mom.
“You think you’re the first Skywalker to fly in that race, kid?” she teases back. “Hells, you’re not even the first Skywalker to crash their speeder in a flaming wreck in that race.” Luke beams at her, delighted.
“Father didn’t.” His mother smirks.
“Oh, he did. All of thirteen and he had to sneak back in at dawn so the other Jedi wouldn’t find out he’d been racing.” His mother’s smile gentles into fondness. “Of course, he didn’t get all the engine oil off him, so his master found out anyway.”
“Dad was so mad when he found out I’d been racing, he threated to make me have extra lessons with the Emperor!” Luke tells her. “All the while the sneaky son of a schutta did it himself!”
“‘Do as I say and not as I do’ is the motto of every parent,” his mother replies, smiling. “It doesn’t really matter who is in charge, not on this planet. It continues on as it has for the last thousand years, illegal street races and all. Coruscant has been and will always be eternal, barring natural disaster or your father’s cooking.” Luke grins, but can’t resist having a jab at her terminology.
“You’re behind the times, Mom. It’s called Imperial Centre now.” Padmé waves a hand at him.
“I will never call it that and you know it, son o ’mine.” As she often does, she falls into Nubian towards the end of the sentence, the endearment coming out in the sweet string of sounds Luke has become familiar with by now.
“Where is your father?” Padmé asks. Luke sighs in frustration.
“Classified,” he reports dully. “But the holonews reported a disturbance in an Imperial base in the Mid Rim somewhere. He’s probably out there putting the fear of the Emperor into whatever poor person runs it.” Padmé sniffs.
“The fear of Vader, more like,” she says dryly. “Most Imperial troops would rather face down the Emperor when he’s furious than your father when he’s mildly inconvenienced.” Luke has to agree with her. He’s not blind, to what his father is. The first eight years of his life on Tatooine were enough to inform him that cruel men exist in the galaxy, and the reaction his father gets whenever their rare public appearances occur is enough to show him that his father is widely perceived to be the same sort of breed. Yet with Luke, he is never cruel, sometimes even gentle, as if afraid to push Luke one iota away from him with his harshness.
His idea comes back to him with a start. Luke side eyes his mother speculatively. If anyone would, his mom would know what kind of things his dad likes in a woman. “Mom?” His mother makes a vaguely affirmative noise, her eyes closed, expression peaceful. It seems that sometimes she is simply happy to sit quietly with her son. Luke understands that. “Do you think Father would ever get a girlfriend?”
That has his mother’s eyes snapping open. She sits up in surprise, gaping a little at him. “Stars, Luke, I haven’t the faintest idea. Whatever brought that on?” she asks. Luke shrugs, picking at a thumbnail.
“I don’t know,” he mumbles, abashed. “He just seems lonely sometimes, that’s all.” He looks up at his mother through his eyelashes. “Did he ever date anyone other than you?”
His mother sighs. “Date… you are so innocent, my son.” She reaches over and ruffles his hair, fingers only barely perceptible. “Things were different then. Jedi weren’t meant to date anyone, although clearly your father didn’t exactly keep strictly to the Code.” She winks at him.
“I know,” Luke replies, and gives her a small grin. “You were rebels.” Padmé smiles, but sobers fast.
“Anakin always cared deeply for me,” she admits. “Even as a boy. I don’t know that he ever looked twice at anyone else.” She twists her hands together. “And now he has enshrined me as surely as if I was a marble statue on a plinth. He remembers only my ideal, not my flaws or faults, not how furious I would be with him if I was alive to bear witness to all of his crimes.”
“You do bear witness to it,” Luke reminds her softly. Padmé inclines her head.
“True. But I am part of the Force now, my love. My viewpoint has changed. I am not the same as I was when I breathed air and my heart still beat.” It is an old conversation. To Luke, Padmé is whole and entire, but then, he never knew her when she was alive. “As I am now, it is not possible for me to rage against your father. Only to grieve him.”
Luke wants to hug her, but contents himself to a pat on the hand. “It wouldn’t even have to be a date thing,” he amends softly. “I just thinks he needs a friend.”
Padmé’s eyes are distant, seeing something that Luke cannot. “He had many friends, before the Empire,” she says. “People who cared about him, and who he cared about. The way he is now, alone except for that bastard Sheev and you, my darling boy… that is new.”
Her voice is sorrowful in the extreme. Luke feels a pang of conscience. Here he is, discussing finding his father a girlfriend, all the while sitting beside Luke’s own dead mother, his father’s last romantic partner. He has the grace of a bantha in a pottery shop.
As if by reading his thoughts, Padmé smiles. “Don’t worry about that,” she tells him kindly. “I don’t mind.” Luke chews the inside of his cheek, anxious.
“Are you sure? It wouldn’t make you sad, or angry, or… or jealous?”
Padmé reaches out, and touches Luke’s cheek. She almost feels real, today, like she’s more heavily centred in the Force than usual. Luke lives for these days, when it’s almost like his mother is still alive. “Sweetheart, I am dead,” she reminds him, although not unkindly. “Your father is complicated, and very deeply flawed, but I loved him. I do even now. And if finding him a friend can alleviate even the smallest of his burdens –” Luke loves her so much. Her eyes are sparkling with unshed tears, and yet she smiles. “I would like that, very much.”
Luke smiles back at her. “I don’t know what he’ll do,” he babbles, set free at last to discuss his project with someone who isn’t a droid. “He’ll probably be all weird about it. You know, he won’t talk about you, but when he does he’s a depressed, miserable ass about it. I don’t get it. It’s like he thinks that moving on would be a betrayal of everything he stands for, that he needs to punish himself for losing you –” Luke stops, mouth agape, for a full minute. His mother just smiles at him. “Oh.”
“Now you get it,” Padmé replies warmly. Luke threads his fingers through his mother’s and looks up, at the constellations he knows are out there, beyond the smog and clouds of Imperial Centre, glittering up into the night.
“Dad still loves you so much, Mom,” he tells her, before admitting, his eyes stinging hard, “I love you, too.”
It is hours before Padmé fades away, her presence in the Force dissolving until nothing is left, but for Luke, as always, it is far too soon. He leaves the roof, swinging back into his window, enabling the force field again as if it was never disturbed. He dresses for bed, applies salve to his wounded feet, and settles down for the night, although his mind is ticking over steadily, never more awake.
His father favours smaller women, if Luke’s own mother is anything to go by. Petite women, with bright warm eyes, stubborn enough to give even Darth Vader a run for his credits. They’d have to live on Imperial Centre, Luke thinks, already drunk off the brilliance of his own idea, and a dry sense of humour, to match the one his father keeps well hidden, deep down. Low maintenance, relatively conservative in their politics, unrelentingly supportive of the Empire, and –
An idea sparks in his mind. Luke smiles. He knows exactly the right place to start. And if it has the added side-effect of getting one over the Emperor, well, that’s just a bonus, payback for the long hours Luke has spent in the old man’s company, gritting his teeth against the poison leaching from the Emperor’s withered frame.
Luke walks a dangerous line, he knows. But he’s a Skywalker.
It’s not like he knows how to do anything else.