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“Are you certain?” Leia asked, her face pale with weariness and the circles under her eyes a mute testimony to how long she had been here striving with him.
“Yes,” Anakin answered firmly, stroking Luke’s sweat soaked hair from his forehead. “I will keep watch. You must rest, Leia, I know you can feel that. Jade is acquiring what we need to combat this. Your brother is strong—”
She opened her mouth and he anticipated her objection.
“----and I will summon you if things get worse and I need your help.”
She closed her lips and then nodded in exhaustion.
“Fine.”
She hesitated at the door.
“Promise me,” she said in a raspy voice.
“I promise,” he replied calmly.
She sighed and exited the sickroom, leaving Anakin alone with his son.
For three days, he and Leia had been the front line in battling this strange fever. It was connected in some way to the Force, and Luke’s power had been wild and unpredictable. Leia had even gone so far as to contact Jade who had arrived on the Lady the day before. She had access to data bases even Anakin had not heard of, and the sight of the red headed former assassin working with Henley was jarring to the mind.
His CMO was supremely unbothered, and even if Henley had known he was beside an Emperor’s Hand, Anakin doubted it would have changed his acerbic manner.
The Lady herself, of course, was always wary of Jade ever since the woman had attempted to kill Vader and harmed Piett in the process.
Anakin had sensed the Lady’s focus following the woman—literally ready to slay her on the spot if she so much as blinked incorrectly at the Admiral.
But Jade had not stayed long. She had determined what Luke needed, in agreement with Henley, and promptly departed to acquire it.
Anakin wished, not for the first time, that Ahsoka could have been here. He wondered if she knew about this illness—if she had encountered anything like it.
But she and Rex were somewhere at Mon Mothma’s request, and anyway, Anakin was still figuring out a way forward with his former padawan.
Luke groaned again, turning restlessly and trying to kick off the blanket covering him.
“No!” he cried. “Father! Father… please …!”
It was a terrible echo of his pleading when the Emperor had turned his dark wrath upon the young Jedi.
“I’m here, Luke,” Anakin told him, laying a prosthetic hand over his son’s heart and placing the cold gel pack on his brow once again. He decided to risk a Force connection. It had helped Luke settle when Leia had done so.
He closed his eyes, sinking into the Force…
Heat all around him.
He feared to see Mustafar again, but it was not that lurid environment. He was in the desert.
Tatooine.
The smell of burning flesh and dark smoke rising into the sky, turning the twin suns blood red.
Anakin realized he was looking at the Lars homestead.
Those bodies were…
Kark.
More death that Anakin was responsible for.
“Father!”
He looked around, squinting through the smoke and heat, but he could not see his son.
The scene shifted abruptly, and it took him a moment to realize that he was standing on the Death Star—the first one.
He watched…HIMSELF, across a hangar bay. He saw Kenobi put up his blade and he wanted to stop the swing of the red lightsaber, but he couldn’t, and his oldest friend, his brother, fell…
Luke’s anguish nearly took him to his knees. His daughter (oh kark, the rescue of Leia whom he had only just TORTURED) her own face twisted with grief, tugged at Luke, pulling him to Solo’s wreck of a ship…
“Father!”
“Where are you?” he called but there was no answer, only another shift…
Force please have mercy.
He stared up at the black abomination, clutching his wounded arm to his chest—even that pain not as horrifying as the words that had just been spoken in the wind whipped shaft.
“That’s not true!” Luke screamed, and somehow Anakin was beside him, but he could do nothing as Vader loomed.
“Search your feelings,” declared his Sith self and he felt the moment when Luke knew in his soul exactly who he was.
The AGONY…
And then Luke was falling, falling because he was braver than his Father had ever been and he shunned power like that.
“Father!”
With a mighty effort, Anakin wrenched at the Force.
“Luke!” he called.
He was…on the shuttle. That’s right. He’d called for the shuttle to get his wounded child. It was the moment that had changed everything.
“Father!”
He used the Force to gently grip the desperate form clinging to the weather vane and brought Luke aboard the lamda.
And things shifted…
Luke was in his arms, but he was no longer the battered figure at Bespin. He was the son fighting this illness. Anakin lifted him, held him close, and began to walk. He wasn’t sure where they were, but the Force was guiding this and he allowed it.
“Father,” Luke murmured, and Anakin bent his head.
“I am here, my son,” he murmured. “I won’t leave you.”
Blinding white light.
Anakin came back to himself and discovered large blue eyes watching him with a weary but lucid gaze.
“Luke,” he said quietly, and burning shame filled his chest. His child had wandered through fever dreams of Anakin . Anakin harming him, taking away all he held dear over and over…
And Luke, weak as he was, felt Anakin’s revulsion for himself.
“What…” his son paused to cough, so Anakin held a glass of water to his lips and waited patiently as Luke drank.
“What did you see?” he asked, while Anakin turned the pillow and laid the blonde head back upon it.
He sat back and stared down at his hands—his prosthetic hands—-simultaneously so powerful and so ineffective.
“I…saw the harm I have done you. I saw it—-through your eyes.”
He wanted to weep.
He knew Luke had forgiven him. That was what made it worse. All that, and his son had forgiven him. Pulled him inch by stubborn inch back to the light.
But he must not be a coward. He had promised Leia he would face the evil he had done. Luke had not demanded that of him, but he required it of himself. So he forced his eyes back to Luke’s.
“I wonder sometimes, how you can bear to look at me,” he whispered hoarsely. “Your sister’s anger I could understand. It was expected. But you…”
Luke’s mouth curved a bit and he reached his hand to Anakin.
The prosthetic one.
He took it, and father and son stared at their fingers for a beat.
“I was calling for you,” Luke murmured. “How long have I been…out of it?”
“Four days now that you’ve been delirious,” Anakin answered. “Jade knows what you need.”
“Mara was here?” Luke asked, a spark returning briefly to his eyes.
“She was,” Anakin replied. “Leia brought her in. Good thing. She knows where to get the substance needed to combat this illness.”
“I…I didn’t hurt anyone I hope?” Luke asked in low tones, maintaining his hold on Anakin.
He sensed his son’s fear that his great power had caused harm.
So different from Anakin at that age.
“You did not,” he said. “Leia and I have been here to help you through that part. I’m not sure why you are lucid now…”
Luke smiled then, his grip tightening, and for a moment Anakin could almost believe their hands were real and feeling properly.
“You found me,” he said simply. “I was lost and you found me.”
“I was in all your worst memories,” Anakin stated, throat tight.
There was a pause and Luke sighed.
“I…cannot deny that.”
Anakin bowed his head and made to withdraw his hand, but Luke didn’t let him go.
“But—Father. I was looking for you . As you are right now. I need you . And you found me. I’m sorry you had to go through that to find me, but you persevered. Thank you.”
Anakin blinked the tears then and bent over Luke to embrace him carefully.
His son was asleep shortly after that so he commed Leia to tell her that Luke had passed the crisis, before relaxing back in the large chair.
Luke had sought his Father in his illness—and Anakin had found him. Luke wanted him.
It was a gift undeserved and he would treasure that.