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“No,” Luke stares up at his sister, caught between indignance, and indignance at himself. “No, you can’t.”
“Luke,” she pauses, her shrewd expression boiling over from empathetic to impatient. She crosses her arms and tilts her head to the side, and even that is a bit too much of a reminder of their father right now. “We can’t keep doing this,” she says.
A swell of frustration overtakes him. The datapad drops from his hand into the pile, and Luke stands up that their faces are inches apart. They stare each other down, neither wavering, both searching the other’s expression.
Leia doesn’t back down from him— not now, not ever. Not back when they were nine and still stuck on Vader’s ship, when he was nineteen and newly crowned the Rebellion’s star pilot. Or when he’s twenty four and a Jedi Master. Allegedly.
Inside the apartment, the Force grows thick with static, as if it won’t bear another moment of their standing against each other like this.
Abruptly, Luke turns away, and marches himself out onto the balcony. The dry and tepid air does nothing to soothe the tightness in his chest, but the noise of Coruscant’s unending mid-level traffic hides his deep sigh. He hugs his arms around himself. Leia follows him out.
And scoffs.
“You know Han is going to go insane if we stay here for much longer.”
You could let him go, Luke almost wants to say. Stay with me.
Well why don’t you come with us? He can already hear Leia bite in reply.
They agreed to come here together, some months ago. In the whirlwind of the Empire’s end everything was changing. Imperial occupation overturned, people returning to their homes, planets rebuilding, coming back alive. Hope blossomed like sandrock flowers after a storm and the galaxy shed off its Imperial past like dead skin. Everything began anew, even the calendar. In the throes of that excitement, they decided to pay the old capital a visit, to search for clues that would instruct them in building the new Jedi, the new Senate.
Luke’s never come to Coruscant before. Not just because the Rebellion tended to operate in the Rim— both Vader and Ben stayed away, and now he can see why. They got here, landed in the midst of all this durasteel skeleton, and he just— stopped. Stopped going forward, riding that crest of hope. And Luke thinks, there is dishonesty somewhere, an illusion that the past would stay harmless behind bars. On Coruscant, shadows lurch from every corner, threatening to swallow them with an enormity of the past that has never been confronted before, when it was just him, and Ben, and the Rebellion.
“And where are you two going?” Luke gives her a sideways glance, deadpan, “Han’s house on Corellia?”
“No.” she snaps. “Alderaan, obviously.”
Luke starts. She must be truly angry, to bring up Alderaan in any capacity.
“Leia—”
“We’re going to Chandrila. It’s where they’re putting the New Republic’s government.” she says, determined, “I am going to be there.”
She waits, for him to turn around, to accuse Leia of never having been the politician— that was all Bail. But he doesn’t say anything. Because she isn’t the only one chasing a father’s shadow.
She speaks like he did anyway.
“I’m not going to live in this graveyard just because you still can’t admit that he’s dead.”
But of course Luke knows that Anakin Skywalker is dead. Ben had been telling him that all his life, even before Luke watched Anakin die on the Death Star with his own two eyes.
It’s about the only thing he knew about him. Anakin Skywalker, could-have-been hero, would-have-been father, and dead.
Who was Anakin Skywalker? Ben always spoke fondly of his memory, even when they were on the run from him— a version of him. Anakin was the man who knew love, the man who loved Ben, who Ben loved in return, enough to carry his children through the final months of a war.
(It was a common refrain in the Rebellion. An inside joke between the twins and the veterans who’d known General Kenobi: look at the Skywalker kids, been fighting before they were born.)
But that wasn’t the father Luke knew. He knew only Vader, who cared for them in his own twisted ways. Cared enough to hurt them.
Luke isn’t sure when Ben began making those plans of escape, of leaving Vader and running away with the two of them. He knows it wasn’t from the beginning, because even he remembers a time when they were still trying to get Anakin back.
(For years and years, Ben took the punches and swallowed the hurt. Luke never saw him cry, or fight back. Ben must have thought that if he weathered away enough of the anger, there would still be a chance to reach through and reason with the man behind the monster.)
(But that never could have been. The rocks will weather to sand before the violent seas run dry. Ben was never the one who could have saved Anakin.)
Luke isn’t sure when the plans began, but he knows it took years, of meticulously refining, revising every part of the escape, reconnecting with the outside contacts, making sure they’re still alive. Luke remembers doubting if Ben was ever going to actually use the plan, but when Vader came too close to getting his hands on Luke, they finally ran.
It was after a siege. Luke was old enough then to understand what was going on. Vader planned a direct attack, but Ben wrangled him into a blockade instead. Taking prisoners, instead of letting Vader slaughter them on sight, then secretly letting them go through the vents and trash ducts that led straight to underground tunnels of established guerilla rebels.
Leia and Luke begged to help him: they were smaller, they reasoned, better at navigating the narrow vents and knew the ship’s hidden passages better than anyone. Reluctantly, Ben agreed, because he was never good at saying no to any of them.
Luke even made a friend. A local boy barely older than he was, who talked gratefully of making it back home to his lothcat. Luke had never seen a lothcat before, but just the boy’s descriptions were enough to make him fall in love with the creature.
Only, he was too busy daydreaming about imaginary pets that he was distracted, and off his guard, and only after jumping down from the vents did he see Vader there, waiting for them.
Ben and Leia too, standing one step behind. Expressions tense and stormy, respectively.
Where are you going with this prisoner?
“I’m escorting him, father,” Luke swallowed his panic, jutted his chin up at Vader, braver than he ever knew, “from his escape.”
There will be no need. All the prisoners are scheduled for execution. If you are so keen to carry out orders, perhaps you will do the honors now.
Luke’s mouth went dry.
Or has Obi-Wan once again failed to impart the lesson of duty?
It was either Luke hurt the boy, or Vader hurt Ben. He knew that.
He was a kid, he wasn’t clueless. He knew— had known for a long time what happened when Vader found out what Ben did behind his back. But he’s never done it in front of Luke.
Tears were welling up. He might have been shaking. He glanced at Leia, and she looked so, so angry.
So you will be weak.
He held his hand out towards the boy.
“Luke, no!” Ben cried out.
And then Ben was choking, involuntarily growling in pain. Luke screamed, both his hands thrown out in front of him. The boy went up in the air. He had never done this to a sentient before. Pretend to be dead, pretend to be dead, he hoped the boy would somehow hear. Eventually, he seemed to have gotten the idea, and went limp, then fell to a heap on the ground.
Vader was, however, not fooled. He stared at the scene for one, two seconds.
You find this amusing.
Suddenly, Ben was tossed across the corridor, his shoulder connecting with the wall. He was picked up, forced to the ground, then thrown back again. Luke screamed and screamed and screamed, even as Vader hauled Obi-Wan down the hall and away by his injured shoulder. When he finally stopped screaming, he saw that both Leia and the boy had gone, as well.
That night, Obi-Wan made the call to Cody. He pulled out a long-since packed rucksack, roused the kids in the middle of the night, and left.
Luke doesn’t often recall that time in his life anymore. Neither of his parents were here for him in the last few years. For how much Luke has grown since Ben’s death, for the battles he’s led and won, for the family he’s found with the people of the rebellion.
He learned of being a Jedi from Yoda, being a fighter from the rebels and from Leia. He became himself in all the ways that the little boy stuck on the wrong side couldn’t have imagined, and it was neither Obi-Wan, nor Anakin who taught him any of that.
The rebellion and the fight hadn’t been about his family. Until of course, as it became clear in the end, everything was about his family.
That quiet, triumphant turn of Ben’s mouth, when he closed his eyes and vanished into thin air. The sweet, gentle smile of a pale and deformed face, before his own eyes closed on him.
They both smiled at Luke, before they died and left him alone.
But by Force, he’d never stop being their child.
“Where were you last night, Luke?” Leia asks, “You said you would come home early, but you didn’t come in till morning.”
“A bounty hunter got in touch. He had intel about some remaining imperial hideouts down in the eleventh hundredths.” Luke says smoothly. “I needed to check on it before they ran.”
Leia falls silent. And Luke doesn’t need to turn to see her unimpressed expression.
“Don’t lie, Luke.” she says, “not to me.” And Luke hates where this is going, because he doesn’t want to fight, not with Leia.
But they’d always clashed, even back with Vader. (How many times would she have gladly burned the whole place down, had it not been for Luke’s holding her back?)
Their instincts about their parents could not be more different. Upon finally finding their way out, Leia immediately chose to stay away, as far away from them as she could. She went to Alderaan, and with the Organas as her adoptive parents, invited herself into the rebellion at the earliest opportunity.
But Luke stuck with Ben, fought and insisted to anyone who would listen that no matter what, he was staying with Ben, who soon decided to leave the rebellion, fearing that he would lead Vader straight to the then fragile movement. And so, they made themselves nomads, the two of them with no one but each other, living for years and years on the run in the galaxy, knowing that the Empire would stop at nothing to find them. Vader would stop at nothing to find them.
That’s how Luke’s learned to lie. People don’t expect Luke to be a good liar. They think him too good, too earnest for it. But all of them forget that he’s had Obi-Wan Kenobi for a mother, who had to tell a million lies to survive.
Lies aren’t much worse than the words people usually say anyway. And really, sometimes lies tell you more than you know.
And Leia knows. Oh stars, she knows.
“You were back at the temple, weren’t you?” she accuses.
It was midnight. Luke was back to imagining blood and blaster shots and lightsaber scorch marks staining marble floors and sculpted walls which had long since been torn out or covered up. Perhaps they were visions, memories of the stone that remained in spite of it all.
The temple was a mass grave, and Luke could see his father marching across those floors. Cutting down the very people that had once been his family.
“Why were you back at the temple? I thought we already said there’s nothing for us there!”
He understands Leia’s anger, knows it stems more than anything from her deep care for him. She worries the past will only hurt him, and given a past like theirs, it’s a very reasonable fear.
And she is right, they’ve long decided that the Temple is too ruined to be useful in helping them build a new Jedi Order. Nothing remained of the vast archives. No structures, or step-by-step guidelines for young Jedi Masters wishing to revive a massacred people. But Luke didn’t go to the Temple as the Jedi Master. He was there as Luke.
The past might hurt. But this isn’t something he can hide from.
“What do you know about Jedi lineage, Leia?”
Leia raises an eyebrow at him. Answering one question with another, which was a cheap move. But still.
“The lines of lineage are lines of family, but it’s got nothing to do with blood. It’s— a Jedi Master would devote years of their life to their Padawan’s training, and they grow and learn together.” Luke glances back, and finds Leia listening. “They are parts of yourself, Leia. If a Jedi goes looking for themself, they’d find it scattered between these lines. Lineage is a Jedi’s deepest relationship.”
She lets out a light hapless snort. “Not for our parents, evidently.”
Luke shakes his head. “Anakin was Obi-Wan’s student. And they were both in Yoda’s last lineage.”
Leia is stunned. And Luke just can’t believe she never knew.
“I’m— I’m them. In more ways than I knew.”
Which is why he couldn’t help going back to look for it. The Temple still had a room that Obi-Wan and Anakin used to share. If only Luke knew in which dilapidated corner, on which floor it is now. Perhaps he can find in the stone traces of the life they had, the love they shared. Before all that remained was Obi-Wan’s sadness, Anakin’s anger, passed down to him along strings tied to his limbs, cutting into his skin.
What is a child of sadness and anger?
Well, something with blue eyes, Luke thinks.
Or not. But Leia never liked being called Anakin’s daughter.
Luke didn’t always know that he had his father’s eyes. He assumed they were Ben’s, though his were paler, less vividly blue.
He found out when Anakin asked with his last breaths to take off Vader’s mask. And even then, he hadn’t known how much he looked like his father until Ahsoka gave him some recordings he’d made for her.
The lightsaber forms themselves weren’t something Luke needed— his instincts serve him better— but just to see his face, the shape of his figure and frame.
Stars, that was his face. Those were his eyes.
Leia is crying.
Like their mother, Leia never cries. But when she does, the tears are always angry ones. Frustrated, she harshly thumbs away the tears, and turns away from him.
I’m not them, Leia has always insisted. I will never be them. Even Ben’s brand of demure goodness was too self-sacrificial, too long-suffering for her to stand.
Her tears have always been for them, for their family. She used to cry for Ben, too.
“There was a lineage that went from Yoda to Ben, to father, and to us.” Luke says, “It’s your lineage, too, Leia.”
“I just want you to stop chasing ghosts.”
Luke smiles wryly. It’s the ghosts that chase you instead.
The last time he was on Dagobah, Ben’s ghost told him Anakin’s story. The part beyond childhood bedtime stories about the best friend, brilliant star pilot, cunning warrior with a heart of gold. It’s the one piece he couldn’t bear telling Luke while he was still alive. And so Luke now knows that Anakin had been hurt too, wrapped up in fear and anger since he was born. Ben told him too, how he had loved Anakin as a student, as a brother, before they became lovers. How none of it was enough, in the end, against the traps of the Sith.
It should have shocked him, repulsed him, but Luke felt only pity. How many children, sons and daughters of the galaxy, were learning the same lesson. That the father’s unhealed injuries festered in their child. And he will never be the father they wanted, because not failing his children was only one of the many, many things Anakin should have been.
The worst part is, Luke never hated Vader like Leia did, and now he never can.
It’s just that, even with the choppy memories of the child, he can’t forget.
He hasn’t seen either of them since catching a glimpse of their ghosts on Endor, but Anakin is with Ben now. Which means that Ben forgave Anakin, the Force forgave Anakin. And so Luke should forgive Anakin, too.
But does he?
Luke thinks he was ready to, back on the second death star. But he had been burning with relief and hope, believing that Anakin has come back, and they’ll finally have the father they deserved, the father Anakin deserved to be.
“Leave me,” Anakin said.
But it was him who was leaving. Him who left Luke behind. When he finally, finally had the chance to undo what he did, erase a past that Luke could never put away, on his own.
Luke stood in front of his father’s pyre, alone, and could not stop it from hurting.
Sometimes he can’t help but think, visceral as a physical twist in his guts, that everyone he loves has left him.
Ben, Anakin. And now, and now Leia is trying to leave, too.
He knows the thought is irrational, more the panicked reflex of a mind caught off guard than a conviction. He knows Leia is right, he has to walk away from what he can never outrun. But even the Jedi Master doesn’t stop being the child scared of his own last name, the child who wanted and wanted to climb back into the bars he’s tried to outgrow, the shadow the shape of his father.
Sometimes he just wishes he could be hugged by Ben again. He’s not tried to hug a ghost, nor tried to touch him when the translucent figure sat down next to him on Dagobah. He doesn’t know if his hand will pass right through, or the incorporeal solidity would be cold against his own. It terrifies him, that a hug might leave him cold.
“He is our father.” Luke insists again. “You can run from it all you want, but it won’t change that.”
“Come on Luke.” Leia says tiredly. “Move on. Come with us to Chandrila. It’s time.”
In front of them, the cut up skyline began to glow gold in the setting sun.
“Yeah,” Luke says, not sure if he’s even convinced himself. “Yeah, okay.”