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Your transport lands in a plume of dust and ultisol. As the engines wind down, you incline your helmet towards your son, who stares apprehensively at the battlefield beyond the viewport.
The shadow of a mining complex casts the landscape in darkness. Stormtroopers litter the earth like snow-powdered ants, toting away the bodies of the fallen. You watch Luke play with the blond curls at the base of his neck, tugging and twisting and weaving roses in his hair. Finally, his gaze withdraws from the world and turns to you.
“Thanks for letting me tag along,” he says. Love pulls his lips into a smile, and you feel your own scars tugging on your cheeks. He holds out his hands expectantly, flesh and warmth and dead metal. “Should we get going?”
You secure a set of Force-dampening binders around his wrists, a pointless precaution for a half-trained Jedi. The links chime as the boy pulls himself to his feet, stretching his arms above his head and shuddering as his tense muscles ease. Written into his youthful features is a childlike bliss, as though he enjoys your company; cherishes the simple fact of being with his father, even. And he does. He’s told you this many times.
Distantly, you hear the murmurs of a pregnant woman: Something wonderful has happened.
A muscle twitches in your jaw. It doesn’t do to languish in the past, so you return your thoughts to the mining complex, to Commander Antilles shrieking in his cell and that untamed need to punish. Padmé’s memory slips through your fingers like pale grains of sand.
The hangar to the complex is half-collapsed under the might of Imperial artillery, devastated by volleys of shells. Acrid black scorch marks are smeared like oil across the runway. Diffused across the debris are bones and organs, more or less mangled, more or less complete. Your troops had descended upon Socorro like a plague of locusts, eating the planet inside-out searching for the last of the Rebellion’s strongholds. They had done well to catch them off-guard.
Your daughter is among neither the fallen nor the captured. Her convoy had entered hyperspace a quarter of a cycle ago, and that’s for the best.
The door to the temporary holding cells is adorned with obnoxious, orange lights. Around an assault tank, a mousy ensign rubs his callused palm along the corner of his datapad. He nearly jumps out of his skin at the mere sight of you, a monstrosity more repulsive than the stench of decomposing matter.
Your son, who always greets your employees with the enthusiasm to overpower your severity, remains unusually quiet. You turn your head to see the boy staring at the mess left by your troops, at an orange flight suit, the ribcage jutting through the fabric, the dented face of a young rebel pilot...
Suddenly, a spark of irritation ignites in your chest. You are indifferent to violence, and you sometimes find yourself expecting the same of your son. Except he’s not like you: he’s moved by the suffering of sentient beings, while you remain inorganic, an obsidian shell insulating a core so brittle but no less solid. Your son is not a monster. In fact, he wouldn’t be Luke Skywalker if you excised his weakness the way you tried to expel your own. So you bite your tongue. So you reach for him, gently coaxing his gaze from the refuse with a squeeze of his shoulder. Luke’s attention snaps back to you, elastic and confused.
You guide him into the corridor past the ensign, filling the gaps between your steps with the quiet clinking of his binders.
“Why are we here?” he mouths. After all, there are no Jedi temples to pillage, and no holocrons for which your son’s abilities would be preferred above your own.
You lied to me, you don’t say.
Although the boy had expressed his eagerness about this outing in the privacy of your fortress, he no longer understands why you’ve brought him here. You don’t speak, and that alarms him even more. In truth, the boy would rather be locked up on Mustafar—his unease is thick enough to cut—but he believes he can change you, that he knows you, as though the cruelty long sedimented in your being can be neutralized. As though your apathy can be set aflame.
That is why he follows you into the bowels of the complex like a moth chasing torchlight. He swathes your prosthetic in the gentle warmth of his hold, even if you scare him—and you do, you terrify him, but he loves you. He loves you.
Something in you gives, and you throw him a bone: “We are on a diplomatic mission.”
“Diplomacy,” Luke breathes, rolling the word between his fingers like a smooth, opaque marble. You let him fill in the gaps with his naïve speculations; the boy needs no further encouragement to paint you in the warmest hues. But he is not all charm and naïveté. Again, his gaze flits to the crushed skull in the hangar, the bits of scalp dressing the concrete, and you detect the telltale wriggle of doubt. “Did I finally rub off on you?”
Your lips twitch again, wryly this time. “You are no diplomat, my son.”
A boneworm stirs in the Force. The boy squeezes your hand before letting go, and your fingers curl around the empty air.
“Maybe not.”
You can hear the gears turning in his head as he scrutinizes the gaps between your words and thumbs through your every interaction. Something akin to suspicion roils behind his shields: you’ve said too much. Knowledge is a resource that you intended to keep scarce, but you dwell on his discomfort time and time again—and now look at where that’s landed you. You just can’t help yourself, can you?
Your son strikes a fragile balance between loving and defiant. He despises being paraded like a trussed-up dog, regaled in dark fabrics and Imperial insignias, but he loves you. He stays burrowed beneath the bedding of his enclosure, taking up little of the space you’ve carved out for him in your new Empire, but he loves you. He is a prince only in name. You grant him his small comforts, these privileges for a timid but affectionate child. A secret verging on conspiracy; an offering to the strange faith that he places in your so-called goodness.
You are a terrible father, and yet there is nothing you can do to make your son leave you. He genuinely—shockingly—believes that you—you?—are the father for whom he yearns. Isn’t his love proof enough?
Spite coils like a viper in your gut: no, not quite. Your temper is as ever-shifting as a desert storm.
The corridor ends at a medbay lit with glowrods and stationed by two troopers. White panels hang off the walls. Ampules crunch beneath your boots. Lining the large, circular chamber are inpatient rooms where lifeless, war-torn bodies rot behind transparisteel panes. You sense your son’s anger flare as he takes in the abysmal sight, and his mouth distorts into the shape of a reproach.
“Father, this isn’t—”
You cut him off with a wave of your hand: these rebels should count themselves lucky to have been assets to your Empire at all.
Across the medbay, a heavy door opens just a sliver. Out of the darkness trickles your admiral with an interrogation droid. He quickly regains his composure, but you sense through the Force that he is unnerved by his orders. He believes that you are the epitome of efficiency, and what you had ordered him to do is anything but efficient. After all, your Admiral is still flesh beneath his stone-skinned loyalty.
You trail shadows across the chamber’s floors, and your son slinks reluctantly after you.
“Admiral.”
“My Lord,” the Admiral says, “and my Liege.” The syllables rest uneasily on his tongue, ready to collapse into old habits: Commander Skywalker.
“Gather your troops and await our return aboard the Executor,” you say, leaving no room for Luke to interject. The medbay is soon emptied.
You are an obelisk in the room’s fluorescence. On the other side of the door is a tiny blip in the Force. With a flick of your wrist, the door flies off its hinges, flooding the dim inpatient room with scalding, white light, and you see it—him. A bright orange flight suit charred and tattered, limbs twisted and bound uncomfortably, and a face nearly indiscernible through the bruising if not for the two pits of brown ensnaring your son in something akin to fear. Not of him, but for him, as though you aren’t already merciful by teaching this lesson only once.
The worm speaks: “Luke? Is that really you?” You seize his neck through the Force and squeeze.
The Admiral is not mistaken about your efficiency: you know how to make your errant son hurt. You ache to repay him with the anguish of a thousand worlds, and you hunger to tear his spirit limb from limb. It’s a feeling that you know well, the agony of the rain cascading down hideless flesh, the smell of ash on your tongue, betrayal still ringing in your ears—
Your son is shaking your shoulders, his mouth moving quickly from demand to demand. You catch your reflection in the lucid blue of his eyes, and you wonder whether you’re still capable of remorse.
“You call this diplomacy, Father?!”
“Isn’t it?” you say, sarcasm pooling like blood between your teeth. “Commander Antilles is merely present to ensure that you reflect carefully on your breach of conduct. After all, you lied to me.”
Luke jerks back in surprise, his binders clinking discordantly like shackles on a slave. He opens his mouth; he knows what you mean, surely he knows— “I don’t—”
“Spare me your excuses,” you hiss, dropping the Commander with a heavy thud. “Are you really so foolish as to believe that I would leave transmissions unmonitored in my own fortress?”
“No—”
“No. We are not strangers, my son.”
Let that sink in, the guilt and the self-crimination, the rippling despair under which you hold his head with a vicelike grip. The boy wears the galaxy on his shoulders; he has far too much responsibility in him. He looks on the verge of hurling as something finally clicks into place in his mind. “You knew,” he whispers, gaze drifting from your mask to Commander Antilles’ cowering form. “This whole time, you knew. You found this base because of me. You did this because of me.”
An invisible force drags the Commander to your feet with a grating screech. The skin around the man’s throat is raw and blistered, staining his hair with yolk-yellow pus. Gleaming in the light, piercing through the shoulder of his bright orange jumper, is a rust-tinged shrapnel. You pick at the metal like a splinter, and a gurgle of blood splats onto the porcelain tiled floor. You pick at it harder.
Luke’s fear bleaches into terror. “Father, this isn’t— You don’t have to—” The fragile thing chokes on his words, as though afraid to speak your cruelty into existence.
Your eyes linger on the drab metal wrought around your son’s wrists. Every day, he wakes, he trains, and he eats his meals in your company. At nightfall, he brings his blankets to your medbay and speaks to you through the glass. You listen to his voice: his words, the inflections in his tone, the reverence with which he itemizes everything that you’ve taught him that day… You work him to the bone, but you are not his master. You are his father. Through his veins flows a destiny in which he may remain ignorant, but from which he can never be free. Where is his reverence now? He lied to you. Again, you ask yourself: where is his reverence now?
“No, stop! Don’t do this!”
Where has your reverence gone? Have you forgotten that your son is your everything, or are you too self-absorbed to see—really see—his misery retching itself dry in the Force? He’s crying as his fingers twist around your outstretched hand. He’s crying like you’re breaking his heart, like you don’t love him anymore.
“Father, stop!”
It baffles you, doesn’t it, that the universe would gift you a son who’s kinder than you are cruel? You hoard his love like a starving krayt, and for a moment, you are neither fire nor fury, nor the brimstone that chokes the fragile balance of the Force. Pathetic is what you are. In the privacy of your mind, you dare admit it to yourself: you always take more than you deserve. And as you drown in your little one’s anguish, that pit of revulsion chafes your esophagus; it is a stone you cannot swallow.
“Please, I’m sorry!”
Your hand trembles. Do you want to punish him, or do you want him to love you? You just can’t seem to make up your mind, even as your entire being quakes with your frustration. You’re pathetic. You would not be on Socorro if you hadn’t spoiled the poor thing rotten.
“I’m sorry…”
Despite your bloodlust, you stop. The Commander gags in between large mouthfuls of air, his body racked by raspy, broken sobs. The shrapnel you were extracting from his flesh inch by torturous inch remains embedded between the fragments of his scapula. You can almost trick yourself into thinking that you’ve mustered a grain of remorse for what you’ve done, but as you stare into Antilles’ brown, glassy eyes, you feel nothing.
“Wedge?” you hear your son whisper in disbelief, falling to his knees by the Commander’s head. “Wedge! I’m so sorry, Wedge…”
Your suit filters clean oxygen into your lungs. For a moment, the Commander’s cries wane into silence. You close your fist. His skull splits and spills around your boots.
Red spiderwebs creep along the floor, seeping into the black fabric of Luke’s pants. A speck of blood dribbles down his chin, and you see in his grief-stricken face the remnants of Nubian royalty. Her voice haunts you still: Something wonderful has happened.
The boy is a mess of nerves and jitters as you gently pry his hands from the roots of his sweat-damp hair. He’s still hurting as you help him to his feet. So you press his cheek to your chestplate and hold him there, stroking his hair and rubbing the sobs from his throat. So you cradle him with all your love. Your son’s fists bunch the black armourweave of your cape as his heart erupts into your arms.
“Please—” The word tears its way out of him like a parasite. He wraps his arms around your torso as far as his binders allow and melts into you. “Please,” he says again. The glass-throated whine of a shot animal; an infant’s wail for the hand holding his bottle: “Father.” A mouth opening and closing around sad little hiccups that reverberate in the hollow of your ribs. “Please.”
Sad little pockets of affirmation that he is still yours.
He clings to you, to that facade you offer up like a patched-up plush, and you feel your stitches tear. Not for the first time, you wonder how he can possibly find the strength to love you for what you are—what you’ve let yourself become. You are a skinless shade birthed out of the lapses in Anakin Skywalker’s biography. It’s you: all you, only you, dead and alive and wearing the skin of a father. A monster. A blight. You can never be what he wants, no matter how readily he gluts himself on the crumbs of your affection. You know that, and yet you string him on. Have you no shame?
His love for you chafes his wrists. It hurts him all over, these soft, oozing scabs that you rake open at the first shriek of defiance. He begs you not to leave. He folds himself into your palm. You doubt that he would’ve loved you as fervidly and unconditionally had you not—in your hubris—deprived him of a father before he was even born.
A boy in the shape of your absence.
Your mistakes hatch the whole of his destiny. Your heart pounds in your ears. Something rotten washes over you like a dry, smoky wind.