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Republics rose and Empires fell. Civilizations crumbled and reforged themselves. The galaxy spun relentlessly on its axles, its march unstoppable and unforgiving like the passage of time that kept carving lines on his father's face, its formation ever-changing like the desert sands that their bones will always call "home".
There was very little that Luke knew to be constant, but the beauty of Naboo's twilight sky was one of them. Sent forth by a shimmering golden sun, the hues of violet and rose shone through the transparisteel of their freighter and penetrated the muted artificial lights of the cabin. Downwards were the vast lakes and verdant trees that his father exalted—Luke could almost hear Anakin’s rasping voice in his ears, praising the landscape's grace and grandeur; he could nearly see those sunken, milky eyes brightening in reminiscence.
It was a shame that his father's eyesight had faded away. While Luke could still take in Naboo's picturesque scenery in full, only a mirage existed in Anakin's head, molded by memories that the man struggled to conjure.
Speaking of Anakin… Luke supposed he should wake his father up, now. The whittled old man had stayed unconscious for most of their trip, having been utterly worn out from his visit to see Leia yesterday. The younger man set their ship on autonav, unbuckled himself from the piloting chair, and made his way to his father in a few strides. He sat down at the edge of the elevated bunk, gingerly squeezing a limp hand.
"Dad, can you hear me?" He murmured next to his father's hearing aid.
The beeping of his father's trusty pacemaker spiked for a moment. His pallid lips twitched, but to no avail; Anakin sank back into exhausted sleep, wheezing. The oxygen feed kept clicking with each breath, hissing compressions into wasted lungs. Sighing, Luke rearranged the corners of his father’s heavy blanket, then pressed his lips to Anakin's wizened forehead—he wanted the man to be comfortable in this last stretch, before they reached their destination.
Ever since his illness took its worst turn, Anakin had been speaking of seeing Padmé's silhouette in his lucid moments. Sometimes his departed wife visited him in his sleep; “I must not keep her waiting for much longer," he'd murmured once, his head leaning on Luke's shoulder when the two sat in their garden. A few days ago, lying prone and debilitated in his bed for the singular fact of being awake, Anakin had beckoned his little one close and requested Luke to let him see Leia, and then to help him to Naboo one last time, and Luke knew then that his father was ready to let go.
"Dad, it's Luke. We're almost at Theed."
The second time seemed to do the trick. Anakin stirred, and as chronic pains cut through his grogginess, the lines radiating from his mouth and cheeks curled down in a grimace. Papery eyelids sluggishly fluttered; a fine tremor ran through his arm. The aches soon turned into confusion, yet the solemn old widower immediately melted at the hazy balm of his son’s presence. Luke was his entirety.
His father did his best to speak, but could only produce a wheezing husk of an exhale; frustrated, he clumsily moistened his lips, gasped for air, and tried again.
"...Luke...?" The wrinkled canvas that was his father's face shifted as he managed to croak out his son's name with hardly more than a worshipping whisper. "My... boy."
"I'm right here, Dad." Luke moved to deliver another reassuring kiss on his father's knitted brows.
The still cabin air wrapped around Luke and suffused him with warmth as the elderly invalid attempted to blink away the thick layer of rheum gathered on his milky eyes. Gnarled prosthetic fingers nudged toward where Luke sat, and the boy brought both hands to squeeze the protruding joints, lingering in the coveted contact.
"Did you sleep well?"
Anakin let out a feeble grunt of affirmation; the strained tendons in his neck bulged against loosened, discolored skin. Luke kissed him one more time, this time on a sunken temple, and his father's breath hitched, overwhelmed by tactile affection. A deep inhale rattled wetly in his father's decimated lungs, and Luke moved away to adjust the settings to his pleural catheter, hoping it would drain the built-up fluid and ease even a little of his father's pain.
The ailing man furrowed his mangled brow, craned his neck, and squinted in Luke's direction while he worked. As the pressure in his lungs eased, Anakin managed,
"Come... closss-ser. My eyes... fail me, Son."
Luke returned to his spot and hovered right above his father's face. Anakin's smile widened, lifting the taut bits of waxy, ruined skin on his sallow cheeks.
"So... handsome." The old man licked his stiff lips once more. He tried to enunciate the syllables as best as his sibilant tongue could manage while his cloudy cataracts scanned what little he could vaguely discern of Luke's features—the faint curve of his son’s nose, the shadow of greying blond hair. "Like... an... angel. Your... Mo—"
Whatever his father tried to say was interrupted by hacking coughs. Luke stroked the crumpled crevasses on his father's forehead while the man shuddered until what scant energy he'd regained from sleep ebbed away, leaving him wracked with pain. He soothed Anakin's chest with his other hand; the coughing had brought on bouts of dull aching in his heart again. The indicators on his father’s monitors blinked red; Luke moved the hand on his father’s forehead to his father’s wizened cheek.
"No... need... to..." Anakin heaved half-breaths and leaned into Luke's touch, barely having the energy to turn his head, "worry f-for... an old... th-thing... like... I, S-s-son."
"Dad. You know better than to say that by now." He took the time to run the Force over his father's whole body and pushed healing energy to each swollen, aching pain point, and that unreliably convulsing heart. As he did so, the harsh lines on Anakin’s face relaxed, and the old man exhaled, relieved.
"Thank you, my… treasure." Anakin coughed a little more, then fell silent. Soothed by his son's presence, his eyelids began to droop, and soon his bleary left eye was swallowed by sagging, mottled skin. He rested there, the only remaining ruminations in his deteriorating mind focused on his child.
"Where... are we, little one?" He slurred.
Luke smiled and brushed his father's scarred left cheek with his thumb, feeling the remnants of each ridge and sore like a living topography. "We've nearly arrived at Theed. I'm glad you could wake up in time; we’re about to land."
Barely managing to stay conscious as he was, Anakin was dazed by the onslaught of information; very slowly, understanding washed over the old man’s face. He lay there for a moment, gathering his breath.
"Young one..." He smiled at his son with infinite tenderness, "My memory... fails me. Have you... brought... my c-cane?" The sibilant words rattled in the quiet air; Luke reached down and squeezed his father's stiff metal fingers. Anakin had long relinquished his effort to completely rid his lisp, his poor body too spent to manage fine movements like clear and fluid pronunciation, but he still liked to try when it came to formalities. Call it his last vestige of pride; he took great value in impressing his child.
"Could I push you there in your hoverchair?"
Anakin's rheumy eyes widened; his mottled forehead creased. "My little angel... my... starlight… a cane is... proper." Heaving another breath, he rebuked, "I must... walk, to see Padmé."
"Please? I don't want to see you hurt yourself. Mom wouldn’t, either."
They both knew his father didn't have the mobility to walk anymore, let alone make the trail to the mausoleum on foot. By now, Anakin had been bound to his hoverchair for months, mostly aided by Luke since his mechanical hands were too unsteady for the controls and his grasp on the Force was slipping by the day; what happened yesterday with his visit to Leia was a miracle, and it had drained the very last modicum of the man's strength. As he was now, he didn't look like he could even sit upright without help.
"Let me push you there, Dad. Please." He insisted.
Anakin moaned in defeat, his sunken lips quivering in senility and a deluge of emotion, knowing his son had him wrapped around his thumb and that there was no way he could refuse, lest he utterly break his own brittle old heart. Not in a thousand years, a thousand lifetimes, no—in the end, he could not deny his boy anything. It would be cruel to do so. Softness of old age be damned; his chest ached fiercely at the thought, as if even his own traitorous heart pump became sentient and fervently disagreed.
Anakin's decayed lips stretched into a quivering smile; he labored to reply clearly, just to make his point. A few tears leaked out and trickled down the cracks in his father's skin like rivulets. "My precious... inss–sssolent boy."
Luke grinned and wiped away the moisture pooling around Anakin's ear stumps. "I'll take that as a yes."
Those colorless lips trembled more. "These recent years... though you... dangerous-sssly... encourage... my indolence... I adore you... too much... to say... otherwise."
“And that’s another win for me.” Luke hoped his father could hear the smile in his voice.
Behind them, the nav console began to beep; the younger man squeezed his father’s leaden right hand, stood from where he sat on the bunk, and made his way back to the cockpit. The landing pad was just below, and Luke deftly settled their ship before returning to his father’s side.
Even the slight tremor that ran through the freighter upon landing lanced pain through Anakin’s body; his face scrunched in a scowl while his mind languished. As Luke sat down, he could hear his father fighting to draw in more focused breaths.
"My son. Though I... loathe... to... admit it..." He paused, squeezing his son's hand in stiff spasms, "I am... no longer... Of youthful age."
He tried to continue but lost his train of thought and could only move his jaw in vague mutters. Luke remained silent, comforting his father with a tender hand on the barren wasteland of a scalp, waiting. It was a while before Anakin’s voice scraped again,
"We must... go, Luke. This... doddering... it is… overtaking me..."
"Are you feeling ready, Dad?" Flying had become a huge strain on his father's already failing body, and for comfort's sake, Luke wanted him to rest a bit more before moving again, if need be. The Force would be gracious toward its now-decrepit servant, aged even farther beyond his already long years. Plus, selfishly, he wanted to stretch out time—just a bit more with only the two of them, together in this ship that contained so many memories. Missions, conversations, adventures, lessons, carved into the steel of the hull itself.
"Yes... Yes, my little one..." It seemed his father did not want to wait—or could not afford to wait—any longer.
Reeling in his brief flash of disappointment, Luke sat back up and took a cloth to carefully dab at his father's face, cleaning up any residual sweat, tears, or drool before the pair began their journey—Anakin always liked to be presentable when he visited his wife, but his body was now so broken beyond repair that he could hardly do it himself. His father feebly croaked a word of gratitude, his prosthetic hands twitching but too weak to move.
After the routine was complete, Luke gently gathered his father's wasted, limp frame into his arms and settled him in his chair, piling small pillows in the areas where his father's body was the most inflamed. Anakin's head lolled on his headrest, and his spine slumped into an inlaid back support. He looked toward his son with bleary eyes. Luke laid a cloak on his father's slack body and tucked it behind his shoulders, then meticulously began to attach his father’s assortment of life support systems to the hoverchair; as he worked, Luke could hear his father's lung rattle as he muttered sentimental nothings.
"Here we go, Dad."
Anakin managed a hardly noticeable jerk of his head in acknowledgement and moved achingly slowly to brace himself for this final stretch. Luke opened their ship’s hatch, then returned to push his father’s hoverchair down the ramp.
The pilgrimage to Padmé's resting place was annual, and made no matter the deteriorating condition of her devoted widower's health. Anakin would kneel by her coffin for hours and hours, steeped in endless grief and longing, and he often wept as he croaked stories of their children, and their children's children, to that silent slab of stone, wishing she had aged together with him, remembering all the moments they shared, still guilty over her death. It seemed like deja vu, walking on this path to the mausoleum again, but Luke knew with a pang in his heart that this was the final time. When he returned to their ship, he would be alone.
Many decades ago, after the emperor was killed and Vader was dragged back to the Rebel fleet for medical treatment, he was still a menace: bewilderingly effective on the battlefield, even with his brutality contained through legal restraints and threats of imprisonment or execution. Lifelong exile was the best option Command had offered, and the reformed Sith Lord had to earn it through decades more of service. Luke still remembered his father’s vitality before the first time they’d visited the mausoleum: fresh from subjugating another Imperial armada, there had been a bright glint in his pale blue eyes, and the man had even taunted the trillions in bounty credits that were marked on his head.
Yet the old war machine was useless now, his gears weathered and rusting until they now grinded pitifully, his claws seizing from terrible tremors, his jaw slack and defanged and his vision jaded and dim, his once proud pose now aching and dragged down by infirmity, until all that prevented him from buckling to the ground was his tenuous tether to the Force. At least Luke had the chance to be alongside him through these transformations.
Naboo’s nature must be thriving this season of the year, but Luke didn’t have the heart to look toward their lush surroundings. He’d thought he was ready to part with his father—had years to meditate on the man’s slow decline—but here, at the end, each step filled him with more dread. He knew his mind was intimately connected with his father’s, by bondage of blood; he could vividly hear each struggling thump of his father’s fatigued heart, and all he could hope was that his own grief wasn’t adding to Anakin’s already unbearable pain.
But of course, his father knew. Though the man remained slumped and silent, the phantom of a hand carded through Luke’s hair before settling on his shoulder.
They soon arrived at the mausoleum; the two entered. As always, Padmé’s stained glass visage greeted them, her painted face pristine and melancholic, her robes the same regal red. Reaching into the hoverchair storage, Luke prepared a bed of cushions next to his mother’s sarcophagus and carried Anakin down. Bottom first, he carefully set Anakin’s body on the padding, sat to his side, and leaned his father’s head on his chest to cradle the old man; the widower’s face contorted into a grimace from being jostled. When he finally registered that he was next to Padmé, his body shook with a heaving sob, and his prosthetic hands convulsed, wishing nothing but to hold his wife. Luke leaned down and whispered soothing words, breaking the heavy air. Anakin grumbled, though now it was no longer that morose, rumbling grumble from before his warhorse fortitude had withered, but a rattling rasp and a tactile satisfaction, as if the physical contact eased the elderly invalid's troubles.
This weight was familiar in Luke’s arms. The position was exactly the same as how he'd held his father for the first time, so many years ago in the explosion-rocked shuttle; it would be how they said goodbye for the last time, both far older now. Past the overwhelming ache and blurriness of his remaining existence, Anakin could feel the low rumble in his son's chest as he murmured sweet reassurances into muffled ears, could feel his son's breath rushing over his desiccated scalp like a spring breeze.
Through the glass, the setting sun danced on his father's figure. The yellow-orange light magnified his ashen pallor and eternal red burnt whorls and purple lesions—that puckered welt under his bruised right eye, that blistered ravine that marked his father's crown—under wrinkle upon wrinkle that branched out from every corner of his face and neck and distorted the man's features and glassy, unfocused eyes that withdrew into caverns in his skull, draped by swollen eye bags that made the past wounds seem as if they were a tapestry woven eons ago. The old immortal was finally approaching life's end; Luke needed to memorize every detail.
His father had never seemed so utterly frail.
Even when burdened by the fog of his mind, the weary man still sensed his mourning and stretched his hollow cheeks—its concavity made even more prominent by the light—into a reassuring smile. He licked his lips, cracked, thin, and colorless as they were. "Grieve... not, my son. This is… but kindness… from the Force." He waited for his respirator to pump another breath, then managed, barely audibly: "for this… I was rewarded… many years, with you."
The only indication of the passage of time was the diminishing light filtering in through the stained glass. For a long while, Anakin had fallen silent, and Luke didn't have the heart to disturb the man. He simply held him close, squeezing him tight when he eventually let out a barely audible groan—whether from his exhaustion or a new wave of chronic pain, he did not know.
In the Force, his father's signature was weaker than ever. It would be time soon.
"Now... tell me... about... Naboo, Luke..." The dying man managed not more than a faded whisper, his eyes rolling shut; it took all his willpower to keep those heavy lids open now, but he needed a few more moments yet. No amount of time together would ever be enough… he could give up ten lifetimes just to savor another minute. Luke pulled his father even closer and leaned down, resting his cheek on his barren forehead.
"It's very beautiful this time of the year," he whispered. "The flowers are all blooming, the river seems alive. You would love the colors."
"...Many... colors...?" That husk of a whisper barely reached Luke's ears. Luke swallowed back his grief, tilted down, and spoke slowly, closer to Anakin's ear.
"It's so vibrant now—I wish I could've taken you to the Lake Country again. Dad, do you remember the Lake Country?"
It took a moment for the relic to sift through the dense grains of faded memory. The soft sand, the glistening sapphire water, all of it was so far away now. His fingers twitched, but could only grab hold of brunette hair that curled in blurs.
"Yes... I do, son. Your mother... she was... radiant..."
Unbridled tears finally burst out of Luke’s eyes; distantly, Anakin felt his son’s body shake with each sob. A few droplets fell onto his forehead. It was the gentlest rain.
"Ss-son. Would that... I could... I would ss-spend... many more... yearsss... with... you." Anakin squeezed Luke's hand and struggled to drag his son's arm to his chest in the best he could manage for an embrace. "I am sorry..."
"Shh... It's not your fault, Dad. Shh..."
The blue light that had accompanied him for days intensified in his blurry vision. He reached his left hand out, and the wedding band that was welded to his prosthetic glinted as he pointed in her direction.
"S-s-son. Your... Mother." Anakin's lips curled into a tremulous smile. He rolled his skull backwards so those cataract eyes could peer at his son one last time. He’d never beheld anything more marvelous.
"Rest easy, Dad. I love you." Luke swallowed thickly, face wet from his weeping. Anakin's heart shattered; he could move his body no longer, but through the Force, he clumsily brushed each tear away before cupping a metaphysical hand to his cheek. In the end, Luke was still his beloved youngling, cheeks blotted pink with mourning. How deeply Anakin wanted to shelter him.
Cry not, little one. I have loved you too, since the moment you came into existence, and I will be with you until this galaxy's end.
"Dad."
Anakin merely managed a smile. The blue light drew close; Padmé's eyes twinkled as her hands pulled him away.
His heavy head sank into Luke's shoulder; his final exhale dissolved into silence. The sun faded over the horizon.