Active Headcanons: Autistic Force-sensitives

Trigger Warnings: Hospitals, blood mention

AUs: Shenanigans after Bespin, will explain along the way.

Vader thrashed again, desperate to escape the strangers who held him. His mind was swimming, his eyes unable to focus, the red tint of his lenses confusing the scene even farther.

He didn't know where he was!

A face came close to his own for a moment, and he held his breath, as best the respirator would allow, trying to focus wholly on the features, before it was gone again, back into the miasma of chaos.

Where's Luke? He thought, unbidden, and immediately he scrambled at the already closed thought. Why had it come to mind? Why would he think Luke would be anywhere near him? Luke hated him, Luke was far away, not here, not now…

He thought he could hear shouting, but something had gone wrong with the helmet, and it wasn't relaying the words to him, or amplifying the sounds.

Were these imperials, or rebels? He could hardly feel them, as they pushed him along, but was it only because his ruined body seemed to finally be giving up on sensation altogether?

He tried to take another step, and stumbled, falling to one knee, only to feel hands under his arms, pulling him back to his feet.

Perhaps losing sensation would be a blessing. Almost definitely, in fact.

He tripped again, but was supported before he could fall.

Actually, he thought, finding himself retreating into his own mind to avoid the chaos of the exterior world, if he could retroactively delete sensation from the rest of his life too, that'd be great.

Maybe… He stumbled again, and this time no one pulled him back to his feet, instead lowering him into a seat that he couldn't see or feel at all. Maybe just scratch punishments, he thought at whatever part of his mind was deciding what senses were necessary.

He was slumping, he thought vaguely, trying to focus on the sensation of his own spine. His vision had gone completely, and he didn't know whether to blame his helmet, or his eyes.

He thought there was someone beside him, some pressure on his arm, but where a hand might've rested, he had only feeling-less metal, and couldn't be sure.

They must have been making sure he didn't move, he thought, and allowed himself to slump further back. With no additional knowledge of what was occurring, or who he was with, he was willing to take the time to rest.

Perhaps later things would be more decipherable, and he would be able to struggle, or return to work with more energy, whichever was necessary.

He thought he felt the hand that may have been on his arm move, and tried to reach out in the Force, to sense the invisible being.

But nothing answered his call, and he tried to quell the surge of panic that rose in his throat.

He didn't like being Force sensitive anymore, he tried to tell himself. He didn't get to show off fun tricks, or fly races, or enjoy his enhanced physical abilities, and hadn't for years.

He squeezed his eyes shut, a tremor going through his body. He didn't want the Force, and he didn't want to feel, and if he couldn't see, well, no feeling meant no pain anyhow, and if this was what it was to die, then he would gladly go through the gates of hell.

The hand he'd thought might've been on his arm gripped his wrist suddenly, and he felt himself pulled to his feet.

He wished he could see, or hear, or feel anything more than the vague sense of down…

He tried to open his mouth, to speak. The words would be useless, and any answer would go unheard, but he wanted to make himself known. But his jaw wouldn't move, and the vague hiss he thought he'd managed wasn't amplified by his vocoder.

The whole galaxy felt wrong, his enhancements suddenly strangely absent, and he was lost. The stranger who had his arm was leading him along, and he struggled to open his eyes, and found the vague shape of a medic, wearing simple blue scrubs. He was considerably shorter than Vader, and Vader realized anew how crouched he was.

He reflected that they may not have realized who he was.

But… that was wrong… he was Vader, he was identifiable! They would know who they had, and would treat him accordingly!

He didn't remember how he had been captured, or anything that felt like recent events… He remembered Luke at Bespin, and his boy's panicked escape, and he knew, though he could not remember, that he had returned to his castle to search for further information.

But that all felt distant. He had a vague feeling that there had been another mission, that he had perhaps left unfinished when these strangers had found him.

The medic pushed him down onto a cot, and he allowed himself to be lain flat.

Why had his first thought been of Luke?

The other responses he could justify, a miasma of panic and desperation, but the thought of his son had been so frivolous, so aside from the situation at hand.

Luke was a non-issue, he thought, still ignoring the medic as his face was turned to the side, the medic pulling at his eyelids to look into his damaged eyes.

His son was not a player in his life in any meaningful way, nor was he ever likely to be. Luke was a distant figure, with an agenda too different from his father's to ever be close, the last shard of a long-broken dream.

The medic pulled at his arm, and Vader lay still, allowing them to move him. He didn't care. Whatever was happening would pass, eventually. He would be killed, or interrogated, or healed and pressed back into service. All was fleeting. His life moved from moment to moment with no release of the passage of time, the horror of the last twenty years firmly crammed into a timeless stretch to infinity, or contained in a heartbeat.

Luke was the only indicator that time had passed.

It had been a shock, almost, to see the boy. To see a man, born and grown in the time since time had ceased to mean anything. To look at a Jedi, and think of the last time he had held his wife, and placed his hand briefly on her womb, on their soon-to-be-born little one, and realize that Luke had lived a whole life in Vader's fevered, broken nightmare.

He twitched as the medics began to prepare him for what he suspected would be a very long hospital stay, preparing IVs, and beginning diagnostics.

He would be lying to himself if he didn't admit that he wanted his son in part for that reason.

His little boy was no longer little, no longer the baby that he had never imagined beyond, but perhaps there would still be change, still growth enough that he could recognize the passage of time in his son.

With his body modified and regulated to the point of mechanical precision, he didn't feel himself age. Any such vestiges of humanity had long been cut from whatever Palpatine did to keep himself alive, when Vader was sure he should have long been dead. Imperial officers came and went so quickly that they were not a mark of time longer than a mere few weeks, months, at most.

But perhaps there would still be change in his son.

A light came on overhead, saturating his vision until the galaxy seemed entirely white, the vague buzzing of mechanical implements surrounding him.

He wanted to watch his son grow up.

He caught himself sob, and felt the medics… yes, there was definitely more than one now, scramble to deal with what must have seemed a flaw in his systems.

He had missed it all, dammit! His son was grown, a man in his own damned right, a man who hated Vader, and Vader didn't BLAME him!

He cried again, a wordless shout of agony. If he still worked, there would have been destruction, but in his failure, it was all he could do to make the sound.

He deserved hatred.

Luke's mother would have hated him too.

Padmé, for whom he had sacrificed his freedom, his mind, his body, and one day his life …

She would have stood at their son's side, across a battlefield from him, proud of their son, and damned him to hell yet again.

And at least Luke wouldn't have been alone.

The medics, having calmed from their panic at his sobs, began shifting him again, and Vader could barely detect the shearing of a tunic from his battered body.

He could have sworn… no… he was Vader… He no longer wore anything so simple as a tunic… where was his suit? He couldn't… he couldn't hear his breathing, and that seemed wrong…

He opened his eyes, and tried to focus on the room, but his lenses still weren't working, the galaxy was still a blur, and it was too colourful, too real to be the simulacrum he dazedly survived.

This must have been the world where Luke lived. Where things were immediate, and blood stood out against a world of other colours, not merely fading away to another shade of red.

He tried to fold his arms over his stomach, to crumple inwards and not have to see the world he had ruined with his ability to forget its truth.

He wished Padmé did stare him down across the battlefield. He wished her voice spoke for his imprisonment, and her eyes glared at him like the scum he was. He wished to see her love their son, and feel jealousy eat at his stomach that he wasn't the one to care for him, that the boy had chosen her.

But Luke's choice had been his own. There had been no mother to draw him to the light, to keep him from following Vader to the comfortable, easy, selfish Dark Side.

Luke was simply too good for his father.

Vader knew he was crying still, though he had abandoned the agonizing gasps and shouts of emotion, now lying still and sipping at the air as tears ran, silent, down his face.

His son. The one he loved. The one for whom he would die, if it came to that.

Luke was too much his mother's son to ever return to him.

The traits he had loved in Padmé had been passed on, had resurfaced in their son, and he knew that it was enough.

His son was perfect, and in that perfection, he could never be Vader's.

His only remaining joy. Not his own.

With the sudden reintroduction of a being he loved, Vader's galaxy had been reconfigured, and he still didn't know where it left him.

He wanted to claim his son, and draw him back into his life, but Luke resisted that. He wanted to protect his child, but his position had not left him with the ability to protect one of his enemy.

He heaved with another breath, and fell still.

He didn't want Luke to be his enemy.

When he heard the name, it looped in his mind until a distraction came along, as he analyzed every tiny inflection. He needed to know every detail of his son, every enemy the boy had made in his fight for justice. He had to have forewarning of every threat to his child's safety, and he ached to hear the closeness in his victims' voices.

His son was beloved.

Like his mother before him, the boy drew importance, etched himself on minds, influenced all those around him…

In a better galaxy, he may one day have followed in his mother's footsteps, leaving the fighting to his father.

He wanted to stand protectively behind the boy, a hand on his shoulder, and death in his eyes, should anyone dare to threaten his youngling.

He wanted to help his son rise gracefully to a podium, to speak of justice and equality, and to see his eyes sparkle with eagerness to hear his parents' impressions as he stepped back down to them.

He wanted to care for his boy, and support him, and perhaps chase him down with a hairbrush when he'd got too flustered, and shaken himself out of his formally tidy hair and ruffled his shirt.

But with every encounter with the boy, he was forced to see how distant that dream was. That it existed in a galaxy that no longer did, and that could not be reconstructed fast enough. That each moment was another in which Luke couldn't be that bold and brave person, or, perhaps more accurately, that now was a time when Luke's actions were what could make change.

And Vader was what stood in the way of that…

With that cold, painful realization, the same one he always came to, he exhaled, and let the tension go from his body, his fists uncurling as he stared sightlessly at the ceiling.

Heartbroken for the thousandth time, he tried to let it all go, to run down his cheeks with his tears, and fade away to unreality, only to be discovered again.

The medics moved around for a short period more, looking into his eyes and changing monitors and systems, before tucking a thin blanket over him, and walking from the room.

With his torturous contemplation of his actions over, time fell back to its usual impossible, time-less slog, and Vader lay in the dark.

All was fleeting.

Soon, the galaxy would return to how it really was, and Vader would be returned to some form of Sithly activity, not the torturously human action of medical aid.

The light faded from the room, and Vader didn't note its change. The sounds of the hospital continued, so monotone and mundane that he hardly heard them, and he didn't care to listen. His heartbeat continued, monitored by electronics, and he didn't choose to feel it. He was only letting time pass.