A Shot at Family
Right now, Ben Skywalker had a long list of wishes. To start, he wished that he had consumed fewer Coruscant Coolers at the cantina he had crept out of his family's apartment (horribly empty now that Mom was dead or one with the Force, depending on the superciliousness of the person describing her aching absence) to get blasted out of his cranium, so he could maybe forget for a little while that he would never hear his mother's voice again, or have a laugh with Jacen, or turn on the holonews and not hear his father blamed for the rise of Darth Caedus.
He hadn't gotten the peace he wanted. All he got was a headache. His brain was throbbing like one big bruise, and he wished that it would stop pounding. He also wished that every sound, including the blaring music (that he definitely wished would be turned down before his poor eardrums burst) in the airtaxi he had hired to take him home wasn't magnified a hundredfold by his hurting head.
Oh, and he also wished that his stomach would stop swooping inside him, threatening to send all the alcohol he had drunk spewing out of him in a revolting wave of vomit. Yes, and he also wished that the driver would navigate the lanes with a bit more care, so that he wasn't continually tempted to vomit by the swerving, and his ears weren't assaulted regularly with the indignant honks of other vehicles when the air taxi cut before them, stealing their right of way.
"Did you ever have a diver's lesson?" asked Ben sharply, wondering if he was a belligerent drunk, and, if he was, what side of the family that trait came from. Maybe he had inherited violent drunkenness from his grandfather along with the blue eyes. Or perhaps his mother's razor tongue would have been like this when she had too much spirits in her.
"Are you even of age to drink?" retorted the taxi driver, shooting Ben a scathing look that conveyed quite effectively that he felt he could be rude to an intoxicated teenage Jedi who was plainly in no position to tip generously. "Are Jedi even allowed to drink? Isn't it against your virtuous beings of the universe code?"
"When you can tell me the rules of the air lanes, I'll tell you the rules of the Jedi," Ben volleyed back, as the taxi finally landed on the pad outside his family's apartment. He paid, with a grunt, the exorbitant fee for transportation in this ecumenopolis, and then stumbled out of the vehicle.
Trying to keep wobbling to a minimum, he walked to the door, and, with only three mistakes, accessed it. He stepped inside and closed the door as quietly as he could in his clumsy state. Then, he tried to sneak back into his room only to bang into a caf table almost immediately.
"Ben." At the sound of his name, Ben turned his head and emerged from his inebriated fog long enough to recognize that his father was on the sofa, which meant that the Coruscant Coolers had obviously interfered with Ben's Force sensitivity. A disapproving Dad had to at least rate as a minor disturbance in the Force, especially since Dad happened to be the leader of the whole Jedi Order.
Wishing that he could melt into the carpet (and why shouldn't he know that Mom was dead, and Jacen, who had gone to the Dark Side, was gone, too?), Ben listened as his father continued in the same stern voice that suggested he was a rebellious boy who had switched off Nanna droid again, "I've been waiting awhile for you to return, son."
"Jedi don't have curfews," Ben pointed out defensively, lifting his chin and hoping he didn't collapse from the effort of arguing when all of his focus should have been on standing and not upchucking.
"Jedi don't go to cantinas at all hours of the night and drink to the point of intoxication, either," Luke said in the same calm but uncompromising tone he adopted whenever his son made another gigantic mistake, which was what Ben did best.
"Their loss," Ben responded, and, in his muddled mind, this seemed like a marvelously unassailable pronouncement.
"Ben." His father's hands gripped his shoulders, demanding his attention. "Did you drive yourself home or take a taxi?"
"Taxi." Ben hated the look of relief that passed over his father's face, so he added snarkily, "I'm not stupid, Dad. I know that if I can hardly walk, I shouldn't drive."
"I didn't say you were stupid." Shaking his head, Luke shot his son a pointed glance. "I think that your awareness of your own poor decision is making you project your own harsh judgment of yourself onto me."
"I think you're full of bantha shit," Ben grumbled, thinking that only Luke Skywalker would attempt to have a reasonable conversation full of polysyllabic words with an intoxicated sixteen-year-old. Anyone else would have seen that as the very definition of hopeless.
"I think that you're lucky I'm not going to wash your mouth of with soap for that remark," responded Luke, still not losing his composure.
With a groan, Ben slid onto the couch beside his father. That was such a Dad remark, because Dad was always saying things like Ben was lucky not to have to repair moisture vaporators when he misbehaved, that it made him miss Mom all the more. Mom would have answered with some profanity of her own, but he didn't have Mom anymore or Jacen. He just had Dad—the man who had always made him feel uncomfortable and somehow lacking.
"Just say it," he ground out, finally bursting out with the words that had been boiling inside him for years. "I'm not the son you wanted. I'm a disappointment to you. A disgrace to the family."
"You're drunk." Gently, Luke rested a hand on his son's forehead, and Ben felt healing tendrils flowing from his father's palm into his brain, easing his heightening sensitivity to noise, giving him back his sense of balance, returning his ability to control his emotions, taking away the pounding in his skull, and eliminating his intense desire to vomit. "I've wanted you from the moment I knew your mother was pregnant with you, and I loved you from the second I felt your presence in the Force, Ben. I may not have always agreed with your choices, but I'm not disappointed with who they made you. You made an unwise, dangerous decision tonight, but that doesn't stop me from loving you and being glad that you're all right. I really don't know how I make you scared sick of me when I've never raised a hand to you, and I've done my best not to raise my voice, no matter how much you provoke me."
After growing up—quite literally—under his uncle Owen's hand, Luke Skywalker seemed to have reached the conclusion that being a good father meant being stern when your son crashed and burned for the nine-hundredth time, but also not whacking the child upside the head repeatedly with a hydrospanner to drive the lesson home. Ben knew that his dad's father figures were limited to a Dark Lord who had chopped off Luke's hand, and a gruff moisture farmer who wouldn't recognize a joke if it danced in front of him in a Twi'lek uniform. With those less than inspiring examples, Luke Skywalker probably really was doing the best he could to be a good dad, and Ben was just messing things up as usual.
"I'm not scared you'll hurt me," whispered Ben, looking away from the raw pain and honesty in his father's bright blue eyes. "I just don't want you to be disappointed in me, but I know that I've made decisions that you aren't happy with, and I'll continue to make them again since I'm just stubborn that way. I know the conversation won't end with you being pleased with me, but sad about the direction I'm going in. That hurts."
"I understand. Thank you for sharing your feelings with me." Luke paused, sighed, and then asked, "But you know that we have to talk about your choices tonight, don't you, Ben?"
"Yes, Dad." Ben nodded, bracing himself for a classic Jedi lecture from the Master of Serenity.
"Then we'll begin with what you did right tonight," started Luke only to be interrupted immediately by his son.
"What I did right?" Ben repeated, staring. "My ears must still be messed up. Definitely time for me to take a solemn oath of eternal sobriety."
"What you did right," confirmed his father, smiling slightly, "because you did something very important right, and it matters just as much to me as everything you did wrong. You paid for a taxi to take you home, instead of trying to drive home yourself. That could have saved your own life, and the lives of other drivers. I'm proud of you for having the presence of mind and maturity to make that choice."
"Anyone who isn't a complete idiot would have hired a taxi if they were in my condition," Ben scoffed.
"Not everyone would have made the decision you did." Luke shook his head. "Have you seen the stats about accidents with drunk drivers being the third highest cause of death on Coruscant?"
"That just proves there are a lot of complete idiots flying around on Coruscant, inflicting death on innocent civilians," muttered Ben. "That doesn't mean I'm going to be winning any awards for wisdom any time soon."
"You don't have to win awards for wisdom, but I never want to see you this drunk again." His father's eyes locked on Ben's, somehow managing to delve into his heart and mind. "I know that you are still mourning Mom, son, and that you suffered in ways nobody should have to when you were imprisoned by Darth Caedus, and that Jacen's betrayal still haunts you but you can't endanger your health by drowning your sorrows in alcohol. If you make a habit of disappearing into a glass to deal with your problems now, you'll do the same thing in the future. Your problems will only get worse, not better, when you try to deny them and the pain of them through alcohol. You will need to accept them and the pain they bring, or else your glass will grow so big it will swallow you. I expect you to deal with your grief in healthy ways—through meditation and discussion. Understand, Ben?"
"Yes, Dad." Ben nodded, thinking that had been a long Luke Skywalker lecture, but he probably deserved every word for stumbling into the apartment more intoxicated than a H'nemthe in lust.
"Then I suppose it's only fair that I say I do understand your behavior, because, before I was a wise Jedi, I made an even worse series of mistakes when I was growing up on Tatooine." Luke chuckled.
Spotting a story about his father's childhood in the dumps of the galaxy, Ben put in, all cheekiness, "Back in the days when holodramas were soundless and appeared only in black and white. Back when speeders had to be pushed uphill both ways to market. Back in the dark days when even the bright center of the galaxy was under the black grip of the oppressive Empire. Back when you had to pull water from the well in a bucket if you wanted to take a shower. Back when life was really rough."
"Are you telling the story, Ben, or am I?" Luke wanted to know, arching an eyebrow.
"Just helping set the mood, Dad," explained Ben, all innocence and cheeriness.
"Wonderful." His father grinned. "Anyway, as I was saying before the mood was established properly, when I was a sixteen-year-old, there wasn't much to do on Tatooine, unless moisture farming was your big passion in life. My friends and I spent our teenage years in constant search of trouble to relieve our perpetual boredom. One day, my friends and I decided that it would be the very definition of excitement to visit the cantina in Anchorhead and get completely wasted. So, we left our chores in various stages of incompletion and rode out to Anchorhead. We had quite the experience getting drunk for the first time in our young lives, but, eventually, it dawned on us that we should return to our families before night fell and the Sand People attacked. We got back into our speeders—barely able to tell the accelerators from the brakes, I might add—and drove back to our homes. So, you see, we were all very lucky to make it back to our farms in one piece, even if I didn't think so when I saw Uncle Owen."
"Bet he blew a major artery with delight when he saw and smelled how drunk you were, Dad," remarked Ben dryly.
"I couldn't sit for a week when he was through blistering my backside with his belt," Luke observed wryly, and Ben cringed. He couldn't understand what would drive anyone to hit his mellow father like that. "He was furious at me for leaving my chores yet again, and for getting disgustingly drunk, and for endangering my life and a good speeder by driving home drunk. I never saw him angrier, in fact."
"I don't like your uncle Owen," announced Ben, crossing his arms. "He sounds like a bully, Dad. He shouldn't have hurt you like that."
"He was a very solid man, Ben, and he just couldn't understand my wild spirit," Luke said. "He was always scared that one of my crazy stunts would kill me, so he felt like I needed strong discipline. That doesn't make him a bad person, just misguided, and, no matter what he did, I did know that he loved me even if I aggravated and disappointed him. I don't agree with most of his child-rearing practices, but, for my early life, he was the closest person I had to a father, and, for that, I respect him."
"Thanks for not hitting me, Dad." Ben could feel tears pricking at his eyes, and he couldn't pinpoint exactly why. "Even when you might have wanted to because I came home drunk and nasty right now or because I wouldn't leave the GAG."
"I never wanted to hit you, son." Luke drew Ben into a tight embrace. "I always wanted to spare you pain, not cause you it."
"I love you, Dad." Ben rested his head against his father's chest, like a little boy instead of a man, for the first time in ages. "I'm going to support you no matter what Daala's idiotic administration says about you causing Jacen's downfall. You've done enough for the galaxy, to free it and to keep it safe, that the government and the media should stop hounding you."
"I'm not perfect, Ben." Luke sighed. "I just wish I were. Then maybe Jacen would not have fallen."
"He made his own choices," Ben argued. "Anyway, Daala has committed enough atrocities that she isn't in a position to judge you for being imperfect. Force, I'm not even sure she has the moral authority to call Darth Caedus evil."
"The words of wisdom that come out of my son's mouth." Luke tossled Ben's hair, eliciting indignant yelps.
"Not the hair!" Ben exclaimed, reaching up to protect his fiery red hair. "Messing that up is just cruel and unusual punishment. I just can't put up with torture like that."
"I think it provides a carefree, windswept effect." Luke chuckled. "It looks very stylish."
"This coming from the man who still wears his hair in the bowl-shape that was all the rage among the farmers on Tatooine." Smirking, Ben rolled his eyes. "Thank you, Dad, but I'll take my fashion advice from a reek instead."
"The insolence I tolerate from my own son." Luke laughed. "And Yoda told me I wasn't patient enough to be a Jedi."
"On Dagobah, where the swamp stank, you stank after you trudged through the swamp, Artoo stank after he toppled into the swamp, and the food Yoda dragged out of the swamp stank." Ben snickered. "I know you only put up with my rudeness because I remind you of your glory days."
"Or, more likely, assure me that I never had glory days and am well past my prime," corrected Luke dryly. "In a galaxy full of uncertainties, it is a relief to realize I can count on you to keep me humble."