Trigger Warnings: Hospital location

Headcanons: Autistic Force-sensitives, trans Skywalker twins

AUs: Vader (Anakin) survives ROTJ

It was a strange experience to wake again as Anakin Skywalker. Strange to feel Vader's aches from long-neglected injuries, and struggle for breath with the help of a respirator as he finally had a reason to live again. He had so easily tied all of that to his sins, and the worthlessness of his life, and to feel it again… It changed his perspective, somewhat.

Slowly, he turned his head, half wincing at the sensation of it. He was aware of his injuries. He had not been unaware while Vader, only associated his pain so closely with his actions that he had not imagined feeling them himself.

There was a hand in his, still, but soft and moveable, not a body in the grasp of rigor mortis. He opened his eyes, found his view partially obscured by a pillow. He shifted slightly, managing uncomfortably to lift his head, and lower it again on the puff of stuffing, gazing in silent, grateful awe at the figure next to him.

Luke. He no longer wore the austere black uniform that he had worn when Vader had met him on Endor, it had been traded for a light blue hospital gown, the neck of which was barely visible beneath a heavy blanket that had been laid over him. His prosthetic hand was curled loosely around Anakin's, his eyes closed and face slack in angelic peace. He was asleep.

There were slight marks on his body, scratches and bruises from their duel, and on his exposed arm, thin lightning scars, running down to the connection point of his prosthetic, but Anakin felt certain that the Alliance was putting everything they had into his care.

They had bothered to get him, their enemy, out of his torturous life-support monstrosity and into a more comfortable, if less mobile, array. A clear mask covered his nose and mouth, and might have been distracting, had his gaze not been so fully drawn to his son.

It was a wonder. A wonder that they were both alive, that they were together at last, that despite his father's lack of faith, Luke had been the one to reunite them, with others who would care for them, rather than simply allow them to suffer in tandem. A wonder that the Alliance had allowed Luke to lie next to him, that Luke had even wantedto.

But there he was. Half-familiar, and silent, and comfortable.

Slowly, Anakin reached out, shifting awkwardly onto his side, brushing his fingertips across his son's face slowly, feeling the contours of his child's cheek. At his touch, Luke smiled slightly, a sort of patient amusement in the gesture as he slowly cracked his eyes open and peeked up at his father.

Anakin hesitated for a moment, unsure if he was ready to speak yet. He had not spoken for twenty years, since he had last held his wife, smiled at Obi-Wan…

"Hello," he sighed, the word quiet enough for only Luke to hear, only his son here to witness his return.

Luke's eyes sparkled, his smile grew. "Hello, Father."

Anakin could only smile back, feeling his heart rise as Vader's never had, settling in his throat, and precluding any additional speech. He reached down for Luke's shoulder, drawing him weakly closer, and the boy rolled towards him, ducking his head comfortably.

Anakin struggled for a second with his breath mask but managed to free himself of it for long enough to press his face into his boy's hair, breathing in unsteadily, unable to get enough oxygen, but not caring in the slightest. His son smelled of electricity and bacta, but he was alive. He was in Anakin's arm, close enough to see without vision enhancements, and smell with his limited breath.

He pressed a kiss into his son's hair, before withdrawing, carefully replacing his mask over his mouth.

"I'm so proud," he sighed, capturing Luke's other hand as well, and squeezing them tightly, holding them to his chest. "My son. My little one."

Mine, he thought again, awed at the very idea of it. He had nothing, he had never truly had anything, it had not been allowed. But Luke had come to him, had claimed Darth Vader as a father, as someone he wanted in the absence of Anakin, the absence of his mother. He had claimed himself as Anakin's child, had made a stand on that ground, which Anakin would not have thought strong enough to support the weight of such a claim. His bonds to his family had been so easily cut, before.

The boy exhaled, squirming his left hand free, and drawing it over Anakin. The part of him that had become accustomed to being trapped in Vader recoiled, anxious and annoyed at the potential pain the action could bring, but he silenced it, pulling his son in close, remembering how right it felt to hold someone, as he finally had the opportunity to do it again. His son gasped in a breath, and squeezed him tightly, pressing his face to Anakin's shoulder, shaking his head slowly.

"I thought-," he began, "I thought you were gone. I thought you'd changed your mind."

"About wanting you?" Anakin asked, incredulous. Holding his son again, it was all he could have wanted, all he had wanted twenty years ago, and all he had yearned for since. Vader had supressed it, the better to follow orders, but now that he had his son again, Vader was gone with his helplessness, banished by the light of his son, the determination to bring that light to the galaxy at large.

The boy only shrugged, slowly releasing Anakin, and slipping back to his side of their paired beds, pulling his blanket properly over himself again before looking up at Anakin. "I don't know. You were gone a long time."

A long time,Anakin thought. As if he had only taken longer at the grocer's than Luke had expected, and the child had become anxious waiting for him to return.

"I'm home, now," he answered softly, making himself comfortable on his side, unwilling to turn back to the ceiling. "You don't have to be afraid anymore."

Luke gave a small laugh, taking his father's right hand, and drawing it to his chest. "I was so afraid," he admitted softly.

Anakin smiled at his son, wanted to laugh at the pure adoration he felt, how at odds it was with everything he had been forced to become. Instead, he reached one fingertip up from Luke's enclosing hand, and tapped his chin lightly. "No more," he said, and as Luke met his gaze again, he tried to give the boy the same smirk he would've given Ahsoka, years ago.

"No more," he agreed quietly. "But you don't get to leave the medcenter for a while."

Anakin laughed. He didn't care that it hurt, he didn't care that it sounded strange and gravelly, it felt good, on a level that physical pain couldn't compare to. "That seems like a reasonable demand," he said. "Have you seen your sister since the battle?"

"She's alright," Luke assured. "She came and visited after I got out of the bacta… Probably not going to swing by again to say hello, though."

Anakin sighed comfortably, finally accepting that laying on his side wasn't a good long-term plan and rolling onto his back. "I would not expect her to. Was she injured?"

"Minor blaster wound," Luke said, and Anakin smiled as the boy scooted up to his side, nestling in the strange contours of his father's battered physique, amidst scar tissue and grotesquely overgrown muscle.

"She's tough," he agreed, managing to work his arm around Luke. He remembered too clearly the pain he had inflicted on her when she had briefly been in his custody on the Death Star, but remembered also her resilience, the way she had boldly defied him, despite his reputation and actions.

Luke nodded, and Anakin looked down at him as he slowly tipped his head against his father's chest, his eyes drifting closed again.

"Rest," he agreed softly, stroking Luke's shoulder.

The Jedi gave a soft murmur of ascent, and Anakin watched as he dozed off slowly. Reaching out in the Force, he surrounded his son's presence with his own, rocking him lovingly in it, testing out the waters of the living Force once more.

He had missed it. Despite what he had struggled to tell himself, the Dark Side was not the same loving embrace that he had always felt from his natural powers. As a child, and even as he had become a Jedi, the Force had been a source of solace, familiar and all-encompassing and steady. He had dabbled in imagining it as a traditional parent, had even used to talk to his mother about his "father", but it had been beyond that. The Force was no more his father than it was a father to anyone else, it was the great equalizer, though not all could feel it. It was an uncaring but constant reassurance, a powerful comfort or guidance, keeping the galaxy locked in its eternal dance, and it was right. Being its agent was right, and allowing himself to be guided by it was right, and as much as the Jedi had told him otherwise, it had been right to guide him to Padmé, and right to see their children born despite great adversity.

The Dark Side had been different. Where the living Force was a current, the Dark Side was its eddies, was rip currents and jagged rocks in the flow, to which a lost soul could cling, and attempt to force the water to obey its will, but which would never be as comforting, as all consuming, as uniting. It was the violence and defiance, the determination to own and control in opposition to the needs and comfort of others, and it was exhausting.

He had lived that life. He had told himself that that violence was freedom, because he was no longer driven by forces outside his control.

But there was a reasonthat rivers sought the sea, and a reason that people flocked to the Force's calm and gentle motion. It was right. It was natural. It was gravity, and it was love, and it was very human need. It was everything that made a man want to fight, save for the concept of fighting itself.

There had been a time he'd thought he liked fighting. A time when it had seemed like his calling to crash on the boulders and overwhelm the eddies and bring everything back to the flow, to equalize what even the Force's great, inexorable self could not. It had been an immense load, and it was one he had passed on to Luke, who had thrown himself against the rocks not to destroy them, but to free the presences upon them, to take his father and bring him back into the flow to drift along with him.

Perhaps it was better that way. Not to destroy the temptation to do wrong, or the inevitable flow of the Force past those rocks, the presences that scraped against them, but instead to simply offer a way back home. A way back to love, to protection, to quiet, gentle order. It was prescriptive, but it was not absolute. There was the enormity of flowing along with others, the streambed a guideline with plenty of space to explore, and in that exploration, there was another kind of freedom. A comfortable kind of freedom. A freedom he wantedto share with his son, in a way that he had not wanted to share the burden of destroying the stones in their path.

Distantly, he heard the door of the hospital open, and he cautiously turned his head as Leia spoke.

"Luke?"

Luke shifted against him, made a tiny sound of distress at being addressed.

"Nearly asleep, Princess," he reported, gently soothing Luke back into the flow, back into the sleep the Force was begging him to succumb to.

"You're awake." She didn't sound glad, exactly, but there was a sort of relief to her voice nonetheless.

"Yes," he agreed, squinting uselessly across the room at her for a moment before gesturing her closer. "Luke told me you were shot."

"It's nothing," she dismissed, but to Anakin's surprise, she approached the beds her family lay on. "I've been treated."

"Show me," he asked. He could feel her now, to, and that was an unbelievable sensation to have not one, but two brilliant presences brushing against his.

She looked at him doubtfully for a long moment, before reaching to her shoulder, and unbinding her injury, carefully seating herself just out of arms' reach.

"Luke loves you," Leia said sternly.

"Yes," Anakin sighed, caressing his son's shoulder again as he inspected his daughter's injury. "I know that it is more than I deserve."

She sighed, her handful of bandages falling to her lap, and her shoulders slumping. She looked very different from Luke, very much a stranger to Anakin's blunt and simple worldview, the one he shared with his son. But she was his child, and his heart cried out for her even as she sat apart from them, and he held out his arm.

"Mother kept a diary," Leia sighed softly, looking up at him from under her lashes, seeming afraid to open her heart to him to even the degree of telling him such a basic fact.

"Yes," Anakin admitted. He remembered seeing her writing in it, had used to tease her occasionally that she still had a secret diary, and had sometimes doodled on the margins as she wrote.

"I know about…" Leia hesitated. "I know about your mother. And… and…" She looked absolutely lost for words. "About your master."

"Oh," Anakin sighed, his heart sinking into his stomach. He'd known his son would have some concept of what their family had been subjected to, being that he had been raised by his stepbrother, but the princess, he'd thought, might have retained innocence of that fact.

"I've been thinking about it," she declared, "And I understand."

"You don't have to understand," Anakin said gently, reaching out for her, intensely glad that his reaching fingers were only metal, the leather gloves with which Vader had harmed her stripped from them. "I do not want you to."

She looked at his sharp fingertips, her hands twisting in her lap.

He began to lower his hand. "You do not have to forgive me. You need not concern yourself with my childhood, for it is long past. My actions are my own."

Finally, Leia stood up, stepping closer to his head, before perching herself at his side. "She was vague," she admitted softly. "She never used your name."

Anakin shrugged, folding his arm over his stomach so that it wouldn't fall against her and startle her. "We were married in secret. I would not expect her to."

"But she wrote about you."

Anakin nodded, watching his daughter's face for every sign of distress, of which myriad ran across her features.

"She loved you," Leia said, twisting the bandages so hard that Anakin heard a faint tearing of fabric before Leia reached up and wiped her sleeve across her face. "Father said that Vader killed her."

"Oh," Anakin said softly, and he dared to move his arm back towards her, careful to keep his fingertips away from her until she was aware of his approach and accepted his hand as he lowered it to her knee. "Yes, I… yes, that would be accurate."

The princess nodded, wiping her tears again. "And you killed him. And my adoptive mother."

"I did not take the actions I should have to prevent their deaths," Anakin admitted.

"So you're all I have," she concluded. "I want to love you, too. I want to feel like Luke does."

Anakin looked down at his son, peacefully asleep in his other arm. The boy's comfort was nothing short of a miracle, the fact that he had gone to sleep next to him not once, but twice.

"It would not be unreasonable to call him naïve," he said.

She laughed, the sound somewhat choked by her tears. "No, it wouldn't be. Luke's really stupid about who he trusts." She sniffled, "And I suppose I want to be a little stupid too."

Anakin smiled, opening himself to her fully, accepting her presence into his heart as he squeezed her knee, wishing he could hug her without dislodging her brother. "Then come be stupid with us."

A/N Please review! The story technically has two reviews, but they're 'just' lovely lovely people letting me know it didn't upload right on the first try! :'D