Luke collapsed onto the bed he'd been given and stared at the ceiling for a long time.

He shouldn't have been surprised when Vader dragged him towards the castle he'd seen earlier; he'd already confirmed that there was no one else on-planet earlier. But it just felt horribly cruel of the Force that the place he'd considered going to for mercy or help was now his prison.

Oh, Vader hadn't said that this was a prison, but the truth was simple: Luke was a Jedi—he wouldn't be allowed to leave unless he joined Vader. Not alive, in any case.

And it didn't matter if Vader's claim was true—which it couldn't be, it just couldn't—Luke doubted he would have any qualms about killing him anyway.

So if leaving of his own accord wasn't an option, then Luke would have to find a way to escape on his own.

Invigorated by the thought, he sat up and looked around. The room wasn't that large, with one measly little window that the reddish light from the lava filtered through, so it was very dim inside and Luke had to squint to look at everything. For a moment he studied the window, debating if that could be used to escape, but it was fairly small and high up. If he stacked stuff underneath it and climbed up, he might be able to wriggle through—

The door swung open.

Luke swore; whiplash lanced up his spine as he snapped his head round to see Vader standing in the doorway like some menacing black monolith.

"Language," Vader chided, surprisingly mildly.

Luke dropped his hand from his neck, hysterical laughter bubbling up from somewhere inside him. Vader was chiding him for swearing? Uncle Owen he would expect this from, but Vader—

"Language?" he asked, scoffing. "Who the hell do you think you are?"

Vader crossed his arms over his chest. "Your father," he said pointedly, and Luke could feel the glare through the mask as he shook his head.

"Stop saying that!" He meant to say it calmly, insistent, but it came out a shout. His voice was still hoarse from when Vader had been choking him, and he coughed after raising his voice that much.

Vader stiffened. "It's true," he said, "and you need to go to the medbay, Luke."

"Yeah, because of you!" He was shouting again now, and he coughed harder. "You—!"

Vader seemed to be out of patience. "Come to the medbay," he said, flatly and sternly. "Now."

Luke lifted his chin in defiance, opening his mouth to spit at Vader exactly what he thought of him—I don't need anything from you—but the third fit of coughing it brought on didn't help his point.

A heavy hand clamped down on his shoulder and pulled him towards the door. Luke tried to twist his hand round, to glare at Vader as he was marched through the corridors, but it was awkward, and the Sith Lord didn't even seem to be looking at him, anyway.

It was a surprisingly short time before they stopped outside a door. Vader keyed in the access code, then it slid aside, and then Luke was dragged through a room with a large pod taking up most of the space, before coming across another door, which slid open at their approach.

"Is that a hyperbaric chamber?" he asked, but got no reply before he was dragged into the next room.

It was full of medical instruments, including a table which several medical droids hovered around. They powered up when the two of them entered the room, one trundling forward. "Good day, my lord, are you—"

Vader just shoved Luke forward; he stumbled, and narrowly managed to avoid collapsing onto the medical table. "Check him for injuries," he ordered, then stepped back against the flurry of motion as the droids moved to do their job.

"Of course, my lord," the one who'd spoken earlier said, then gave Luke a gentle push. "Please sit down on the operating table, sir."

Operating table? Luke shot Vader a questioning glance, but if the Sith Lord noticed it, he didn't acknowledge it.

"Er, alright," Luke said instead. The moment he sat down the droids swarmed him, scanners and needles and metal limbs prodding and poking and passing over him as the first droid let out a flurry of questions.

"Have you experienced any serious fatigue lately?"

"Do you have difficulty breathing?"

"Have you had any unexplained aches or pains?"

Luke tried to answer each question as best he could, but he was getting uncomfortable having all this attention focused on him. He wasn't one who ever liked having to wait to heal, and acting like a little cough could hurt him was absolutely—

There was a beep as one of the medical droids finished its scan of his throat, and then it started giving its report in an inflectionless voice.

"The patient is completely healthy aside from lack of a few vaccinations and nutrient deficiencies, and the damage to his throat. His trachea has been partially crushed, which could cause breathing difficulties in times of high duress and strain. We may be able to fix this if we operate on him now."

Luke was just left blinking. Partially crushed? Had Vader—

He threw the man a sideways glance. Of course he had.

"Do it," Vader said. "And fix the lack of nutrients and vaccines while you do."

"Yes, my lord." The medical droid turned back to Luke, who eyed it with a wary expression. "You will need to be sedated for this, sir, or the operation—"

"You're not knocking me out," Luke said flatly, shooting Vader a distrustful glance. The droid trundled away to prepare the necessary shot anyway.

His supposed father stepped forwards. "Luke, you need to—"

"No!"

"You might die." Despite the bass tones of the vocoder, it sounded almost like Vader's voice had broken on the word.

It didn't help Luke's temper. "Because of you!" he insisted, hand going to his throat as reflex. He could feel the burr on the inside of his throat that meant he needed to cough again, but doing so would only worsen his case, so he kept quiet.

"Do not test me on this, Luke," Vader growled. "I will not let you die as well."

As well? "Why would you care?"

Vader seemed to still at the words, suddenly straightening up and going very, very quiet.

Then—

"I am your father."

Luke shot upright on the table, ignoring the outraged tut of the droid. "You," he said heatedly, as if that would make his denial carry any more weight, the words scratching along the edge of his throat, "are not my—"

The droid jabbed him with the shot without warning. Luke cut off mid-sentence, staring at the small red hole in his arm where the needle entered, then looked back at the droid in disbelief. Vader was practically radiating smugness.

"You—" He didn't finish that sentence either. The drug worked quickly, and soon enough he knew nothing but oblivion.

And in that oblivion, there was the Force, and it told him exactly what he didn't want to hear.

Vader couldn't stand to stay in the room as Luke's throat was operated on; it reminded him too much of days shortly after his rebirth, where all he knew was fire and pain and betrayal, and the droids worked day and night to keep him alive. He didn't care for the memory.

Instead, he retreated to his hyperbaric chamber in the next room—far enough away to avoid unpleasant flashbacks, but close enough that he could constantly monitor the boy's state through the Force. The droids were reliable, they'd certainly kept him alive when he seemed on the brink of death, but he didn't want to take chances.

His son was alive. He wouldn't let him die so soon.

But how was he alive? Padmé had died—he'd killed her himself. So how had the child she was carrying, whether he was ready to be born or not, survived?

The answer came to him readily, probably because he'd known it all along: Kenobi. He clenched his fists, feeling the leather creak under the strain. The Jedi had taken his child, possibly even cut him from his dead mother's womb, and trained him to be a Jedi.

Trained him to kill his father.

It didn't matter. It didn't matter, was of no consequence, because Vader had the boy now and he would give him the galaxy. He'd missed Luke's childhood, but the boy was still young; they would have time to bond, he would have time to show Luke the failings of the Jedi. To bring Luke round to his way of thinking. From the power he'd sensed in Luke already, together they'd be unstoppable.

Except—

He turns eighteen in three months. If you haven't left the Sith behind by then, he dies.

If what Ahsoka said was true, they didn't have time. Three months was barely anything. If Ahsoka had foreseen some great threat to Luke that would come in three months' time, then Vader would have to find a way to save him while he did, the way he hadn't been able to save Padmé:

He would have to get Palpatine to teach him Plagueis's secret of immortality, as had been promised to him all those years ago.

He'd been too late to save Padmé, too rash and drunk on his own power, and it had been her undoing. He'd burned as she died, still ignorant of the only power he'd sought to gain from his new role. And after she was gone. . .

After she was gone, there wasn't anyone worth saving.

Now there was. Now, he needed to get that secret off of Palpatine. There was simply no other way. Leaving the Sith certainly wasn't an option—this was his destiny—but neither was letting Luke die. At least he knew when it would happen now, instead of the agony that was waiting on tenterhooks for when time would run out.

The only issue was how to get the secret from Palpatine without revealing the existence of his son.

Vader glanced towards the general direction Luke was in, even if there was no way of seeing him through the wall of the room and the closed hyperbaric chamber.

Because he knew what would happen if Palpatine ever got wind of the fact that there was a new, extremely powerful potential servant for him to use. The very existence of the Inquisitorius had proven to Vader that his Master could and would replace him the moment it was advantageous, and Luke was almost as powerful as him, young and uninjured. Vader couldn't allow Palpatine to sink his claws into him, or treat him like the Inquisitors had been treated. Luke deserved better than that.

So Vader would have to be subtle. He would have to be clever, underhanded, resourceful.

He would have to do what any given politician does on a regular basis.

He clenched his fists again, and focused on his breathing for several cycles, just the word invoking memories of Obi-Wan shaking his head in scorn, of her insisting that she had important work to do—

Despite being best friend to one of them, and husband to the other, he had never had much of a head for politics.

Luke resurfaced an unknown amount of time later, the muscles in his throat feeling stiff and his head woozy. Other than that, he felt better than he had in years—rejuvenated, even. Warm and healthy and alive.

Instinctively, he made to sit up, to swing his legs over the side of the bed—because it was a bed, not the medical table, he recognised—but there was a tugging in the right arm, and he glanced down.

A tube ran into his arm, presumably providing nutrients while he was unconscious and couldn't feed himself, and he stilled automatically at the sight of it, resisting the urge to rip it out; nearly two decades of living as a reckless child in Uncle Owen's household had led to a lot of lectures on properly looking after himself and not trying to shun medicine that could save his life.

He wasn't lying there for very long before the droids came into the room to start poking and prodding him again, testing whether or not he had the clean bill of health they'd predicted, but he found this time he could tune their administrations out, letting his gaze wander around the room.

There was a lot of medical equipment in here. Spare prosthetics, various instruments that looked like they could easily be repurposed for use in interrogation, and even massive tanks of a murky substance he recognised as bacta. He had to stare at that for a while: bacta was expensive. How rich was this man?

He glanced to his right, through the door he'd been dragged, where he somehow knew his— where he knew Vader would be. His presence in the Force was pretty impossible to miss, a small galaxy with a black hole at the centre of it, sucking all light and warmth and heat out of the surroundings. Funny, though: there were stars in that galaxy as well, spots of light among the darkness that Luke would never have expected from Darth Vader of all people. . .

And he steadfastly wasn't going to think about how easy it had been to locate the man, or the way that a channel of his mind seemed to lead straight to him, similar but different to the master-apprentice bond he had with Ben. . .

Nope, he wasn't going to think about that.

He glanced up at the droids when they stopped poking him and asked, "Are you done?"

"Yes, sir," one of them said. Idly, Luke wondered if it was the same one that had done most of the talking yesterday, but there was no way of knowing—they all looked the same. "You are perfectly healthy, and are cleared to leave. The master wants to see you in his personal chambers as soon as possible."

Luke grimaced. It didn't take a genius to work out who that was. "Alright, I'll head over there," he said, having no such intentions. But the droids were satisfied, and they shooed him out of Vader's personal medbay. He walked slowly past the pod he'd noted the last time he'd passed through here—it was a hyperbaric chamber!—but quickly moved on. He could sense that Vader was close, and he wanted to have as much time to explore the castle and potential ways of escaping it before he caught on to what he was doing.

He did his best to orient himself the moment he stepped out of the room. Vader's presence—and, presumably, his personal chambers—were to his right, so Luke veered left, round a bend in the corridor, down a flight of stairs—

Luke. Vader's voice rippled through the Force directly into his mind, heavy with annoyance. It made the boy flinch; how was he supposed to ignore this new bond between them if the man kept using it?

But he'd resolved to ignore it, so he would ignore it. The stairs kept going round, a spiral structure that led deeper and deeper into the castle—

Luke. Stop running away from this. We need to talk.

Again, he flinched. Then he bit his lip and kept moving.

Luke—

Luke yelped when he took another turn in the spiral staircase only to come across an old man in a dark, drab robe. The man's face, heavily lined with age and (no doubt) the stress of working with such a temperamental employer, pinched when he saw Luke; before the boy knew it there was a vice-like grip on his upper arm—much stronger than the man looked—and he was being dragged back the way he came.

Up the staircase, along the corridor, round the bend, past the medbay. . .and then round one more bend to get to Vader's chambers.

The man stopped abruptly outside the door to key in a code. It hissed open, then the man released his grip on Luke and shoved him inside, before standing in the doorway again to prevent his escape.

Luke looked around.

The room was circular, with almost half of its space dominated by a massive viewport that showed off the deadly, chaotic grandeur of Mustafar's fiery surface. Vader stood in front of it, looking out at the planet he'd chosen to build his base on; if Luke hadn't known he was human, he mused, he might've assumed he was a part of the scenery, a towering black rock that had been there for hundreds of years and would probably be there for hundreds more.

"My lord," the old man who'd caught him said, "here is Skywalker."

"Very well," Vader said, not turning away from the viewport. Luke was somewhere between stung and relieved. "You are dismissed, Vaneé."

The old man bowed his head, then left, the door hissing shut and locking behind him.

That was when Vader finally turned to look at him.

Luke immediately wished he hadn't.

Even through the mask, he could feel Vader's stare. The branches of the galaxy that was Vader's Force presence stretched out to and around him, sucking the light and warmth out of the air, making him shiver. He imagined he could see through the red-tinted eye plates to the eyes beyond, his irises that sickly Sith yellow, glowing with an inner flame.

"You were foolish to think you could ever escape so carelessly," Vader remarked, not quite idly, but close enough. "I hope you didn't honestly believe you had a chance."

Luke just shifted, uncomfortable. It wasn't so much as hoping he could escape as trying to prove he wasn't under Vader's thumb, but he didn't want to say that. It sounded. . . petty.

Fortunately, Vader didn't press the matter. Instead, he just asked, almost hesitantly, "How do you feel?"

Those tendrils of Vader's Force presence probed him again, but this time it felt warmer, more like the prods of those medical droids, and Luke forced himself to relax.

"Better," he admitted, forcing the words out. It didn't make sense to anger the man, especially when he was claiming to be— "I feel healthier than ever, really."

Vader nodded. "You were in the bacta tank for a long time to make sure any and all injuries were healed."

"Bacta?" Luke asked, some of his incredulity seeping into his voice.

Vader tilted his head. "You are surprised?"

"It's just—" Luke bit his lip. "Bacta's expensive."

Vader didn't comment on that, though Luke thought he felt a slight shift in the Dark Lord, even if he couldn't for the life of him say what that shift was.

The man waved his hand and a door in the corner on the room slid open. Luke tried not to feel envy at the sight—he'd progressed extremely far in his Jedi training in the past years or so, according to Ben, but still. . . Vader used it so naturally.

Vader waved his hand again, and, begrudgingly, Luke stepped towards the door. It was dark in the next room, but from what he could see it seemed to be some sort of study.

"Come, young one," Vader said. "We have much to discuss."

It was a study. And it was very obviously Vader's study as well—the reports were all organised with the sort of brutal order one would expect a leader of the Empire to have, and the seat was so massive it wouldn't be practical for anyone else, anyway.

That didn't seem to stop Vader, though. "Sit," he told Luke, gesturing to the chair.

Luke blinked. It wasn't like there were any other chairs in the room, but even so. . . "Isn't this your chair?"

"It is," Vader said, folding his hands behind his back, "but I prefer to stand, and you have just completed a session in bacta. You will likely tire of standing fairly quickly."

The same familiar defiance reared its head in Luke's chest again, but he quashed it down. That— that made sense. No matter how healthy he felt, no matter how rigorous his Jedi training could get, walking up and down those stairs had tired his post-operation body out, and he needed to save his strength.

Luke sat. The massive chair dwarfed his slight frame.

"Good," Vader praised, and the sound of it half made Luke want to stand up again. He didn't. He wasn't that petty. "Now, we have something important to discuss." He paused. "Namely, the threat on your life."

Luke blinked once. Twice.

Then he scoffed.

"The last I checked, Vader," he said, hand going to his throat by instinct, "the greatest threat to my life is you."

Vader bowed his head. "That was true, and I. . . regret that, Luke. But nevertheless, we must move forward. You—"

"Move forward?" Luke felt anger rising in him, and he strained to quash it down—not the Jedi way—but his next words came out biting nonetheless. "You nearly killed me!"

"I did not know who you were, at that point."

"And I suppose that makes it so much better then?"

"Luke," Vader thundered, "you are going to die in three months."

Something inside him quailed at the tone before he even registered the words.

"I—" He cut himself off. "What? How— How do you know?"

"I have been told," Vader ground out, "by a reliable source, that you will die on your eighteenth birthday."

Luke crossed his arms and cocked one of his eyebrows. The overall effect of the look was probably diminished by how small he seemed in the massive chair, but at least it conveyed how he felt. "What reliable source?"

Vader crossed his arms in retaliation, but he hesitated before answering, and when he did, he said haltingly, "My old apprentice—she came back as a ghost. . ."

Luke almost laughed.

He wanted to laugh. Darth Vader, Dark Lord of the Sith, going senile and talking to ghosts? That was unbelievable, a hilarious joke if only because of its impossibility.

But this wasn't a joke. This was real.

He was the prisoner of a madman.

". . .okay," Luke said. His hand absently touched his throat again, reminding himself to tread carefully, a faint shiver running through him at the memory of what had happened the last time he'd aggravated Vader. "Your dead apprentice told you I'm going to die in three months. Right."

"You think I'm insane?" Vader demanded. "I'm not insane."

"I'm sure you're not," Luke said, placating, doing his best to inject soothing touches of the Force into his voice. It had always worked on the eopie back home, why not—

"Your lack of faith disturbs me," Vader hissed. The man was clearly not an eopie. "I am in as perfect health as ever," Luke gave a pointed look to the suit, which Vader ignored, "and I am telling the truth about this. Your life is in danger."

"I don't think—"

"You might die, Luke!" he shouted. "I will not allow that to happen."

"Why not?" Luke's voice was getting louder and louder now as well; he flinched at the sound waves echoing back at him in the small office, but refused to back down. "You were perfectly willing to when you started choking me!"

"I have already stated that I didn't know who you were then—"

"So what?" Luke was positively shaking now. "You see no issue with killing random people simply because they turn up where they're not supposed to be? You're so entrenched in the Dark Side that your anger overrides your basic respect for sentient life?"

He was left gasping, breathing heavily after the outburst; he found he kept touching his throat, frightened. He had felt a brief pressure on it during his rant, but now—

It was fine. Everything was fine.

Until Vader sneered, "I see Kenobi has already drummed his hypocritical ideals of Light and Dark into your head."

Luke took a deep breath to steady himself—not the Jedi way not the Jedi way not the Jedi way—and stated, "My views on the Force don't have any bearing on the conversation, except that the Dark Side is more likely to lead to the deaths of innocent people. But you didn't answer the question." He fixed Vader with a glare. "So, you don't have any respect for sentient life?"

"Most sentients are useless, irritating—"

"That's a yes, then." He shook his head, feeling strangely deflated. Disappointed.

He bit his lip. "And. . . you say you're Anakin Skywalker?"

"That name no longer has any meaning for me."

"But you used to be," Luke pushed on. "So, what changed?"

For a moment, Vader seemed almost caught off guard, turning away from him slightly. "What?"

"What changed?" Luke repeated. "I— I've heard so many stories about you," his voice broke slightly, "from Ben, and I know he was telling the truth when he was telling them. They always made him so happy to remember them, before he got sad because he remembered you were dead." He said the word with some bitterness. Then he shook his head. "What changed? What turned you from the Jedi hero in those stories to," he ran his gaze up and down Vader's considerable bulk, not bothering to hide his disgust, "this?"

Vader turned back to him abruptly, cape snapping about him. "This is who I have always been," he thundered. "The anger you saw has always been a part of me, as your anger is a part of you," Luke winced slightly at the comparison, "and if Obi-Wan or Ahsoka or even Padmé herself ever believed I was or am someone different, then they never knew me at all." He turned away again. "The only thing that changed was I gave up my foolish naïveté and accepted what my destiny had in store for me."

There was a brief pause after that, like both of them were trying to recover after Vader's outburst, then Luke had to ask—

"Who's Padmé?"

He instantly got the feeling that it had been the wrong thing to say. Vader stilled, fists clenching, then looked over his shoulder at him.

"You don't know?" he hissed.

Luke shook his head.

Something crackled and crumpled; Luke jumped, wide eyed, as several datapads stacked in the corner crumpled under some invisible force. Glancing back at Vader, he flinched. He didn't need to guess what had just happened.

The ruined datapads hovered where they were for a moment, then something hurled them at the wall. They fell to the ground with a clatter.

"So you mean to tell me," Vader continued, still with that deadly softness to his voice, "that Obi-Wan stole you away from me, raised you on a pathetic world like Tatooine, trained you to one day kill me, and he didn't even have the decency to tell you your mother's name?"

Luke thought his heart might stop beating. The sheer hate in Vader's voice scared him, but. . . He touched the Force, and could've sworn there was a lingering sense of betrayal there too—a deep, profound loneliness.

Luke closed his eyes, and felt a single tear escape through his lashes, sliding down his face. If anything, that was the saddest thing: Vader felt betrayed by Obi-Wan. Vader—his father—had loved Obi-Wan.

So that meant, if all of Ben's stories were true. . .

If Anakin Skywalker, a good man, no matter what this empty shell of him might claim, had become. . . this in the face of the Dark Side, then what hope did Luke have?

Suddenly, all of Ben's warnings came back to him in a lot more clarity.

He sucked in a breath. "My— my mother?"

He'd never had a name for her; she was always some faceless figure in his imaginings who'd never seemed real. His uncle had said he didn't know who she was. Aunt Beru had admitted once that the only time she'd met his father, there'd been a young woman with him, but Luke knew as well as she did that they could just be friends, or even romantically involved at the time, only to end it before Luke was even conceived.

Eventually, he'd stopped asking about her. He'd known there was no information left to find, so he'd turned his efforts to asking about his father, because at least he knew there was something there, something his guardians weren't telling him. He'd stopped wanting more, because what's the point in wanting something you knew you would never get?

Except, now he had a name. A name, and a source of information about the woman he'd never known.

And now he wanted so much worse than he used to.

Luke opened his mouth to ask something—anything—about her, but before he could, Vader said bitterly, "Obi-Wan betrayed me. Turned her against me, and probably cut you from her dead womb." Luke flinched at the imagery, but. . . everything about his father seemed to lead the man back to Ben. It was an obsession.

"Why do you hate Ben so much?"

Vader's gaze snapped to his, voice heated. "He turned your mother against me, cut off my three remaining limbs and left me to burn to death in the lava of this very planet, then stole you and hid you from me, so you were denied the luxuries growing up that you deserved."

"Stole me?" Luke didn't like that—although stole may be a perfectly reasonable word to use, the way his father said it. . .

"You are mine," Vader hissed, "and he had no rights to you. I was robbed of your childhood, seeing you grow up, but I will rectify that now. Now, you are at my side, where you belong, and you will stay there, and finally, Obi-Wan's failure will be complete."

Luke stood up abruptly. "I see," he said in a flat tone. "So, you don't care about my life and wellbeing because of who I am as a person. You care about it because you want revenge on Ben."

Vader just stared at him for a moment. "I—"

He didn't finish. Luke had already walked out of the door, and his father made no move to stop him.