AN: As always I have to thank everyone who has been reading this story. A special thanks to everyone who has been commenting - I really appreciate all the support.

This is the one that has to work. This is the one that sets the tone for the future of Dark Times - and I hope you can follow what is happening here, despite the flashbacks.

Within the Interlude timeline Creation comes before Prisoners - but I kept it until last for dramatic purposes. Sorry...

As always my thanks go to Kazlynh for beta reading - however, if you see any errors they will be mine and please let me know so I can fix it.

All previous disclaimers for Dark Times still apply!


Creation

The boy had been a corpse when Vader had delivered him; a cadaver through which blood still flowed: artificially oxygenated and pumped around the lifeless body; a carcass kept cool within the medical capsule to slow down the need for energy and oxygen to a brain left damaged by anoxia.

Palpatine ignored his apprentice and walked around the capsule looking in at the still form lying within, noting the large bacta patch that covered the blackened and scorched blaster shot that had punched into the boy's chest. It had punctured a hole through the rib cage, nicking the sternum and searing the tissue of the right lung, severing the phrenic nerve and the brachiocephalic artery. The boy had bled out into lungs rendered useless by the loss of the nerve that controlled the diaphragm. Blood loss and suffocation had killed him.

Palpatine noted the scars left by the emergency surgery that had been performed to repair the damage to the artery and the nerve. He also noted the tubes of blood that entered and exited the chest cavity feeding the body's circulatory system with vital oxygen. The boy was lucky that Vader's personal shuttle had been his transport from Horaarn. The shuttle carried Vader's own medical supplies: blood, plasma, bacta and emergency capsule. A capsule that had been tailored to meet the Sith's own particular needs for artificial oxygenation. There was also a medic, who had been specifically trained in performing the necessary procedures.

Walking on, around the pale figure, Palpatine reached out a gnarled hand and touched the tubes that carried fluid, medication and nutrients. He ran his fingers along the pipe that was fed into the boy's mouth and down his throat feeding a steady flow of bacta into his lungs and chest, flushing through to exit via the drain inserted into the patient's side where it was collected, filtered and recycled to flush through the boy again.

He also saw the healing stab wound on his shoulder, the cut sliced into his palm and, older still, a thin scar and yellow bruising on the pale, drawn face… below which fresh bruising around his throat marked out the shape of a hand.

It would seem that young Skywalker had somehow provoked his father some time before his death.

Finally he withdrew his hand and turned away, regarding Vader, dismissing the boy, "He is dead."

He smiled at the rage and grief that roiled from Vader, the scorching denial torn from the vocoder. "No, he lives! I can feel him still…"

It was very much like the denial he had uttered when informed of Amidala's death.

Holding up a placating hand, Palpatine stretched out with his feelings, tracing the boy's body with the Force. He placed a hand on the cool forehead and probed deeper, looking for the essence that Vader spoke of. There was nothing; just a stillness, just a bleak hollow shell where once there would have been…

Wait.

There…

A small flicker, a minute light, a tiny flame guttering against the wind of death.

He opened his eyes, glared at Vader, black pupils gleaming with sudden fury…

She had failed!

…and with guiling temptation.

He could let death extinguish the flame and watch Vader's reaction; set the Dark Lord loose once more upon the Galaxy; a bleak man, a hate filled man, causing pain and destruction because that was all he knew.

Or…

He could save the boy, wrench him back to life. Allow the flame to grow, to catch and blaze into conflagration.

He had felt Skywalker's gusting powers, had felt how strong the youth could become. He had felt the touch of the dark side during the Cusrean battle, had felt the pain and the pleasure of it when the station had erupted into a million pieces. However, he had also felt the brightness that was the boy's heart, the light that even now flickered tremulously within the Force. Life where none should still exist.

Palpatine closed his eyes, gathered the Force to him. A dark squall, a storm of possibilities, rose within him as he searched through the pleated folds, searching for this boy's destiny.

Never had he been successful in bringing back one so far into death. If he could take the boy's life, if he could hold it within his own hands as he had with no other, he could nurture it, mould it, shape it into the Sith that was the unfulfilled potential of the father.

And there!

See him…

The vision was fleeting, a mere flash within the Force, a transitory image of bristling power and corruption, of blackness and foul malevolence. A figure bending a knee, bowing a head and a smooth voice…

"My Master…"

How glorious Luke Skywalker would be! How wondrous a creature; powerful and formidable. The darkest of lights in the deepest of nights.

He opened his eyes and looked to Vader.

The father pitted against son. The son against father and a Galaxy trembling under the power of their struggle.

Conflict.

The desire was too strong, the compulsion too demanding. The challenge to his powers, to test his own abilities, was tempting. The need to know if he could do this, if he could bring this corpse back from the brink and create the being he had just seen was enthralling and enticing.

"If I do this," he whispered aloud, his voice dragging the words. "If I do this… I do it alone."

Vader stepped forward, his shadow falling across the capsule as though to protect the young man within. "Master, he is my…"

Palpatine turned on him and Vader sank to his knee, at last remembering his place. "I am aware of who he is," he hissed. Spittle speckled the floor by Vader, droplets spattered his helmet. "Did you think you could hide him from me? Did you think I could not feel the stench of light within the Force? Did you truly believe that the Rebel pilot could remain hidden from me?" He looked down in scorn at the Dark Lord. "Oh, my friend, my failed apprentice, I have long known of Anakin Skywalker's son."

Vader was quiet, subdued, waiting: knowing he had no choice but to do his master's bidding. His son's life depended upon it.

"I do it alone," Palpatine repeated, looking back down into the capsule. His word was final and Vader knew it. "And you will return to your duties. You will burn across the Galaxy as you once did, my friend, you will hunt down this Rebellion, this Alliance, and you will scatter them, you will destroy them…."

He paused, placed a gnarled hand upon dull, blond hair, knowing Vader had understood the unspoken threat to his son. "And you will not return unless I summon you."

There was a brief hesitation, a minute moment of internal struggle, of considered rebellion. Then Vader intoned, "Yes, my Master." Two decades of servitude and the driving desire to save his child by any means, by all means, dulling any thought of further argument.

Sidious moved his court back to the summit of the Emperor Palpatine Surgery and Reconstruction Centre. He had given no explanation, and as Emperor his word was final. For days and nights, he went without sleep, spending hours in meticulous study and meditation and even more hours with the boy himself. Standing by a bacta tank, deeply submerged in the Dark Side of the Force, he had woven his power through the still body, carefully manipulating the midi-chlorians that teemed in the boy's blood, rebuilding him from the cellular level.

Slowly, gradually, Skywalker's body began to respond. Floating serenely in the bacta, the boy's body began to heal.

After days of work, Skywalker's lungs had reached a point where he could be weaned from the external blood oxygenation. Artificial respiration forced oxygen down the trachea into the bronchial tubes. His heart, however, still required external stimulation to keep it beating.

In the days that followed, under Palpatine's careful manipulation of the midi-chlorians, even those supports could be reduced and finally removed altogether.

Now Palpatine, Darth Sidious, grinned as the limp body was pulled from the bacta and laid on the slab of durasteel: the same cold, hard surface; the same platform; the same dark room that had been so instrumental in saving the young Darth Vader's life. Here, Sidious had brought the mutilated, burned body: sculpting Vader; chiselling the distraught and guilt ridden boy into the entity the galaxy now knew and feared.

Two decades ago Vader had shrieked and screamed, ignored by the unfeeling droids as they tended to his injuries with pitiless precision. Vader's son, however, was quiet: comatose; lost within a brain damaged by anoxia.

The boy had been without oxygen for a significant period and the medics had been quite specific about their expectations for recovery.

"Excellency," the droid intoned, dolefully. "The patient scored three on the Galactic Coma Scale. He shows no response to any stimuli, pupils are fixed and dilated and scans show no significant brain activity."

"But there is activity?" Palpatine's attention was fixed on the young man floating loosely within the bacta tank.

"There are random electrical pulses, enough to cause the seizures. However, I believe these to be simply…"

"Just tell me, droid."

"There are significant acquired injuries to areas of the cerebral cortex, the frontal and temporal lobes and…"

"And this means?"

"Impaired motor functions, speech, language, sight, memory, understanding and personality, behaviour and…"

"Can the damage be reversed?"

"Not by conventional medicine, Sire. There is little we can do for such a serious brain injury. I do not believe it to be survivable."

"You may leave…"

Palptine waited until the One-Bee unit had left the room. He laid a hand against the cool transparisteel of the bacta tank, reaching out with his mind to the boy within. "I can feel you," he whispered as Skywalker's body convulsed within the tank. A tone sounded, lights flashed their alarm and medication automatically flowed into the subject's veins to calm the sudden seizure.

Sidious grinned. These spasms had not been caused by the brain injury. On some level, on a primitive level, the boy was reacting to his presence through the Force.

"There is no hiding!" Sidious warned him. "I will find you and when I do…. You will be mine."

It had been meticulous work, needing unbroken concentration and patience. Sidious lost himself within the Force again as he influenced the boy's healing. Slowly new synapses, neurons and glial developed. Fibrous axons spread and branched, generating fresh pathways and bridges between new and existing brain matter. Over the weeks, as Palpatine worked, scans began to show increased activity. His pupils began to respond to light, his body to pain. Muscles began to flex and straighten. Little by little, Luke Skywalker's mind began to reconnect and develop.

The doctors and the droids had said it was impossible. They said brain cells could not regenerate, could not undergo mitosis and divide. They did not know the Force. They did not know the Dark Side.

And once the brain was reformed, Sidious had spent the final few weeks within the boy's mind itself. Skywalker's consciousness was a jumble of disconnected images and memories: shifting, random snatches of thoughts and snapshot images and feelings.

Twin suns setting… a warm, breeze carrying the scent of freshly baked bread…

"Luke put that down! Suns, boy, you will be the death of me."

A man's face, a worn face smiling... being picked up and swung around until the dessert was blur. Laughing…

"Wormie, wormie! You're a worm Skywalker!"

Exhilaration as he swooped down into the canyon, piloting the tiny vessel through tight turns and…

A ceiling, with colour, above at table… a taste of milk… a twist of anger. "But it's a whole 'nother year!"

… a burst of light, relief, friends calling over the com.. "Great shot, kid! That was one in a million!"…

Falling…. falling… wind ripping against a flight suit as the ground rushed him…

"Flyby…"

Pain! Stop… just stop… please…

Dade!

Innocents. So many Innocents… I felt… pleasure…

"I… win… father…"

Everything was disconnected, chaotic, disorganised. The experiences that had shaped the boy, that had given him his identity, were lost in the fog of amnesia: potentially unrecoverable... leaving him malleable to Sidious' influence. And so Palpatine lured his patient, urged him forward, lighting the dark of his coma and dragging him up from the deepest recesses of his mind.

And then, the boy had his first dream. It was fleeting, ephemeral, an image of a woman in simple woven clothing standing by a dome at dusk shouting his name…

"Luke!"

It was the moment the Emperor had been waiting for. It was proof that Skywalker's mind was processing subconscious thought. It was the vindication of Sidious' work and it had left the doctors and medical droids perplexed and confused, still cautioning that the boy could not emerge whole from the coma.

He did not need to be whole, he just needed to wake.

And surface he would. Today the boy would wake. It was time to release him from the prison that his body had become. It was time to show his creation the door; the way out.

Skywalker only had to take it.

Palpatine walked around the platform as Luke's legs and wrists were secured into the table's restraints by the droids. He waited, watching, while the bacta was cleaned from the limp and loose body. The boy's head rolled loosely on the flat surface, eyes partially open, but showing no awareness; just blank, sightless staring. An oxygen mask still covered his nose and mouth and sensors attached to his chest monitored a steady heartbeat.

The Emperor stood for a moment looking down at the unblemished face of the boy as he waited for the droids to finish and leave. There was no doubt Skywalker resembled his father in looks, if not in stature, but could this boy be the promise that his father had been unable to fulfil?

Alone at last, he reached up and removed his cowl, folding it carefully over his shoulders. He stepped closer to the table and took the boy's head into his hands. He gathered the darkness to him, drawing it in and subfusc shadows deepened around the chamber. His yellowed eyes flared, the vein in his temple pulsed with pressure and he focused all of his power, all of his strength, on the boy lying helpless before him.

A soft, blue corona of light trailed and sparked over his fingers, the glow growing in intensity until…

He suddenly snarled, viciously releasing the power into the boy, shunting his presence into the boy's mind. Skywalker stiffened, arched, limbs pulling against the restraints and an inarticulate sound was driven from him by the sudden contraction of his diaphragm.

Holding tight to Luke's head, Palpatine rammed into his mind again. Energy crackled and sparked, and another cry ripped from the boy's throat. Muscles bunched. Legs and arms jerked and pulled against the restraints and still he pressed, using the Dark Side to bludgeon into the boy's mind again and again and again, until….

He was pushed out…

So strong was the youth's response that Palpatine staggered back, hands releasing Skywalker's head, finger nails scrapping against scalp and drawing blood, pulling away strands of hair.

Luke gasped, chest heaving, eyes open.

Breathlessly, quickly, Palpatine turned his patient's head toward him. The boy's pupils contracted in the light of the room and, just for a moment, just an instant, they touched him. They saw him. They registered him.

"I am your Master," he declared to the blue gaze that fixed upon him.

Skywalker's eyes rolled in his head as awareness left him, as he lapsed back into unconsciousness, his body fell limp and a thin river of saliva escaped his mouth to pool in the side of the oxygen mask.

This was but the first step in Skywalker's journey to full consciousness. There would be many trials for the boy to come as he continued to wake and to heal, as he was shifted and crafted into the beast his master had foreseen.

Sidious grinned, pleased by the result.

It was time to bring Vader back from Hoth.

The boy was no longer a corpse.

ooOOoo

To be continued in Dark Times: Chapter 7: Darkness restores...