Written for Whumptober:

No. 11 - JUST KEEP SWIMMING

adrift | drowning | dehydration

Warnings for water-based torture. This was partly inspired by the opening scene in Slx99's Under the Stars.

The flash was blinding, brilliant and breaking. Luke had mixed feelings about it.

They had destroyed the Imperial base here. It would be harder for the Imperials to oppress the innocents on this planet. It would be harder for them to regain their foothold in this entire sector.

But he had crashed his X-wing and drowned.

It was a horrible sensation. Leia had started teaching him how to swim once, when they were on a base next to a lake, but his movements were sluggish, his head dizzy. It was dark underwater, no one had ever told him that. It was dark, and the water pressed down worse than heat ever could, and he'd lost his distress beacon to the depths, and bursting to the surface didn't help his dizziness in the slightest. He went from inhaling salt water to inhaling smoke; he wasn't sure which stung his eyes more.

When he grappled for a handhold, it was the massive side of one of those great transport crates. His vision blurred too much for him to see the stamp of the Imperial cog, but he knew it was there. He wondered what the crate had been carrying—food rations? Weapons? Bombs?

Whatever it was, it was now lost to the sea, and the strange creeping shadows he'd seen swimming underwater.

Luke clung to his crate and let himself drift, clambering up onto it so no part of him was in the water. He was still soaked through. Freezing. But he wasn't at risk of drowning unless he fell off.

Stay awake, he murmured to himself, even as his dazzled eyes slipped closed. Stay… awake…

He woke up to a fist in his flightsuit and sand in his mouth.

"Eugh!" His eyes flew open and his flopped like a fish for a moment, wet sand scrumping into every fold of his clothes. It was icky, as wrong as blood outside the body. For a moment he blinked in the harsh sunlight, shivering and feeling generally like shavit, before he peered out…

The debris in the sea.

The base in the distance.

The island he must be lying on now…

The fist in his flightsuit twisted and yanked him up. Way up. Luke dangled at the end of a long, strong arm, his feet a foot from the sandy beach he'd apparently washed up on, and staring at him eye-to-eye was…

Kriff.

Vader's blank, insectoid eye plates studied him. That gaze was prying him apart, slamming into him, and Luke felt stripped naked by it.

You killed Ben, he thought angrily. You killed my father. You killed—

"Only a lieutenant." Vader observed the rank on his uniform then threw him aside with barely a flick of the wrist.

Luke slammed into the sand with his shoulder; he heard a crack, had no idea what it meant, just knew that it hurt. Eyes welling with tears, he pushed himself up onto his elbows.

Don't show weakness. Don't show weakness.

"It will suffice," Vader decided, then stalked forwards. "I imagine you are parched, Rebel. If you answer my questions, you will receive a drink."

Luke was parched. He was from the desert; he knew what dehydration felt like. His head was spinning, his tongue was dry. "I won't take anything from you."

"So be it. But I will take from you." He raised his hand. "What is the location of the Rebel base?"

Luke screamed.

He'd once bashed his head open on a rock while flying his Skyhopper, and felt like a thousand miners were pounding his skull at once for weeks thereafter. He hadn't been able to speak for days, had been banned from flying for months, and that… that was a fraction of this.

"You will get nothing from me," he got out through gritted teeth.

"I will. What is the location of the Rebel base?"

It was excruciating. He toppled over and landed face-first in the sand again, blood dripping from his ear. But he felt no sand on his skin, not did he feel the pain of his injured shoulder; they were grains in the desert compared to—

—this.

"Nothing," Luke whimpered.

Vader drew back. "Nothing for now," he conceded with a spit. "Let us try something else. What is the name of the pilot who blew up the Death Star?"

Luke's eyes blew wide. Vader's voice held a tinge of amusement when he noticed.

"So you know them. Perhaps you are friend? You cannot protect them." He lifted his hand again. "Let us discover who they are."

And Luke was ready to burst with unbridled rage.

That red hot poker came for his mind again and he screamed, fuming, hating. Vader didn't seem to enjoy his pain, but was rather indifferent to it: he pushed through it methodically, searching for what he could rip out at the roots. Luke wanted him out, he wanted to rage, he…

He wanted this murderer to know whose ghost had come back to haunt him.

He would tell him one name. One name, largely worthless, and watch him realise the reckoning that was coming for his cruelty.

"You want the name?" he spat out. "Skywalker."

The way Vader stiffened was so, so satisfying.

"What." Despite the menacing vocoder, it sounded like a squawk. "Skywalker?"

"Anakin Skywalker has come back to haunt you from the dead, murderer," Luke hissed out, staring up at him through a curtain of wet, sandy, bloody hair.

Vader seized him by the throat and lifted him up again. "Anakin Skywalker," he boomed, so loudly Luke thought his entire being would shatter from it, "is dead."

"He left someone behind. There is a child, coming to avenge his death and kill you." Vader seemed so shocked by that that he outright dropped Luke, and Luke landed in a pile of clumsy bones again. "I can't wait to see it—"

"The child," Vader said immediately. "What is their name. Who are they?"

Luke shook his head. "I will not betray that." He had no death wish. He wanted to see Vader panic, he wanted Vader to know the vendetta that would, hopefully, end him, but he was not a fool to think he could do it now, beaten and broken on a desert island—

Vader straightened up. "I promised you water if you cooperated," he said lowly. "I will fulfil that promise." He lifted his hand.

A wave roared up. Luke sucked in a breath as it engulfed him, spun around him—shoved down his throat, into his lungs, spasms sending agony across his chest. It ebbed away after a few minutes and he was left prone, half-conscious.

Half-dead.

"I would offer you more water," Vader mocked. "Or you can give me the child's name."

The child. For some reason that phrasing stuck in his mind like one of Yavin IV's flies in a flytrap. Not offspring. Not spawn. Vader was largely clinical in his language, it seemed, but… child.

Anakin Skywalker's offspring would be an adult by now. Was an adult. Vader knew that.

Luke opened his eyes and glared. "I will not tell you anything," he gasped out.

But, it seemed, he didn't need to.

The water had blasted back his hair, plastered it to his head and left his face bare. Vader was staring at his nose. His chin. His eyes.

Then that horrible mental presence returned. It wasn't a poker, it wasn't a spike; it wasn't meant to destroy. But it gushed around him like seafoam, inescapable, pricking at his shields to reveal the light hiding beneath, pounding like years of water against a cliff until the cliff crumbled into them…

"You," Vader said. "You destroyed the Death Star."

Luke didn't deny it—he was no good at lying—but he didn't confirm it, either. He just glared.

Vader knelt in front of him. A hand came up, and hovered halfway between them. "You are the son of Anakin Skywalker."

"You killed him," Luke spat. Pain fractured his voice. He was going to die here, it seemed. At the hands of the man who'd killed his beloved father, too. "He's dead."

But when Vader's hand made contact with his cheek, it was not with violence. It was with some facsimile of gentleness, learnt not from experience, but from a contrast with harshness.

"So I had thought," Vader said.