Resilience - (Extended Version)

A/N: When I wrote the original oneshot story Resilience, I originally had two different ideas for how I wanted to write the story, so decided to do both, the original oneshot, and this version, which was originally going to be a longer, albeit still short story, 3-5 chapters long, but as I started writing it, more ideas popped up for it, so this one is going to be far longer than originally planned. The first chapter largely rehashes the original story but with a few noticeable differences. Hope you all enjoy, please read and review!

Luke Skywalker had blown up the first Death Star space station. This feat had taken place less than 72 hours after his aunt and uncle had been murdered by the Imperials in their home on Tatooine, the desert planet where he'd spent his whole life and feared he would die there, never getting to be a pilot like his father had been in the Clone Wars. He had jumped into the Rebel Alliance with both feet and gone on countless missions with them over a span of three years. He had faced off with Darth Vader on Bespin, only to lose his hand to the dark lord and learn the horrible truth that this evil being was his father. He had spent a year figuring out a plan to get his friend Han Solo back from Jabba the Hutt with the help of his friends, Princess Leia Organa, Han's copilot the wookiee Chewbacca, and Lando Calrissian, not exactly a friend of Han's, but the two had history, and it was obvious the man's guilt over his own role in what happened in Cloud City was driving him now to help them recover their friend and the true owner and captain of the freighter ship the Millennium Falcon. They'd gotten Han back, Jabba was dead, they'd gone to Endor to try and stop the Empire, Luke had surrendered himself to the Imperials to be taken to his father in a last ditch effort to try and save the man. He knew despite all the evil that Darth Vader had committed over the years, that his true father, Anakin Skywalker, the noble Jedi, was still in there somewhere, and that the Emperor hadn't been able to fully drive him away. He'd gone to meet his fate, knowing he would either succeed, or he would die, either his father would kill him, or the Emperor would, but he also knew Darth Vader couldn't kill him, proven by his failure to do so on Bespin, and he truly didn't believe his father would let the Emperor kill him either.

It had been a trap. The reason their infiltration to Endor had been so successful was because the Emperor had arranged it that way. Luke couldn't tell if his father had been involved in that plot or not, but he was met with an impossible situation, his friends would all die if he couldn't defeat the Emperor, but he couldn't defeat the Emperor without fighting him, and he would not fight the man, who appeared to be even less human than his father who had been half machine for 20 years. The Emperor goaded him on, daring him to strike him down since he was unarmed, that hadn't been enough to do it, but the threat against his friends, that had changed things. However his father was still loyal to the dark side and the Emperor and would not allow Luke to destroy Palpatine, they had fought. In hindsight, he had come so far from a year ago on Bespin, he knew what to expect now, or thought he did, his father would not catch him off guard and dismember him again. During it all, he could feel Palpatine's pleasure at watching father and son fight, anticipating either the son to be killed by his own father, or turned towards the dark side once and for all. In the end, neither had happened. He had wound up kicking his father down the stairs during the fight, he had cut off his father's prosthetic right hand, how was that for irony? He hadn't wanted to fight his father, but he wound up doing that anyway, because he'd betrayed Leia. He'd betrayed his twin sister, the one he'd just found out existed, just found out the beautiful princess he rescued four years ago and had worked alongside in the Rebellion ever since, was his sister. Vader had suggested if Luke would not turn to the dark side, she would, Luke couldn't let that happen, he had to protect her at all costs. Leia had suffered enough at Vader's hands, he had taken her prisoner, threatened her with torture, blown up her home planet and everyone on it, including her adoptive family, while she was forced to watch, Luke couldn't let him hurt her anymore. But he would not destroy his father, and he would not fight the Emperor. He was adamant, he was a Jedi, as his father before him.

The next thing he was aware of was a pain searing through his entire body, an excruciating agony he had never known the likes of before, Force lightning, from the Emperor himself who decreed since he would not turn, he would be destroyed. Every attack was more painful than the one before, he couldn't get up, he could hardly move, he writhed on the floor screaming at the top of his lungs, he saw his father standing beside the Emperor and called out to him, but the lightning didn't stop, it just got worse, and worse.

And then he heard the Emperor screaming.

Luke looked and saw his father had lifted the Emperor clear off the ground, over his head and as the Force lightning shot all over the room, and hit his father, Darth Vader marched over to the railing over the reactor shaft and threw the Emperor over the edge, and then his father collapsed, his respirator made a shallow sound now. Luke forced himself up and went to his father.

Between the Emperor's death, and the Rebels' successful attack, the second Death Star was going to be destroyed, sirens blared all throughout the station and everybody was abandoning ship. Luke struggled to pull his father along towards one of the emergency shuttles and saw everyone around them running to get off the station before it blew, nobody even noticed them. He tried to get his father to the shuttles but he was too large and too heavy and Luke found he couldn't support him and they both went down. He got up again and pulled his father along the floor, before going down on his knees himself. He tried to pull his father up, to get moving again, but his father had other plans.

"Luke, help me take, this mask off."

Luke felt his heart pulsate at this statement, but his words were strangely calm as he pointed out, "But you'll die."

"Nothing can stop that now," his father told him. "Just for once, let me look upon you with my own eyes."

The gravity of those words didn't escape Luke. A year ago he would've given anything for this man to not be his father, and he'd come back determined to redeem the man who had once been Anakin Skywalker.

He removed the helmet first, then pulled the mask off, and he hadn't been prepared for what was underneath. The man who had terrorized the galaxy for 20 years, was a pale man, bald, large scars from being burned, physically he actually didn't look all that different from the Emperor. The whites of his eyes had permanently been burned pink long ago, they were painful just to look at. And yet, this man looked at his son, and Luke would be damned if his father didn't smile at him, faintly, weakly, but he could see it nonetheless. The man was dying, in excruciating pain, and he was smiling at his son.

"Now...go, my son," he said, his voice so much quieter, and smaller, without the vocoder to distort and magnify it. "Leave me."

Luke shook his head. "No, you're coming with me. I'll not leave you here, I've got to save you."

"You already have, Luke," his father told him.

Darth Vader's respirator was the only consistent sound in the dark room as he sat with his 20-year-old son Luke seated sideways across his lap, the boy's head resting between his armor-covered shoulder and the side of his helmet, Vader's gloved hand softly patting the back of his head. The boy's soft rhythmic breaths told the dark lord he had nearly fallen asleep, almost, but not quite. Luke had spent the last hour or so in this room in the dark telling his father about the dream he'd had, and what a dream to hear the boy tell it. Him joining the Rebellion, saving a princess, flying with a smuggler and his wookiee navigator, dog fights, wampas, ewoks, Obi-Wan, Yoda, the two of them fighting onboard the Death Star, the Emperor Palpatine trying to kill Luke, Vader killing Palpatine, which in turn killed Vader.

The dark lord considered himself grateful that this time it was just a nightmare, and not his son sleepwalking again, which he'd suddenly taking to doing a few weeks back. Not that this was much easier for his son. Even without their bond through the Force, he'd heard Luke's panicked voice echoing off the corridor walls throughout the palace as he stumbled through the rooms in the dark, frantically calling, "Father? Father!" He'd found the boy wide eyed and broken out in a sweat at the prospect of not being able to find him. As he'd done before, and as he knew he'd do countless more times, he took his son in his arms, reminded the boy that he was safe now, he was home again, and when Luke finally started to tell him about his nightmare, he sat down and took his son with him, because he knew Luke's nightmares were never anything simple, easy, or quick.

A small sigh escaped Luke, Vader knew before too long he would be dead asleep. He moved his hand from the back of Luke's head to his back just beside his shoulder and told him, "Let's get you back to bed, Luke."

He felt rather than saw Luke slightly open his eyes, and heard the quiet moan of protest as his son absently hugged his father tighter, not wanting to be separated from him. But then Luke pulled back, swung his feet around to the floor and stood up, allowing his father to do the same, and Vader walked Luke through the corridor downstairs, and up to the second floor back to his bed chamber. Luke was half asleep on his feet, and Vader hoped he would stay asleep when he went back to bed.

"Here we are," he told Luke as they reached the second floor and returned to the boy's room.

The door slid open and they walked in. The room was nearly pitch dark, Vader couldn't see much but he could definitely feel tools and parts crunching and clanking under his boots. It drove him crazy the disarrayed state his son kept his room in, but he knew it made sense to Luke somehow, so he didn't raise issue with it. He walked his 20-year-old son back over to his bed. There was enough moonlight pouring in through a crack in the covered window he could just make out the equally disarrayed state Luke's bed was in, the covers were strewn all over, as well as all the assorted junk his son insisted on keeping on top of it at all times.

"Now," Vader said as he eased his son onto the bed, "go back to sleep, everything is alright."

Luke made an exhausted sound in his throat as he laid down, his eyes were already closed, but he maintained a grip on his father's wrist, which then became a two handed grip, something he'd often done as a child when he didn't want his father to leave. Darth Vader glanced over the miscellaneous stuff littering the unused side of Luke's bed, and found what he was looking for. He picked up the stuffed baby wookiee doll Luke had had since he was four years old and pressed the furry toy half against Luke's arm and half against his cheek. Of course Luke had insisted ever since he was eight that he was too old for it, but he'd never been able to bring himself to get rid of it...and for many years, Vader hadn't been able to get rid of it either...

He knew his son better than Luke liked to think he did. All these years later and it still had the same effect, Luke nuzzled his cheek against the soft fur, released his two-handed grip on his father's arm to instead clutch the wookiee, half curled on his side and fell asleep after a few minutes with the thing pressed simultaneously under his armpit and against his face. Many times when he was little, that was the only thing that could calm him down when he was upset, he was as attached to that toy as if it were a living wookiee.

Chewbacca, that's what Luke had named it when he got it as a Life Day present. Vader never knew just how he came up with the name, but then again he'd learned long ago that his son was too imaginative for him to keep up with. Luke had always been an imaginative child, which had always suggested to Vader, that unfortunately, his son might make a better inventor than a pilot. Sure, the two weren't mutually exclusive, but it left him concerned with his son's ability to stay focused and operate with precision when he was flying, and as a Skywalker it was always his hope the boy would take after him in that regard. The dark lord tried sighing which didn't translate well through his vocoder, he had planned for Luke to be a skilled pilot long before now, but then again very little of the boy's life had turned out the way he'd thought it would, especially the past several years.

Luke had been kidnapped out of his home six years ago, and Darth Vader had searched the galaxy from end to end for his son but there had been no sign, and for the longest time he feared his son was dead. He'd finally found his son hidden away of all places, on his home planet Tatooine, Luke had been rescued, and brought home, older, taller, skinny, oh so skinny, he'd been starved and dehydrated, he bore scars from injuries he'd sustained from his captors. He'd spent his first week home in the med bay, hooked up to IVs administering fluids and medicine, he had to be bound to the bed because he tossed and turned and writhed around furiously while he ranted and raved in delirium, telling all kinds of wild stories about his father kidnapping the princess Leia Organa from Alderaan, torturing her for information, blowing up the planet and forcing her to watch, about he and the princess and a Corellian smuggler named Han Solo and his wookiee copilot Chewbacca nearly being crushed to death in a trash compactor aboard the Death Star, of joining the Rebel forces and blowing up the Death Star in a dog fight, at the expense of losing his best friend, Biggs, who he'd grown up with on Tatooine, where he'd been raised by his uncle Owen and aunt Beru and worked on Owen's moisture farm. Of finding two droids, an Astromech named R2-D2 and a humanoid protocol droid named C-3PO, who became his friends, of an old hermit named Ben, revealed to be Obi-Wan Kenobi, who Vader killed in a fight aboard the Death Star.

From there the stories ran even wilder, going with his Rebel friends to Hoth, nearly being killed by a wampa, nearly freezing to death in the cold, the ghost of Obi-Wan telling him of Dagobah and Yoda, Darth Vader taking his friends hostage on Bespin, carbon freezing Han Solo, cutting off Luke's hand in a light saber fight only then to reveal his true identity as Luke's father, jumping into the reactor shaft and landing on Solo's ship, the Millennium Falcon during their escape.

Vader stood at his son's bedside and listened to one story after another about him torturing and killing Luke's friends and their families, destroying entire planets, torturing him, trying to kill him. The doctors had explained this went beyond simple fever induced delirium and more likely, the trauma Luke had endured during his kidnapping, was so horrible, the only way his psyche could protect him was to transfer the role of torturer from his true captors, to his father, a 'safe' target by comparison. Vader was faintly aware of the way psychological transference worked, he knew Luke didn't consciously believe him capable of committing all those heinous acts, but he'd be lying to himself if he said it didn't hurt nonetheless to hear those accusations fall from his son's lips, pointed directly at him.

So many fantastic and horrible accusations. And so much pure fantasy blended into the mix. He knew Senator Bail Organa, his politics left much to be desired but he was a decent man, but Vader also knew that the Senator and his wife had no children. Him? Him torture a teenaged girl for information? It would be laughable if it wasn't so horrifying. Him cut off his own son's hand? He would sooner dismantle his respirator and finally bring about the end after living in this suit for 20 years. Him? Him kill Obi-Wan? He had specifically never told Luke about Obi-Wan, for that way led too many painful memories he couldn't bear to think about anymore.

Luke finally slept, and that's all he did for several days in the med bay. When he finally woke up, he was low energy but coherent, he knew who and where he was and he'd thrown his arms around his father and sobbed at finally being home again. He continued his recovery in his old room, spending most of his days there, hidden away from everyone except his father. The stories didn't stop, but they were no longer about his father being the most evil monster in the galaxy. He didn't speak much about his ordeal from the past six years, instead, he bombarded his father with all these stories. In a way, it was like nothing had changed. Luke could always come up with the craziest stories as a child, with no second thought whatsoever, as if he truly believed they had all happened, and every day when he woke up he would chatter on and on about another one. Sometimes the stories repeated themselves from day to day, and Luke didn't seem to be aware of it, so Vader simply let him tell them all. He was thankful his mask hid his true facial expression because he knew his son wouldn't appreciate him less than subtly rolling his eyes at some of the most fantastic plots that sounded like a bad holothriller. But to Luke they were very real, and they all centered around the same friends he'd talked about before. Princess Leia Organa, at first she was merely a princess and a member of the Imperial Senate, and Luke fell in love with her, but then she became his sister, not just his sister, his twin sister that Obi-Wan had hidden at birth. Other times Luke had another twin sister, Nelleth, lost somewhere out in the galaxy that he had to find, so that together they could defeat the Emperor Palpatine. Darth Vader found the almost obsessive way Luke carried on with the stories to be slightly disturbing, but he'd come to terms with the fact Luke's overactive imagination seemed to be the only thing that had kept him sane during his six years of imprisonment and torture. It had allowed him a way to escape from the horrifying reality of his environment, by imaging he really was zipping around the galaxy on a junked freighter with a group of rogues and outlaws performing so many daring feats of heroics. And for that reason, he was eternally grateful to hear his son prattle on about flying missions with a smuggler, a wookiee and a princess, swinging from vines on a jungle planet with a short annoying green Jedi named Yoda riding on his back, and a pessimistic protocol droid that never stopped complaining.

Darth Vader stood by the bed for several minutes and just watched his son while he slept. Asleep, his bright blonde haired son looked like he didn't have a care in the galaxy, but Vader knew better. Nothing about Luke's life had ever been simple, or easy, he at least had tried to make his son's life a good one. He'd tried, but he'd failed so many times. It didn't ease his own conscience that Luke had never blamed him for anything that had ever happened, the boy didn't need to, Vader blamed himself.

Despite the darkness of the room, he was able to make out various items scattered all over the place. This room had been where his son spent most of his life, it was his past mixed with his present, and where one ended and the other began, that was a difficult line to draw. On his work desk one thing caught Vader's eye even through the red tinted lenses of his mask. A model star ship Luke had made when he was eight years old, he'd christened it the Millennium Falcon. On the other end of the desk stood an antique doll with dark braids in a long white dress. Luke had seen it passing by a street vendor when he was seven years old and for some reason his father could never understand, just had to have it. He had loved it nearly as much as he did the stuffed wookiee and never let any harm come to it.

Vader shook his head as he remembered, practically since Luke was old enough to talk, his imagination always ran wild and he would tell his father the most outrageous, explicitly detailed stories about all kinds of people, as if they were actually alive and all the events had really happened. It never seemed to occur to the boy that they were just dreams, or sparks of his imagination livening up an otherwise quiet part of the day. Maybe it had never really gone away, but gradually as Luke got older, the stories became fewer and farther between, until one day they just seemed to disappear altogether. Vader hadn't noticed the silence when it first happened, but when he actually took notice of it, he'd found it unsettling at first. Luke would prattle on about his imaginary adventures at all hours of the day, whenever he was around to hear them, when they stopped he became much quieter and far more serious and more engrossed in tinkering around with his inventions.

The quiet sounds of rhythmic breathing let Darth Vader know his son was alright, but still he couldn't bring himself to leave Luke's room. An uneasy feeling weighed on him that if he left his son, he might not see him again. Of course he knew that was foolish, but there was no way to deny it was grounded in reality, one he knew only too well.