Recovering from Bespin, a feverish Luke Skywalker lets slip his parentage, but what will the Alliance do with the son of Darth Vader? Their mistake proves monumental and delivers Luke into the hands of his worst nightmare. Destiny goes into an about turn where there's only one person who can save Luke from the darkside - his father. Recovering from Bespin, a feverish Luke Skywalker lets slip his parentage, but what will the Alliance do with the son of Darth Vader? Their mistake proves monumental and delivers Luke into the hands of his worst nightmare. Destiny goes into an about turn where there's only one person who can save Luke from the darkside - his father.

C h a p t e r T h i r t e e n

The night was cold and dark; the deck of the cabin floor colder still.

"Leia?" She looked over at Han as he lifted a sleep-creased face from the sheets and struggled to focus leaden eyes on her. She felt the lop-sided grin touch her lips, comforted simply by his presence as his words came muffled through the sheets. "What's wrong?"

The tension in her hands receded a little when she forced them out of the tight little balls of fear and anger. She used her spread palms to brush the tears from her cheeks, knowing he wouldn't miss the gesture. He didn't. He sat up and made an attempt at wrapping the sheet around the lower half of his body, bare torso tawny coloured in the faint light.

"I couldn't sleep."

He quirked his head to one side and sighed, the sound brushing over her, calming despite her turbulent emotions. "Nightmares?"

"Yeah..." She was hugging her legs to her chest to stop the shaking, not caring about either the show of emotion or the sheen of sweat on her skin making the nightshift more see-through. In her hands she clasped the cold hilt of Luke's lightsaber… or rather, the saber that had been passed on to him, from his father. From their father. She rolled it in her hands. "For your protection." Vader had said. Initially, she'd refused. "For your heritage." He'd walked away then, and it had been several minutes before she'd hooked it to her belt, yet to ask how and why he'd retrieved it from Bespin. Not that it mattered.

Han stood and shuffled towards her, the serious look on his face confounded by the vaguely comical movements, and she accepted the warm embrace eagerly. He wrapped the sheet around them both where she sat on the floor, not even grumbling at the frigid cold of the deck plates. The heat from his skin was more potent than a cold shower could have been, reminding her that she was alive, that she was not the one living those nightmares.

The selfishness of the thought hit her and she shivered, burying herself against the warm skin of his shoulder, inhaling the smell of soap and night-sweat. Guilt was useless, and would help no one, least of all Luke. Only resolve would help now, and she was more than determined to get the saber in her hands back to its rightful owner, Luke Skywalker.

"We made a mistake," she mumbled against him, feeling him shiver as her breath skittered against his skin.

"Who us?" he said, infamous Solo humour not managing to break her tension.

She nodded, her hair clinging to his skin as tightly as her arms clung around his waist. He held her tighter. "We shouldn't have tried to contact Luke."

His fingers brushed the soft skin on her arm, "Why not?" His words were muffled from speaking into her hair.

"Palpatine knows now." She shivered, despite the tight embrace. The cold on the deck was creeping up her skin. She lowered her lashes when he tried to find her gaze.

He was silent, his breath coming in waves through her hair as he considered the statement. "Maybe it was inevitable."

Leia tightened her grip on the one stable element of her life. Inevitable that Luke would turn...? "No." She said fiercely. "This wasn't meant to happen." It was a strange tension running through her, an absolute conviction that this was not the way things were supposed to happen.

Han ran a hand down her back, fingers tracing her spine, "That's not what I meant. I meant it was inevitable that Palpatine would find out. 'Darth Vader' has been silent a while. I don't think you did too much harm."

Too much. Too much; too much, too fast. What if too much was far more than enough?

"Han, I think he's dying."

She expected denial, punctuated by his soothing caress, but she got silence. Silently, he lifted the saber from her hands and placed it on the shelf above his head. He only spoke when she lifted her head to his stormy eyes. "You don't know that," he said. He didn't sound convinced.

"I do... I wake up and I can't breathe. It feels like fire but there's nothing there, and there's no smoke, no flames." Her breath stilled in the air. "There's no light at all, and all I can feel is his despair." She shook and didn't even try to stop it. "What if we're too late, Han?"

"We still have time."

Time. It was time that was working against them. They could pour their hearts into the search, they could use the monies of a Dark Lord and a Princess, they could use their formidable desperation to try and make the Falcon to go just a little faster. But it was the time she had taken to travel to Tatooine, the time she had needed to rescue Han that worked against them. Did she resent that?

Of course not.

The reaction was immediate; and immediately distrusted. She wasn't quite sure she believed that thought, even when the source of any guilt pushed little strands of hair from her eyes.

"I'm not sure," she said. Morning bristle rubbed against her cheek. "I don't know what the dream means. It's..." She shifted against the sheet wrapped around them, "It's confusing."

He anchored her with his arms, circling her waist, "Have you asked your father? He might understand it better."

She sighed at the immediate revulsion at that thought. Still, it was lessening. "Yes."

Han's fingers stroked little trails over her back but the muscles refused to relax, "What did he say?" He was insistent, but calm. His voice was as soft as the sheet he wrapped her in, but far warmer. It was incredibly tempting to be lulled into an embraced sleep. A sleep that would be chased by dreams that were far from imagined.

"He wasn't very clear." She shrugged. The Darth Vader they had known would make his point known with the bluntness of Imperial authority. This new Darth Vader was strangely elusive with his answers. "He doesn't know if it's more feelings than something physical happening to Luke." The hands tensed, as she knew they would. Han was the stable point in her world that every disparate thought and action spun around. She let her eyes close, to drop into that stability, offered by the one she had once thought as fickle and wayward as a Veekan whore. He had changed; she had changed him and Luke had changed him.

"What kind of 'physical' somethings?" His voice growled and trembled warm against her skin. She didn't open her eyes, but she knew his glare was blazing.

"I don't know, and I think maybe he doesn't want to, but when I feel it, I can't breath, and my skin is burning. Vader said that might be just 'the physical symbolism of mental changes', supposed to weaken you for the real changes. Whatever that means. He talked, briefly, about some old Sith rites of passage ceremonies that Palpatine might be using, but he wouldn't go into details." She shivered.

Han was silent a moment, breath steady, stable, solid, reliable…

"Like an Undercut," he said, strangely appreciative. She opened tired eyes and looked at him curiously, drinking in those stable features.

"Undercut?"

He nodded, that grin returning although solemn, "Old tactic someone taught me on the Spice runs. It's basically a distraction, but the difference is it's blatant."

"Go on." She rested her head against his shoulder, watching her breath play with the tawny hairs there.
"This guy, he taught me it when we were relieving a customer of his stockpile." He paused to smile, memories playing out, totally unembarrassed by his past. "He knew we were coming, and there was no way we could have gotten it out of there if he wanted to stop us."

"What did you do?"

Han grinned again, relieving some more of her tension, then he continued, a little smugness colouring his voice. Hard to believe they were less than five hours out from Coruscant. "We went in, made a play for it. He was so busy worrying about how we were going to do, spent all that sweat and frustration trying to figure out the plan, that he didn't notice when we sneaked it out the back."

"You got it out right under his nose?"

"Sure, we paid a guy from the local cantina to dress up in the local garrison costume and had him come in whilst we were making a fuss out the front. He made it look like he was trying to arrest us. The owner – we did it in his shop – the owner nearly had a fit at having the police breathing down his neck. You could almost see his mind ticking over, deciding whether it was some elaborate ploy or just fate. Screwed himself into a ball over it. Worked a charm. Chewie got clean away with the stuff."

Leia took in a breath of stale cabin air, "So you're saying that you used an elaborate front to con him?" His nod bobbed his stubbled chin on top of her head. Her fingers found his as she shivered, "Then, you're saying the ceremonial part of... whatever Palpatine is doing doesn't matter."

He shrugged, and she knew he was giving that lop-sided grin that would light the room if only she could see it from this position, "Well, I don't claim to know how the Emperor thinks Princess, but since when did ceremony have any meaning?"

Her brow wrinkled, "Lots of times," she protested, turning in his grip and frowning, "Royal ceremonies on Alderaan always had a purpose. Funerals, marriages-"

She broke off and blushed suddenly at that last word, coughed to cover her discomfort. Now why did that give her such a strong reaction?

"Sure, they have a purpose, but do they have any meaning? Going to a funeral doesn't make anyone any less dead, getting married doesn't make you love the other person any more," he argued. There was a strange warmth spreading across her chest as he struggled with the word 'marriage', but she couldn't say where it came from.

"That's just the cynical smuggler talking. Of course they have meaning, they solidify, unify; they're a physical manifestation of feelings, traditions..."

"And that's her Highnessness talking." He raised those expressive eyebrows. "They only serve to manipulate peoples feelings. And that's my point – if Palpatine is performing some sort of sick ceremony on Luke -" His cheek twitched, his fingers tightened, before the anger flashing in his eyes bled away by force of will, "Then it might be nothing more than a way to make him more... prone to the Darkside. You know; let his barriers down when he gets afraid."

She looked at him curiously, then buried her head against his shoulder. "You've been talking to Vader," she said, "About the Force."

He shifted uncomfortably, "Always good to be prepared," he murmured, only slightly tinged by embarrassment.

"I thought you didn't believe in that stuff, Solo." She hid the grin in the skin of his shoulder.

He groaned and she knew his eyes were rolling, "I might be cynical, Leia, but I'm not stupid enough to deny what's right in front of my eyes."

"I know that," she whispered, "I was just surprised. Vader said-"

"Leia," he interrupted her. The room dropped a couple of degrees as her heart started a rapid descent towards the floor. Leia shivered.

"What?"

"I don't think you should call him that anymore," Han whispered.

"Call him what?" Her breath came in little ice clouds.

"Vader."

She couldn't look at him, "Well what do you expect me to call him? Father?" She trembled and he held her tight.

"No... no." He sighed and it brushed her skin soothingly again, "Look, he's changed. He's accepted it… well, nearly. You need to too."

She heard the suck of a breath being held and wasn't entirely sure if it was his or hers. She shook her head, "I... I can't."

Han was strangely silent. "Leia, you have to do this. For him."

With a shock, she realised she was not the only one trembling. "For him?"

"Oh, Sithhell. I can't believe I'm asking you to trust Darth Vader, but I think you've got to. If you're going to get Luke back, you need Anakin Skywalker with you, not Darth Vader."

No one spoke for several long seconds. Leia's mind was numb. It was the blissful feeling she had longed for over the restless nights. Now it was here, it made her want to scream.

"Anakin Skywalker?"

"Anakin Skywalker became Darth Vader." Han was being gentle, but insistent. She felt like a moth dragged towards the flame when she should have gone willingly. But the truth was not something easy to embrace.

"Don't you think I know that?" She shifted uncomfortably against him, anger boiling. She pushed it aside.

"Hell yes. I'm just not sure you see that Darth Vader has become..."

"What?"

"Well he's acting pretty spaced, Leia. That's not Darth Vader, so who is it?"

When she stiffened it was only the tension deep within her bursting to the surface. "Han I can't do this. I can't accept this... can't accept that... thing as my father!"

Her hands found the sheets and she was wringing them between bleached white hands. Han took them in his own and stopped her frantic action. "Then at least accept him as something other than Darth Vader."

Her lips pursed in concentration as she leaned into him again. "I'm... not ready."

"It doesn't condone his actions, Leia, to admit he'd changed. Damn it, I still feel the urge to throw out an airlock every time I see him, but we need him, and he's not the same guy that... well, you know."

She nodded.

"He's hurt us all. Badly. And I'm not saying forgive... just..."

"Put it aside?"

"Right."

She studied her own hands in his, "I'll try."

Her head rested on his chest for long minutes before he spoke again, Leia furiously not allowing her mind to work. "Less than five hours now," he whispered into her hair, "You should get some sleep."

"I… I don't know if I can."

The arms around her tightened, comforting. How had she ever thought the smuggler was cold-hearted? "Okay, but there's one other thing, Leia."

She tensed. "What?" She clung to the sheet and to him.

"You think we could get off this deck? It's colder than a camping trip to Hoth."

She chuckled. "And I guess you'd know, flyboy."