Written for Angstober Days 5: Hearts of Cinder and 14: Ashes to Life
Vader burned, but that wasn't the end of it. His ashes remained, a few errant specks drifting through the woods of Endor and delivering him visions of Ewoks scampering over the trees, Rebel troops coordinating their retreat, and a richness of wildlife that the desert child inside him would always treasure. The rest—majority, even—remained in an urn, carried under Luke's arm from Endor to Rebel ship to planetside, where he could hear his son's heartbeat in a way he had never been allowed to in life.
Yavin IV, the moon over which Vader had nearly killed Luke, was where he buried his ashes properly and planted a young sapling over the top. He did not need to ask why, even if he didn't know for sure. Death, and the Force, was a peculiar state of being, where he both knew everything and nothing at all. Too much was in motion to make assumptions or jump to conclusions—Yoda had chided him on that plenty of times since their bitter and sweet reunion—no matter how skilled he had been at that in life.
It was enough to think about where they had first nearly killed each other, and first seen the tide of war turn to shape their lives, and speculate.
Later, Luke's reasons became clearer. Droids cleared away the detritus of long-gone Rebel occupation and the stone-cracking growths that threatened the foundations and structural integrity of the great, abandoned temple. A Jedi Temple emerged from the dusty, overgrown remnants of the past. But no Jedi emerged with it.
Luke trained alone for a long time. He ran through the jungle, the wet, humid heat no longer bothering him as much as it had when he was fresh out of a bone-dry desert, instead a nostalgic oddity that tugged at him. After a blink of an eye, Vader—for he still struggled to call himself Anakin, but Vader meant father and that title was the most important to him—could reach out through narrow white branches, a slender trunk bending almost double in Yavin IV's tropical storms but never breaking. A frail tree, by all accounts, far too weak for children to climb on.
More time passed before there were any to climb on him, anyway. But they came eventually: a green-haired boy with a Twi'lek mother who smiled at Luke in a way that did not hide her grief; an insolent babe of Yoda's species with a fussing tin can of a father; others, children and adults alike, of more species than Vader was familiar with; and, finally, a small boy with his great-grandmother's dark hair.
He did not come to train. It was the yearly holidays for the school—insofar as the school was formal enough to have holidays—and no other students congregated in the temple's square or its great, green halls. Life still glowed throughout, but it was plant and animal life, buzzing in every cubic inch of air. When the boy came, Luke was the only sentient being other than Vader's tree in the temple, and when the boy flung himself into his arms, Luke caught him with a laugh, spinning him into the air.
"I missed you!" he said, over and over, booping his nose. The Wookiee came behind them, and the boy let himself be engulfed in a furry hug as his uncle and father greeted each other with their own embrace. Then, after two nights of merriment, he and his father and his godfather the Wookiee all boarded the ship that should have been put in a trash compactor, and they left.
It was his mother who stayed.
Padmé's daughter, Luke's sister—no. Leia stayed. She was more tentative than she had ever been in anything else in life, angry and reluctant to follow Luke's soothing instructions. They faced each other, faced their shared heritage, and compromised.
She built her own lightsaber.
Vader watched her final test from his silent tree. She and Luke warred like the warriors of light they were, their blades slicing through trees, foliage, but never each other. Luke knighted her there and then, with far less pomp and ceremony than the Jedi of old had used—he had no tolerance for that, and nor did she.
That was her final test, but not her final trial.
Luke knew nothing of this. Luke was powerful, but he was not one with the Force; he could not feel the tension brewing in her heart. He had taught her to shield too well for that. When she meditated in the gardens the next day, Vader watched her breath hitch—watched momentary terror cloud her serenity—watched her eyes slide open.
They fixed on him.
"You," she said. There were, again, too many potential meanings to decipher there; Vader took all of them, in their messy, interconnected chaos, to his quiet, wooden heart.
A tree cannot speak, so he said nothing.
"You're here," she said. "Still. You're meant to be gone." She snarled, suddenly, "Why can I still feel you?"
The twigs at the end of his branches were thin and brittle. She snapped five off, one by one, like slender, shattered fingerbones. "Every time I clench my shoulders, you're still holding me back, making me—"
She cut herself off, turning away. She'd been shredding the stolen fingers in her own; she cast them aside, now.
"I can still feel them, too," she said. "Death doesn't leave you. The dead don't leave, either. Look at you, still hanging around Luke, even though you should have left him alone long ago."
Trees didn't feel pain, but there was a smarting at his end, meristem cringing back, then surging forwards. He needed to fix the breakage. But plants did not know how to seek revenge the way animals did, so he felt no anger at Leia.
No fear, either, when she twisted around and lit her lightsaber, holding the blade against his rough trunk. He simply waited for her to swing.
What would happen once his tree was felled? He could likely not keep Luke company so often anymore, even if he could do little more now than simply murmur to him in rustled branches and ripples of comfort. Obi-Wan and Yoda advised him, but manifesting took effort, and they could not stay long; Vader would be no exception, once he left. That was his only regret. She had the right to demand his banishment from her universe.
But it was her only regret, as well, perhaps. Because no matter how long she stood there, saber paused to swing, he did not fall. She did not make him.
Finally, after shaking, sobbing, and staring, she deactivated her blade. "So long as you are still here," she vowed, "my son will never train here."
She stalked off.
Several days after Leia left, Vader's tree began to grow fruit.
Strange fruits, bright and fresh and sweet. Luke harvested them with care and permission, and they did not rot in the bowl. His students gathered them excitedly during what Yavin IV called autumn, along with the other fruits the trees—Luke had gathered an orchard—bore. But Vader's tree gave fruit all year around, uncaring of the subtle fluctuations in the moon's orbit of its planet and sun. And finally, it grew strong enough for children to climb on. He would spend hours with the Force pressed around his charge, cradling them in his branches, to calm them and ensure they would not fall.
Eventually, Leia's son did train on Yavin IV while Vader was there.
Already trained by his mother in rudimentary skills, and bolstered by Luke during brief, loving visits, he did not know nothing when he came, but he did not know enough. Older than the other padawans, he faced embarrassment and the red flush of envy, though Luke never allowed teasing or bullying. And the darkness Vader could sense growing in him suggested that was not the only feature he had shared with Anakin Skywalker.
There was another in his life. An influence. Someone who coveted his power for his own. Vader knew well what that felt like.
But Ben Solo climbed into the now thick, stoic boughs of Vader's tree to pick fruit and laughed when he did not fall. And the more Vader's tree grew, the more he shaded and encircled a whole side of the temple, casting his comforting presence wider across the grounds. Luke's bedroom faced him: every morning, he smiled to see his father's love shining back at him in blossoms and fruit.
Vader, long-lived and far-reaching in his power, cradled the family that allowed him to, and no darkness dared touch them while he did.