Written for Angstober Days 1: Miscommunication, 13: Worthless and 22: Corruption.
Ever since learning his father had once been a Jedi, this had been the darkest fear of his that lurked beneath all other, all rational ones, Luke thought. It had only got worse when Ben grimaced and amended the story to the truth. He had never pictured it happening this way—he had never pictured it happening at all; even after knowing the truth, he'd never counted on Vader being at all interested in him—but here he was. Standing in the barren corridor of an Imperial official's quarters on the Executor, facing a man who knew too much about the Skywalkers to be lying about being his father, and feeling his heart crack in his chest.
Vader, his father, was somehow less perceptive than Luke was despite his overwhelming advantage in the area of perceiving others' emotions: he didn't notice his turmoil. He just kept talking. "…what you may have learnt as a Jedi, but you must shed it. When you touch the dark side, our combined strength will be enough to overthrow the Emperor and seize the power that by rights should be ours."
Luke nodded. "So," he said, "you only want your son for his power."
That, at least, seemed to hit Vader. "That is a problem?" he queried.
"Yeah!" he snapped. "Especially if I didn't have the Force."
Vader waved a hand in irritation. "That line of enquiry is irrelevant. You are my son. It is unthinkable that you would not be Force-sensitive. You should cease worrying and instead focus yourself on—"
"Cease worrying?" Luke demanded. "You know, Ben never trained me as you seem to think he did, but he did tell me about you."
His father froze. "You… knew?" he asked. And— "Obi-Wan never trained you?"
"He told me about the dark side," he continued. "And how it could corrupt a person until they were incapable of love. He said that happened to you."
"Sith Lords do not love."
"Yeah. Clearly." He blinked before tears spilled over his cheeks, eyes stinging, but it was too late. Vader had noticed.
"You are upset," he said, almost chidingly.
Luke glared through his tears. "That's clear too."
"Your behaviour is irrational," Vader dismissed. "There is neither need nor reason for you to cry. You are my son, and I have searched for you tirelessly in the year since I discovered your existence. You have just confessed that you knew of our connection all along, and yet you said nothing. Why?"
"Because of this." Luke waved his hand. "Because you just confessed that Ben was right, and you're incapable of love. Which means you have nothing to do with me but kill me."
"Kill you?" Vader thundered. Luke winced, unable to tell if the sudden volume spike was anger, shock, or faked distress. Maybe he'd try and manipulate Luke until the end. "What stupid idea makes you think I'd kill you?"
"What stupid idea makes you think I'd join you? What makes you think I have what you desperately crave?"
"You are my son," Vader said. "It is naturally you that I wish for."
"I have nothing to give you."
"That is far from true."
"What makes you think I'm powerful at all?" Luke snapped. "That I can destroy the Emperor? Where the hell did you get that idea?"
"It is evident," Vader dismissed. "It has been from the moment you destroyed the Death Star. You made that shot with perfect accuracy without letting me ever sense a flicker of the Force from you. Not only could you achieve such an impossible feat for a non-Force-sensitive, but you could shield yourself while doing it."
Luke raised his eyebrows. "That shot was impossible for a non-Force-sensitive?"
"Naturally."
"I don't think so."
"You are incorrect. You fail to consider—"
"No," Luke said heatedly. "You're the one being foolish here. You're the one who fails to consider that maybe a pilot who has trained all his life, bent every moment of his free time, towards flying and shooting, could make that one in a million shot, whether he has the Force or not."
"No pilot could be so skilled."
"Not without a reason," Luke agreed, a lump in his throat. "But maybe that reason was because growing up, he missed his dead father so much he could barely breathe. And he was told that he was a pilot, a navigator, and he wanted to be a pilot too. He wanted to be the best pilot he could be."
Vader shook his head, stepping towards Luke in the barren entryway. "I do not see the relevance of this."
"Father," Luke said, and he hated that the word he'd waited twenty years to say was so bitter and acerbic on his tongue, "I am not Force-sensitive."
Vader froze. Luke, feeling threatened anyway, backed up anyway, until his back hit the door of one of the rooms in this wing. They hadn't even opened any of them yet. Vader had been too eager to tell him the news and claim his son as an ally to let them do anything as mundane as sit down first.
"Impossible," Vader said.
Luke laughed and tried to channel a little bit of Han's strength. Han would face this with a sneer and a wisecrack. "You wish."
"Why did Obi-Wan follow you so doggedly if you were not to be the resurrection of the Jedi?"
"Because he loved me. He was protecting me."
"This is impossible," Vader repeated. "I am the son of the Force itself."
Luke blinked. "What."
"I am the most powerful Force wielder to ever exist. Any child of mine would be Force-sensitive."
"Then maybe I'm not your child!" Luke shouted. "If you don't want me to be, feel free to disown me!" His heart hammered, hope and fear intermingling furiously. That was both the last thing he wanted and the only thing he could ever truly desire. "Set me free."
"You are my child," Vader confirmed, stepping forwards. Luke reached for the controls to the door he was leaning against before Vader could seize him, but he was too slow. His father didn't seize him, though. He gently took his chin between two fingers and lifted it to meet his gaze. "You have my eyes. Your mother's nose. My name. Who you are is not in doubt. And therefore, this line of enquiry is unthinkable."
"Then clearly someone thought it," Luke got out, but only in a half-hearted hiss. His father's touch was too gentle, too affectionate, and he didn't know what to do with this. "My mother, maybe. Whoever she was. Maybe she didn't want me to end up like you."
Vader dropped his hand like Luke had burned him. "Perhaps. She would not be amiss in wanting that."
"Then let me go," Luke said. "You don't want me; you want my power. I don't have any power to give you. Let me go and leave me be."
"I have only just found you, Luke. I will not let you go."
Luke glared. "Why?" he demanded. "You don't want me! We've established this! You can't love. I'm worthless to you!"
"Worthless?" Vader stared at him. "Were you to leave or escape right now, I would make the bounty for the Death Star pilot a mere handful of credits compared to the bounty I would place on you."
"So, you're threatening to send bounty hunters to stalk and kill me?"
"The bounty would specify alive and unharmed. On penalty of death."
"What's that supposed to mean? What are you trying to say?"
Vader said nothing.
Luke scoffed, disgusted. He tried to back away farther, but the closed door blocked him yet again. He fumbled and finally, finally, found the controls.
It slid open. He stepped back, stabbed the controls so it shut again behind him, and buried his face in his hands. This would be a temporary respite at most. He couldn't sense him as he wanted him to, but he could still hear his father standing less than a metre away from him behind the door, his breathing rasping emotionlessly. Luke sagged against the door, sliding down until he hit the floor.
After several moments of blinking back tears, he lowered his hands, wiped his cheeks, and opened his eyes. And froze.
He was in a bedroom—a bedroom of unthinkable size on a ship. When Vader had taken Luke from the stormtroopers escorting him and frogmarched him to this floor, it had clearly been a wing set aside for visiting dignitaries and other such guests. Home One had a similar wing, which Leia and several other members of High Command stayed in. But this was too extravagant for a mere dignitary.
And it was personalised.
The bed had light blue sheets, patterned with ships. Not X-wings, of course, but not just TIEs either. Freighters, like the one Luke had thought his father worked on. Patrol vehicles. Intergalactic buses.
The carpet was deep and soft, the off-white yellow of sand. And there were so many plants here. They sprung from every shelf, anchored with magnets in case of gravitational disturbances. Two cleaning droids buzzed around, vacuuming the already spotless floor.
On the shelf above his bed, there was a toy. A T-16. And next to it, a holo.
Luke frowned, climbing to his feet to get a closer look. It was a dark-haired woman smiled beatifically, her hands behind her head in the middle of undoing a severe-looking hairstyle. Half of her hair tumbled around her shoulders already, curly and loose. She wore a thin but fancy nightgown, and she was clearly pregnant.
She looked, Luke thought, like Leia.
It wasn't a stretch to guess who she was. And it wasn't a stretch to guess who this room had been personalised for. Luke wondered how many holos Vader had of Luke's mother, and how many he had to spare for a bedroom that might never be filled.
Swallowing, he turned. Stared at the door. And when he opened it again, Vader was still outside, his hand poised to knock. He must have been frozen there for several minutes.
Luke said, "You would have paid that much for someone to find me? Why? I'm worthless."
Vader looked at him, and somehow his mask managed to affect shock. "You are priceless," he said.
Luke looked back over his shoulder. His mother smiled at him, through time and space, illuminated and immortalised in blue light. Next to her on the shelf, which he hadn't noticed before, were four block letters of the sort that Biggs had had on his shelf as a kid. They spelled out Luke.
The dark side, Ben had said, corrupted Vader. He was incapable of love.
But when Luke turned back to his father, he found him waiting on his reaction: tense and quiet, and his heart bleeding even through the black distance between them.