Benduday. 22.10.27 AFE

He sucks in air but water plummets into his lungs instead, cold enough to freeze the muscles in his chest. He kicks and kicks and kicks; he does not remember how to swim but his body does. He crawls up through the cold and surfaces.

Fragments of ice slice into his cheeks when he breaks the water, gasping. The cold air builds frost in his lungs. His cheeks tingle; the rest of his body might be tingling, but he doesn't know. He can't feel it. He kicks pathetically, but the cold has its teeth in his thighs like a rabid dog scenting blood. His motions slow.

When the water folds back around his face, his head, the world going dark and blue again, he hardly notices.

A hand knots in the back of his jacket. The cold rushes through him all at once again, water sluicing off him. He tumbles to the riverbank in a shivering, clattering pile of limbs, teeth gritted so hard he expects them to shatter from the impact force. Grunts shudder out from him. Breathing burns.

When he looks up, blinking frigid water out of his eyes, he can see why. The water, dark blue and clear as acid, is a stark contrast with the bile-yellow sky. Amber clouds skid around him. The riverbank underneath him is white and brown, what might have been grass brittle under his knees.

"Luke."

He doesn't respond to that random word. The world around him is dead. He can't feel anything here, not for miles. There is only a wasteland of a world, with the dark blue rivers bisecting its ruined face like tears. The air itself feels like it wants to die.

"Luke, look at me."

Finally, irritably, he looks at his rescuer, clutching his arms to himself. The water clinging to him feels like it's trying to freeze his heart and crack it in two. Did he have a coat? Surely he didn't come out into this hellscape only in his shirt. "What?"

His rescuer is tall—much taller than him. He stands out like an inkblot against the overly saturated colours around them. His face—mask?—is not a design Luke has seen before, but it reminds him of something, something he can't make out.

"Are you well? Are you injured?"

"Who—are—you?" His teeth grind.

His rescuer pauses. "You do not know?" he asks, a note of caution in his booming, monotonous voice.

"No!"

"I am your father."

He stares. That answers everything, but also nothing, because— "Who am I?"

"What?"

He shudders, a hint of a breeze in this stagnant cold sending ice through his bones. "I said who am I?"

Something heavy and dark falls around his shoulders. He almost buckles underneath it, but his father catches him. It is his cloak that has been draped around him so suddenly.

"You are Luke Skywalker," his father says. "My son. You are safe now."

He is Luke Skywalker. He is his father's son. He is safe.

For the first time in what feels like an age, Luke lets himself relax.