"I don't want to be here," Luke said as he paced frantically in the academy's med bay, which was right next door to the behaviorist's office.

"I know you don't," Vader calmly responded.

Luke sharply turned on his heel and asked, "Then why are you making me?"

"Because if you carry on like this, you're going to kill yourself," Vader answered simply and to the point.

Luke resumed pacing back and forth, his breathing becoming loud, ragged, erratic.

"Luke, calm down."

"I can't!"

The gasping breaths got louder, and louder, Luke's whole body about doubled over with each one.

"Luke..."

In a few more seconds the boy was hyperventilating and his chest was heaving hard enough each attempt to breathe nearly knocked him down.

This was very familiar, a lifetime ago.

Vader grabbed Luke by the arm and forced him to lie down on the exam table, then slipped one glove clad hand under both of Luke's feet and elevated them as he tried to get Luke to control his breathing. Instead, a few seconds later Luke slumped back against the table in a dead faint.

Vader flashed on when the same thing happened to him 20 years ago, at least this way Luke didn't injure his head. Sit down and put your head between your knees indeed. He released his hold on Luke's feet and stood back.

Luke came to a few seconds later, still erratic but notably calmer now.

"What happened?"

"Nothing," Vader answered. "How are you feeling?"

Luke sat up and asked, the despair plain in his voice, "Why do I have to be here?"

"Because you need help, Luke. I'm asking you to trust me."

"That's not fair," Luke said.

"I'm your father, I don't have to be fair," Vader pointed out. "But I have to do what's in your best interest."

"And you really think this is it?"

"I do," the dark lord nodded.

Luke sucked in a heavy, uneasy breath. "Okay...okay...I'll try it, but I'm not promising anything."

"You look tired, Luke. Would you like to sleep?"

Luke groaned as he raked one balled up hand across his eye until the skin surrounding it stretched out before snapping back when the contact was broken. The academy's cerebral behaviorist was a tall thin man with pale skin and dark hair who looked to be somewhere in his 40s. He was strangely monotone, he bombarded Luke with a lot of personal questions but maintained a tone void of any and all emotions, never giving any indication to what he was thinking. Luke hated the guy.

"I want you to go away," Luke answered snidely and bluntly. "I don't want to be here."

This was not the first session Luke had had with the behaviorist, and while he wasn't sure what exactly what he was supposed to say, or do, or what was supposed to happen, it hadn't. This guy had the power to ground seasoned pilots if he thought they were getting too reckless in the cockpit, and somehow, he'd had the power to confine Luke to a strange room where the only furniture was a table and two chairs, and the rest of it, floor, ceiling and walls, was a strange, soft, padded material. He didn't understand why he was being kept here but his brain wasn't really able to put the words together to ask. He had a bad headache that wrapped all the way around his skull and went down his neck and he felt like the whole thing was about to cave in. He'd asked for painkillers but he'd been told he needed to sleep instead. That wasn't happening, so his skull pulsated along in excruciating silence.

As it currently was, Luke was seated across the table from the doctor, that being a loose term, his whole upper body was folded on the table, his eyes could hardly stay open, but he knew he must not fall asleep, not under any conditions. If he fell asleep that thing was going to come back for him.

"Nobody ever wants to be here, Luke."

"Then why can't I leave?"

"Where would you like to go?"

"Home."

"With your father?"

Luke sat up in his seat and looked at the man sitting across from him.

"Aside from him making me come here in the first place, what's my father got to do with this?"

"You know he's worried about you."

"That's his job. He's been worrying about me for 18 years," Luke said dismissively, sinking down against the table again.

"But this is different, isn't it?"

Luke shrugged, wishing everything would just go away, the doctor included.

"When was the last time you ate, Luke?"

He shrugged again.

"Are you familiar with the body's method of self preservation, Luke?"

"Hmmm?" He'd hardly noticed he'd closed his eyes, but he could only get one of them open now to look at the man.

"Are you aware that when the human body begins to starve, it will break down its own protein to keep going? This form of self-cannibalization isn't safe, it's not healthy, and it's definitely not comfortable."

"You can't scare me into eating," Luke was slurring his words.

A loud, deafening noise filled the room and Luke about jumped out of his chair, he realized it was the behaviorist slamming his hand against the table.

"Luke," his eyes were hard now, as was his tone, "your father has given the medics permission to insert a feeding tube if you don't start eating."

There was a blank look on Luke's face for the longest time before his eyes finally widened, "He wouldn't do that."

The doctor was unemotionally calm again, like a droid. "I told you, he's worried about you."

Luke was quiet for a minute before he glanced down and responded, "That makes two of us."

Darth Vader was waiting when the behaviorist came out.

"How is he?"

The man looked at the dark lord for a moment as if contemplating the answer, before saying simply, "It would be easier to show you. Come with me."

He led Vader through a set of twisting corridors and they stopped outside of the padded room Luke was being kept in. A section of the padded wall had been automatically retracted to show a window hidden behind it, allowing outsiders to gaze in.

"I still haven't been able to convince him to eat yet," the man told Vader. "But he did request a pillow."

Vader looked in the window and saw Luke curled on the floor in a fetal ball in a dead sleep.

"With trauma, progress is always slow," he explained to the dark lord, "we have to take what we can get."

"I want to take him home," Vader informed the doctor.

"Understood, Lord Vader. I'd give it an hour, by then his body should be far enough in N3 sleep that he shouldn't wake up when he's moved. He's been fighting sleep for two weeks, even before he entered the academy, so he'll likely be out of it for a while, but when he wakes up I'll need to see him again."

"Is he going to get better?" Darth Vader wanted to know.

The behaviorist opened his mouth to respond, then closed it, and opened it again and said, "He won't be able to go back to the person he was before his attack...the trauma will always be there, but hopefully with time, and effort, he'll be able learn to live with it, and not let it consume him. I suppose that's all anyone can ever hope for."

Vader sat on the edge of Luke's bed and watched his son while he slept. Luke had slept during the shuttle flight home, he'd slept while he was moved upstairs and put in bed, and he'd slept for the last 18 hours without waking once. On occasion he would toss and turn and murmur in his sleep but it passed quickly and without incident.

"Luke."

The man in black carefully reached a gloved hand down and stroked over the top of Luke's head, the boy didn't stir at the touch, just breathed steadily, unaware of anything around him.

He heard a transmission come over his comm link. It wasn't loud enough to wake Luke, for which he was thankful. He answered it and realized it was one of the medics in the bay, they needed to see him right away.

Vader wasn't sure what that could mean, Luke was here, so it couldn't have anything to do with him. He felt uneasy about leaving his son incase Luke would wake up while he was gone. He picked up Luke's comm link from the desk and keyed it up to his own so he'd hear whatever happened in the room while he was gone, and he went to find out what was going on.

The white haired medic was grim faced as Vader entered the room.

"Lord Vader, there's been a development."

"Not with Luke."

"No, milord, with the creature."

Vader's head instantly turned to see the thing still lying dead in its case. It had been preserved to prevent decay so it could be further studied if need be, but for a moment the dark lord felt his heart racing in anticipation that it somehow was still alive.

"In trying to figure out just what we're dealing with," the medic explained, "I reached out to other systems to see if anyone had any experience with the same breed of creatures. It took a while but we found a few that knew what we were talking about. I'm afraid though, sir, that the news is bleak."

"What is it?" Vader demanded to know.

"Other people have been attacked by these things, most were also impregnated by them, however, no other attempts to remove them before they reached term were successful. Most victims either died when the embryo burst out of their chests, or they were killed by the initial creature when attempts were made to remove it from the victims' faces. One med bay sent over some holotapes so we could get a better idea what these things produce."

He inserted a tape into one of the Astromech droids working in the bay and turned it on.

Vader felt himself lean back as if he really expected the long black creature with an exoskeleton body, no eyes, long claws on both hands, an inner jaw and outer jaw both full of razor sharp teeth, and a long tail with a large blade shaped stinger on it, to lunge out at him and attack.

The medic stared at the image with a stonefaced expression, his voice was grimly monotone as he explained, "They can grow up to nine feet long, weigh up to 400 pounds, and this is all within just a few short hours after their birth. They reach their adult stage just as quickly as their embryos grow to term in their hosts. They're extremely hard to kill, and like that thing in the case over there, they bleed acid which presents all the more of a challenge to kill without being killed in the process."

"That thing was in Luke?" Vader asked in total shock.

The medic merely nodded, right now words escaped him.

When he did speak again, he told the dark lord as he shut off the tape, "Nobody knows what they are, where they come from. Nobody knows if they're a naturally existent species, or if they were bio-engineered in a lab, possibly as an instrument of warfare. Few people who have encountered them have actually been able to destroy them."

Vader felt a sinking sensation in his body.

"And no one knows how many of them are out there."

"No," the medic shook his head.

"Or where they are."

"No, milord."

Vader felt an ice cold sensation running through the human part of his body.

"How did you know carbon freezing that thing would release its hold on Luke and kill it?" he wanted to know.

The man looked at him and answered, "I didn't...it just seemed a plausible option."

His respirator eliminated any option of him sucking in a deep breath as he processed all of this.

"Luke is never to know about any of this," he told the medic in no uncertain terms.

The medic nodded and said in response, "No, Lord Vader."

Vader felt a disembodied sensation as he walked through the corridors of the imperial palace. He felt things through his neurotransmitters that resembled when his body was still all flesh and muscle, the way his shoulders would stiffen when he was worried, the way his legs felt weighted down and his feet would drag against the floor.

He thought about that thing laying dead in the case, and he thought about that thing on the holotape. That thing was in Luke. That thing would've killed Luke, could've killed him so easily because nobody knew what to anticipate. It was only by dumb luck of a quick thinking medic that his son was apparently the first person in the galaxy to survive such an ordeal. His prosthetic knees tried to knock as he thought about how close Luke had come to dying, so horribly, painfully. And now Vader felt weighted down with something else to worry about, wherever that thing came from, there could be more out there, anywhere, and there was no guarantee Luke wouldn't encounter anymore of them when he left again when...when he recovered.

By the time he reached the top of the stairs, Vader felt like his whole body was shaking. He returned to his chamber and saw Luke was still asleep in bed, rolled over onto his back, the covers wrapped high around his neck, practically engulfing him completely.

Vader felt like his prosthetic feet weren't even under him anymore as he warily moved over to the bed and looked down at his son.

"Luke..."

In one quick move, Vader swooped down, grabbed Luke under the arms and pulled him up in a tight embrace.

"Hu-ha...Father?" the groggy voice asked. The eyes opened but were half crossed as the boy asked, "wha...what is it?"

He couldn't tell him. He simply could not tell Luke. He had been traumatized enough already, knowing as full of the details as they had wouldn't benefit him in any way. Vader couldn't inflict that upon his child.

"Oh...nothing," he answered, even through the vocoder his lie came up fairly monotone and nonchalant. "I just missed you."

Luke closed his eyes for a couple seconds, they were aware and alert when he opened them again and he seemed more awake now as he replied sheepishly, "I was only gone for a week, Father."

"I know," Vader held him closer, "but it was the longest time we've ever been apart."

"Well...Father...you're gonna have to get used to it, because when I go back to the flight academy I'll be gone for months," Luke told him.

"Yes...when..."