This was written from a prompt received on tumblr (if it looks like I've been doing a lot of these recently, it's because I have a two year backlog of stuff I just forgot to write that I'm finally getting around to):
AU Return of the Jedi : Vader lives. Admiral Piett Lives. After the battle on Endor, Admiral Piett meets Luke as Dark Vador'son. Piett'POV if possible. with Vador present please and maybe with a light apparition of Leia.
Hope you enjoy!
The escape pod hit the ground in a shattering of earth, trees, and Piett's consciousness. He groaned, blinked his eyes fiercely, and came to a few dazzlingly confusing moments later, with his head on his knee and his ankle by his ear. It had been decades since he was able to bend like this. His body was loudly protesting it.
He untangled himself from the undignified tumble of limbs and tried the airlock. It took a couple of tries and five minutes of furious, desperate bashing in which all of his frustrations, tragedies and stresses could not help but come to the fore. The Lady was gone. Destroyed over Endor by a stray A-wing. What a disgrace. What a terrible thing, that so many of his friends must have tied for a single Rebel's suicide shot.
If he ended up bent over double, screaming, by the time the airlock deigned to decompress and open, showering him in dirt, only the startled birds could vouch for it in court.
He stayed on his knees for a minute. Two minutes. Sixty? He didn't know. He didn't even know whether his back started complaining or if it was just still complaining after the tangle in the escape pod. But the Empire needed him, and the situation was direr than it had ever been before, so he needed to pull up his socks and keep moving. The fact that his socks had been dirtied, torn, and one of them even lost in the scramble to the escape pods, the tumble through the atmosphere, and the small collapse he had just had… well, that was irrelevant.
He found one of his shoes wedged in the corner of the pod but didn't find his missing sock. His cap was missing as well—his life truly had gone to the dogs—but that was that. Time to move on. There, in the distance, was a light. Orange and flickering: not the white light of a ship or a base, stark against the cooling colours of the sky. Someone had lit a fire.
Perhaps it was the natives. Reports had come in that the Rebels on the Forest Moon had succeeded due to their aid. He could only pray that it was escaped stormtroopers, or the other survivors of the Executor's demise, or crashed pilots, or…
The trees parted for him and he stared at the back of a blond head, clothed in black from the neck down. Piett hated the fact he recognised the man just from the colour of his hair and the shape of his ears alone. He had never seen that outfit! He had not seen that haircut! But if that wasn't Luke Skywalker, he would eat his cap—not that he still had his cap to eat, tragically—
Skywalker turned to reveal his face and looked straight at him, the rank bars on his chest, though Piett was sure he had made no noise. "Oh, he was right; you're an admiral. You must be Admiral Piett. My father was sure that was you that crashed near us."
Piett stared.
Skywalker knew his name.
Skywalker knew his name?
Somehow this day got increasingly inexplicable.
All he could say was, "I was under the impression your father was dead, Skywalker." He thought to reach for his blaster a moment later, fumbling for his belt—wait, no, he hadn't actually been carrying it when he was on the bridge and fled…
"The Emperor certainly tried, Admiral Piett," boomed a voice. Piett nearly screamed again. When he turned his head, he saw his lord reclining—or perhaps awkwardly sitting back was more accurate—against a tree stump. The stump was charred and unevenly chopped, almost like it had been taken down with a laser.
Piett turned his head back to Skywalker, who was tending the fire in the glade. He had a veritable tree of firewood to burn, it seemed. His lightsaber gleamed on his belt.
"Well, I am sorry that you and His Majesty did not succeed to kill that Jedi then, my lord," he said cautiously.
Skywalker frowned, then forcibly relaxed his face. Vader snorted—or made a sound that may have been a snort. "I am Luke's father."
The world fractured again. Bracken was a comfortable pillow, when arranged correctly, and Piett opened his eyes to Skywalker standing over him in a panic, trying to position him against it.
"Sorry for the shock. You're already in a delicate state," Skywalker said, laying him back. "But it's true, even if Father should have broken it to you more gently. Are you injured? From the fall and the crash."
So it was true.
Piett stared up at the now black sky, glimmering with a graveyard of corpses. Light flashed off the debris from the Death Star, the Executor, and a thousand other structures full of people he cared for, but for a moment he convinced himself they were stars. If they were stars, they were no constellations he had ever seen, moving rapidly and reforming themselves. He was far, far from the universe he knew. Reality was reshaping itself before his eyes.
"Admiral?" Skywalker prompted.
Piett sat up. By the stars, dead or not, a Rebel was not dressing his wounds. "I am perfectly capable of examining myself."
"Really?" Skywalker grimaced. "Because your forehead and hairline are covered in blood."
Piett gingerly reached up to touch the area. His fingers felt nothing, but his eyes told him his hand was now a fetching shade of red.
"May I bandage it?" Skywalker asked. Lord Vader was watching them both. At Piett's desperate appealing glance, he nodded.
"Very well," he said.
Skywalker was quick and firm. It hurt, but when it was on there, and whatever effect Skywalker had cast on it with his Jedi powers meant it was starting to feel much better.
He got out a stiff, "Thank you."
"No problem."
Piett stared between Vader and Skywalker—father and son—as they seated themselves next to each other. With night falling, Skywalker rested his head on Vader's pauldron. Vader tilted his mask down to observe the Rebel commander and notorious Jedi he had been hunting like an anooba for more than three years.
It was an incredibly tender tilt. Piett did not know how he knew this, but it was.
And that, perhaps, was what comforted him enough to let him sleep.
He did not know that the next morning he would be rudely awoken by a Wookiee's roar, by a tinny shout, and (he suspected) by the sheer intensity of a furious princess's stare. Had he known this, he might not have fallen asleep there at all. He was not one for family drama—his own family were hellish enough—and Skywalker and Vader clearly had plenty. But they, at least, seemed to care about each other. Baffling and inexplicable as that might be, it was comforting.
But the princess of the dead planet of Alderaan was Vader's daughter? He would have liked some forewarning. He would have preferred to run for the hills. Even if the natives had apparently tried to cook the Rebels, he would rather take his chances with them.
Foresight, however, is not a luxury most have.
So Piett woke up the next day barely able to see his new graveyard sky against the light of the sun. But his perception of reality in the galaxy was forever warped, nonetheless.
