Resilience

Luke Skywalker had blown up the first Death Star space station. This feat had taken place less than 72 hours after his aunt and uncle had been murdered by the Imperials in their home on Tatooine, the desert planet where he'd spent his whole life and feared he would die there, never getting to be a pilot like his father had been in the Clone Wars. He had jumped into the Rebel Alliance with both feet and gone on countless missions with them over a span of three years. He had faced off with Darth Vader on Bespin, only to lose his hand to the dark lord and learn the horrible truth that this evil being was his father. He had spent a year figuring out a plan to get his friend Han Solo back from Jabba the Hutt with the help of his friends, Princess Leia Organa, Han's copilot the wookiee Chewbacca, and Lando Calrissian, not exactly a friend of Han's, but the two had history, and it was obvious the man's guilt over his own role in what happened in Cloud City was driving him now to help them recover their friend and the true owner and captain of the freighter ship the Millennium Falcon. They'd gotten Han back, Jabba was dead, they'd gone to Endor to try and stop the Empire, Luke had surrendered himself to the Imperials to be taken to his father in a last ditch effort to try and save the man. He knew despite all the evil that Darth Vader had committed over the years, that his true father, Anakin Skywalker, the noble Jedi, was still in there somewhere, and that the Emperor hadn't been able to fully drive him away. He'd gone to meet his fate, knowing he would either succeed, or he would die, either his father would kill him, or the Emperor would, but he also knew Darth Vader couldn't kill him, proven by his failure to do so on Bespin, and he truly didn't believe his father would let the Emperor kill him either.

It had been a trap. The reason their infiltration to Endor had been so successful was because the Emperor had arranged it that way. Luke couldn't tell if his father had been involved in that plot or not, but he was met with an impossible situation, his friends would all die if he couldn't defeat the Emperor, but he couldn't defeat the Emperor without fighting him, and he would not fight the man, who appeared to be even less human than his father who had been half machine for 20 years. The Emperor goaded him on, daring him to strike him down since he was unarmed, that hadn't been enough to do it, but the threat against his friends, that had changed things. However his father was still loyal to the dark side and the Emperor and would not allow Luke to destroy Palpatine, they had fought. In hindsight, he had come so far from a year ago on Bespin, he knew what to expect now, or thought he did, his father would not catch him off guard and dismember him again. During it all, he could feel Palpatine's pleasure at watching father and son fight, anticipating either the son to be killed by his own father, or turned towards the dark side once and for all. In the end, neither had happened. He had wound up kicking his father down the stairs during the fight, he had cut off his father's prosthetic right hand, how was that for irony? He hadn't wanted to fight his father, but he wound up doing that anyway, because he'd betrayed Leia. He'd betrayed his twin sister, the one he'd just found out existed, just found out the beautiful princess he rescued four years ago and had worked alongside in the Rebellion ever since, was his sister. Vader had suggested if Luke would not turn to the dark side, she would, Luke couldn't let that happen, he had to protect her at all costs. Leia had suffered enough at Vader's hands, he had taken her prisoner, threatened her with torture, blown up her home planet and everyone on it, including her adoptive family, while she was forced to watch, Luke couldn't let him hurt her anymore. But he would not destroy his father, and he would not fight the Emperor. He was adamant, he was a Jedi, as his father before him.

The next thing he was aware of was a pain searing through his entire body, an excruciating agony he had never known the likes of before, Force lightning, from the Emperor himself who decreed since he would not turn, he would be destroyed. Every attack was more painful than the one before, he couldn't get up, he could hardly move, he writhed on the floor screaming at the top of his lungs, he saw his father standing beside the Emperor and called out to him, but the lightning didn't stop, it just got worse, and worse.

And then he heard the Emperor screaming.

Luke looked and saw his father had lifted the Emperor clear off the ground, over his head and as the Force lightning shot all over the room, and hit his father, Darth Vader marched over to the railing over the reactor shaft and threw the Emperor over the edge, and then his father collapsed, his respirator made a shallow sound now. Luke forced himself up and went to his father.

Between the Emperor's death, and the Rebels' successful attack, the second Death Star was going to be destroyed, sirens blared all throughout the station and everybody was abandoning ship. Luke struggled to pull his father along towards one of the emergency shuttles and saw everyone around them running to get off the station before it blew, nobody even noticed them. He tried to get his father to the shuttles but he was too large and too heavy and Luke found he couldn't support him and they both went down. He got up again and pulled his father along the floor, before going down on his knees himself. He tried to pull his father up, to get moving again, but his father had other plans.

"Luke, help me take, this mask off."

Luke felt his heart pulsate at this statement, but his words were strangely calm as he pointed out, "But you'll die."

"Nothing can stop that now," his father told him.

Darth Vader's respirator was the only consistent sound filling the large dark halls as he walked with his son's arm draped around his neck to hold the boy up as he took Luke back up the stairs. His son tiredly and intermittently rambled on despite possessing almost no energy to even be on his feet, let alone talk, but he carried on, recapping the fight on the Death Star, the Emperor trying to kill him, Vader killing the Emperor which in effect wound up killing him.

"It was horrible, Father."

"I know, my son, but it was just a nightmare, you're safe now," Vader responded as he pressed his durasteel hand against Luke's back reassuringly.

Luke was practically asleep on his feet, but he was awake enough to insist he would not be carried like a child. Under his mask, Darth Vader slightly smiled at his son's stubbornness, there was no denying it, he was a Skywalker.

"Here we are," he told Luke as they reached the second floor and returned to the boy's room.

The door slid open and they walked in. The room was nearly pitch dark, Vader couldn't see much but he could definitely feel and hear tools and parts crunching and clanking under his boots. It drove him crazy the disarrayed state his son kept his room in, but he knew it made sense to Luke somehow, so he didn't raise issue with it. He walked his 20-year-old son back over to his bed. There was enough moonlight pouring in through a crack in the covered window he could just make out the equally disarrayed state Luke's bed was in, the covers were strewn all over, as well as all the assorted junk his son insisted on keeping on top of it at all times.

"Now," Vader said as he eased his son onto the bed, "go back to sleep, everything is alright."

Luke made an exhausted sound in his throat as he laid down, his eyes were already closed, but he maintained a grip on his father's wrist, which then became a two handed grip, something he'd often done as a child when he didn't want his father to leave. Darth Vader glanced over the miscellaneous stuff littering the unused side of Luke's bed, and found what he was looking for. He picked up the stuffed baby wookiee doll Luke had had since he was four years old and pressed the furry toy half against Luke's arm and half against his cheek. Of course Luke had insisted ever since he was eight that he was too old for it, but he'd never been able to bring himself to get rid of it...and for many years, Vader hadn't been able to get rid of it either...

He knew his son better than Luke liked to think he did. All these years later and it still had the same effect, Luke nuzzled his cheek against the soft fur, released his two-handed grip on his father's arm to instead clutch the wookiee, half curled on his side and fell asleep after a few minutes with the thing pressed simultaneously under his armpit and against his face. Many times when he was little, that was the only thing that could calm him down when he was upset, he was as attached to that toy as if it were a living wookiee.

An idea occurred to Darth Vader. He grabbed the corners of Luke's top sheet and essentially swaddled him in it, Luke might roll out of bed in his sleep this way, but maybe it would hinder this sleepwalking problem he'd developed. Vader had briefly considered and quickly dismissed the other options that had been brought to his attention: locking Luke's door at night so he couldn't get it open even with the Force, putting a tracker on Luke so he'd know where he was at all times, giving him tranquilizers that would make him too weak to even stand up. In any other circumstance he might consider them, but it was all too much like what the boy had already been put through, and he would not further traumatize his son as so many others had done. For that very same reason, securing the boy in the enclosed space of his meditation pod overnight was equally out of the question.

Luke had started wandering the palace in his sleep a few weeks ago. Considering what he'd been put through, maybe it wasn't surprising, but it had caught his father off guard. He knew it was a problem some children had but his son had never been one of them, but that had been then, and now...the doctors said it was often caused by stress, of which he knew Luke had no shortage of, despite being home again and safe now. So far nothing had been able to deter his son's nocturnal roaming, the only saving grace had been his father was able to catch him fairly quickly each time. Waking him up was a struggle, Luke's eyes were open, he was talking, but he wasn't awake, and when he finally was, he'd rave on about all sorts of things he didn't realize he was dreaming about.

Luke had been kidnapped out of his home six years ago, and Darth Vader had searched the galaxy from end to end for his son but there had been no sign, and for the longest time he feared his son was dead, the contents of his room had been left just as they were when he was taken, always with some faint hope that one day he would return home. He'd finally found his son hidden away of all places, on his home planet Tatooine, Luke had been rescued, and brought home, older, taller, skinny, oh so skinny, he'd been starved and dehydrated, he bore scars from injuries he'd sustained from his captors. He'd spent his first week home in the med bay, hooked up to IVs administering fluids and medicine, he had to be bound to the bed because he tossed and turned and writhed around furiously while he ranted and raved in delirium, telling all kinds of wild stories about his father kidnapping the princess Leia Organa from Alderaan, torturing her for information, blowing up the planet and forcing her to watch, about he and the princess and a Corellian smuggler named Han Solo and his wookiee copilot Chewbacca nearly being crushed to death in a trash compactor aboard the Death Star, of joining the Rebel forces and blowing up the Death Star in a dog fight, at the expense of losing his best friend, Biggs, who he'd grown up with on Tatooine, where he'd been raised by his uncle Owen and aunt Beru and worked on Owen's moisture farm. Of finding two droids, an Astromech named R2-D2 and a humanoid protocol droid named C-3PO, who became his friends, of an old hermit named Ben, revealed to be Obi-Wan Kenobi, who Vader killed in a fight aboard the Death Star.

From there the stories ran even wilder, going with his Rebel friends to Hoth, nearly being killed by a wampa, nearly freezing to death in the cold, the ghost of Obi-Wan telling him of Dagobah and Yoda, Darth Vader taking his friends hostage on Bespin, carbon freezing Han Solo, cutting off Luke's hand in a light saber fight only then to reveal his true identity as Luke's father, jumping into the reactor shaft and landing on Solo's ship, the Millennium Falcon during their escape.

Vader stood at his son's bedside and listened to one story after another about him torturing and killing Luke's friends and their families, destroying entire planets, torturing him, trying to kill him. The doctors had explained this went beyond simple fever induced delirium and more likely, the trauma Luke had endured during his kidnapping, was so horrible, the only way his psyche could protect him was to transfer the role of torturer from his true captors, to his father, a 'safe' target by comparison. Vader was faintly aware of the way psychological transference worked, he knew Luke didn't consciously believe him capable of committing all those heinous acts, but he'd be lying to himself if he said it didn't hurt nonetheless to hear those accusations fall from his son's lips, pointed directly at him.

So many fantastic and horrible accusations. And so much pure fantasy blended into the mix. He knew Senator Bail Organa, his politics left much to be desired but he was a decent man, but Vader also knew that the Senator and his wife had no children. Him? Him torture a teenaged girl for information? It would be laughable if it wasn't so horrifying. Him cut off his own son's hand? He would sooner dismantle his respirator and finally bring about the end after living in this suit for 20 years. Him? Him kill Obi-Wan? He had specifically never told Luke about Obi-Wan, for that way led too many painful memories he couldn't bear to think about anymore.

Luke finally slept, and that's all he did for several days in the med bay. When he finally woke up, he was low energy but coherent, he knew who and where he was and he'd thrown his arms around his father and sobbed at finally being home again. He continued his recovery in his old room, spending most of his days there, hidden away from everyone except his father.

The stories didn't stop, but they were no longer about his father being the most evil monster in the galaxy. Luke didn't speak much about his ordeal from the past six years, instead, he bombarded his father with all these stories. In a way, it was like nothing had changed. Luke could always come up with the craziest stories as a child, with no second thought whatsoever, as if he truly believed they had all happened, and every day when he woke up he would chatter on and on about another one. Sometimes the stories repeated themselves from day to day, and Luke didn't seem to be aware of it, so Vader simply let him tell them all. He was thankful his mask hid his true facial expression because he knew his son wouldn't appreciate him less than subtly rolling his eyes at some of the most fantastic plots that sounded like a bad holothriller. But to Luke they were very real, and they all centered around the same friends he'd talked about before. Princess Leia Organa, at first she was merely a princess and a member of the Imperial Senate, and Luke fell in love with her, but then she became his sister, not just his sister, his twin sister that Obi-Wan had hidden at birth. Other times Luke had another twin sister, Nelleth, lost somewhere out in the galaxy that he had to find, so that together they could defeat the Emperor Palpatine. Darth Vader found the almost obsessive way Luke carried on with the stories to be slightly disturbing, but he'd come to terms with the fact Luke's overactive imagination seemed to be the only thing that had kept him sane during his six years of imprisonment and torture. It had allowed him a way to escape from the horrifying reality of his environment, by imaging he really was zipping around the galaxy on a junked freighter with a group of rogues and outlaws performing so many daring feats of heroics. And for that reason, he was eternally grateful to hear his son prattle on about flying missions with a smuggler, a wookiee and a princess, swinging from vines on a jungle planet with a short annoying green Jedi named Yoda riding on his back, and a pessimistic protocol droid that never stopped complaining.

Of all the details from all the stories Luke had told his father about since his return home, there had been one in particular that the dark lord didn't know what to make of it. Luke especially had had a very detailed background on this Han Solo, a former captain in the Imperial Navy, the best TIE fighter pilot the Navy had ever known, once vastly decorated for his services and feats, down to the Corellian bloodstripes on his pants, who had since been courtmartialed under ambiguous reasons involving the wookiee Chewbacca who became his navigator. He'd won the Millennium Falcon in a sabbac tournament, and spent years modifying it to suit his smuggling needs as well as being able to race across the galaxy from end to end quicker than anyone else, even able to outrun Imperial cruisers. There were just so many exact details to Luke's story, it almost lent credit to the possibility it could be true, it could be real.

Vader had consulted the records for the Imperial Navy, past and present, checking against current members, deceased, discharged and courtmartialed. There was no record of a Han Solo ever serving in the Navy, and yet to hear his son talk about the man, it created a sense that the Corellian was in fact real, or if nothing else, that Luke needed him to be real. Hearing his son talk of the pilot, it was obvious in his subconscious anyway, he revered the man as a surrogate father figure. More transference he supposed. If in Luke's imagination he had become the monster, it seemed this captain had become the hero in his son's life. All the same, transference or not, it struck the dark lord as a bizarre concept his son could attach that much adoration to someone who didn't even exist.

In his sleep Luke softly moaned and turned over on his other side, the wookiee's head tucked firmly under his chin. Using their bond through the Force, Darth Vader picked up on his son's thoughts, and felt some assurance that this time his son would stay in bed where he belonged. He carefully placed one gloved hand on top of his son's head and grabbed a fistful of Luke's bright blonde curls. Six long years of not knowing where his son was or if he was even still alive, and now he finally had him back.

He left the room, the door sliding shut behind him, and he started down the long corridor when he saw someone else turning the corner and coming towards him.

"Lord Vader," Admiral Piett said in lieu of announcing his arrival. "I heard on the comm system there was a situation with your son, is he alright?"

"He's fine," Vader answered. Physically anyway. Luke was recovered from his ordeal physically, but the doctors had told him Luke's mental growth had stopped when he was kidnapped, meaning he was for the time being anyway, emotionally stunted at 14 years old. Not the life he'd hoped for his son at all, but there were plenty of far worse fates, every single one of them Vader had contemplated on a daily basis for six agonizing years. At least Luke was finally home, and here, he would continue to recover, Vader was well aware it could be a timely process, but time was one thing he had plenty of.

"Were you able to find anything?" he asked the admiral.

"As you suspected, no record of a Corellian named Han Solo was ever registered in the Imperial Navy," Piett told him. "We made contact with the authorities on Corellia, there are no birth records, no service records, no arrest records, no death records. This man simply does not exist."

Vader nodded. "Thank you for checking, Admiral."

"You'll excuse me for saying so, milord," Piett said, "it's too bad this man is only a figment of your son's imagination, the Navy could use someone like him."

"I know."

"It's a very strong imagination your son has."

Yes, but was that all? Luke did not imagine Obi-Wan, he had never been told of the man, and yet he prattled on and on about the old Jedi training him, he solicited Solo to take them to Alderaan at the same time the planet was being blown to asteroids, of his ghost communicating with Luke. Vader hoped for both their sake that Luke had merely picked up on some of his own thoughts through their Force bond when he didn't have his shields up, had heard of the man, which led to him imaging the man, because any alternative was too disturbing to think about.

"And you have no idea, Admiral," Vader looked at the man, "just how grateful I am for that."