This oneshot was written for kyber-erso in SilverDaye's 2021 Summer Luke & Vader fic exchange! Hope you enjoy.
He had never been here before.
Luke opened his eyes as he looked around and frowned. No. He had never been here before.
A desert stretched towards the horizon on every side but one, two crimson suns hanging frozen just above the skyline. He sat on the edge of a pit, sand shifting underneath him, and around the edges of that circular pit doors were set, closed tightly against the oncoming night. Behind him were two domes where the homestead burst up from the sand, an entrance on ground level.
Where was he? Why was he here?
He didn't know. But as he sat there, the silence crystalline around him, coarse grains of sand scratching against the calloused skin of his palms, he heard a noise.
He looked down. "Hello?" There, in the corner of the pit below him—near the door to what he thought might be a garage. A figure, hiding in the shadows cast by the low, red suns. "Is someone there?" Another thought: "Where am I?"
"I do not know, Luke," came a low, rasping voice, and Luke started.
He narrowed his eyes. "How do you know who I am?" Luke had a lot of pseudonyms he went under, and so did Master Obi-Wan; only a few people knew his true name. Which was good, because his true name was a wanted one.
"I know your family. Skywalkers always seek out trouble."
He narrowed his eyes. "I'm not seeking out trouble. I don't even know how I got here."
"You are dreaming."
"How do you know?"
The figure, their hood still drawn over their face so not the faintest chink of light fell on them, shifted. "I am intimately familiar with visions of the Force, young one. They come often through dreams. Dreams can show you the past, the future… and the present."
"Evidently it's not the present, seeing as I'm currently not in a desert."
A heavy pause. "Then," they asked, "where are you?"
Luke didn't actually know. They'd fled from Rodia and Vader's dogged pursuit, then Ben had punched some coordinates into their dinky freighter's navicomputer. The Angler had groaned and rattled in protest, but she'd jumped to lightspeed successfully, and Luke had crashed in his bunk, his head still swimming from his concussion.
Concussion. From that wall falling on him. Maybe that was why he was dreaming oddly.
(He was still puzzled at that—he should have been crushed. That should have squashed him to pulp. Ben had been too distracted by his duel with Vader to do anything more than cry—"Luke!" And yet the debris had largely missed him, and he'd walked away with only a head injury.
It baffled him.)
He shrugged. "Hyperspace," he answered. "Somewhere."
"I see," the figure said. "It is odd that we should start dreaming of each other."
"Are you dreaming of me as well, then?" Luke frowned. "I thought this was a one-way thing."
"You thought I was a figment of your imagination?" The figure sounded amused. "No, boy. I am real. Real and dangerous."
Luke snorted.
The figure tilted their head. "You do not believe me?"
"Not many things are dangerous to me."
"Not even the darkness?" the figure probed. "The sort of thing that seizes your soul and drags you down into its depths without mercy or rest? The fact that you stand alone amongst the crashing wave of it all, as it engulfs the galaxy and hunts you for sport? Is that not dangerous for a little Jedi such as yourself?"
Luke swallowed. "Who are you?"
"No one. A figment of your imagination, as you said."
"Alright, Figment. How did you know I was a Jedi?"
Figment—that was what he was calling them now, he decided—gestured at his clothes vaguely. For one moment, a matte, clawed hand slipped out of the shadows and was bathed in bloody light… then it vanished back into their robes. "Look at you. It is obvious."
"I look like a spacer. I always look like a spacer." Luke picked at his holey, ragged, oily shirt to prove it. His boots were just as rough; cloths wrapped around his ankles and calves kept them tight against his legs.
"You look like yourself." His tone suddenly filled with a visceral hatred. "You look like a Jedi."
Luke clenched his jaw. "Well, that's good to know. I'll be sure to look more Sith-like when the Inquisitors next come knocking."
"The Inquisitors are not the ones hunting you."
"How do you know that?" he snapped.
Figment cocked their head again. "Am I scaring you?"
"A little!"
"I am sorry," they said gently. "I do not mean to."
"You're ridiculously cryptic. Worse than Ben."
Figment stiffed, then, and a bolt of lightning forked across the sky. Luke had no idea where it came from; the day had been clear, the air rosy. Now the lightning struck the distant desert and sand puffed up like a mushroom.
"Indeed?" Figment muttered. "Then let us change the subject."
Luke crossed his arms, glowering. "What do you want to talk about?"
Figment cocked their head slightly.
"Do you like flying?"
"Your ideas were brilliant," Luke gushed, still sitting on the edge of the pit, and peering down onto Figment. "Angler—our ship, by the way, I misread her name as Angel when I was a kid, so I wanted her desperately and Ben didn't have the heart to tell me no—is running smoother than ever! Thanks so much for the advice."
Figment said dryly, "Hello to you too, Luke."
"Right. Yes. Hello. I'm glad we're meeting again." He shook his head. It seemed that the first dream hadn't been a concussion-induced hallucination after all, despite his high emotions after facing Vader in person after fifteen years of fear. These were a pattern.
He wondered why.
Figment chuckled. "I am glad to see you again too. I expected to, but I am fortunate to have been proven correct."
Luke squinted. "What? How could you know that?"
"A suspicion of mine. The Force works in mysterious ways, but I highly doubt it bridged us merely to tear us apart again."
"Uh huh. Unless you're a hallucination."
"Do you think I am a hallucination?"
"No, but Ben does." Luke chewed his lip.
Figment stiffened. "And your Jedi Master dictates all your thoughts?"
"What? No." Luke snorted. "You sound like an Inquisitor. Jedi padawans don't follow their master blindly. I think for myself. You of all people should know that."
"Should I?" Luke wondered if he was imagining the self-deprecation in his tone.
"You're a Jedi yourself, aren't you?"
Figment seemed to choke on his surprise; for a moment, his breathing was loud and rasping. Luke shivered, despite the fact that the evening desert was not yet cold. "You truly think so?"
"I was thinking about what you said—about the darkness and the Force—while I was fixing up Angler. I tried talking aloud to Ben, but he doesn't trust dreams from the Force, he doesn't like how easily they can blend into normal, meaningless dreams. And I think he might've had an unpleasant experience with them." He waved it away. "So I just talked to Angler herself, and thinking about it…" He kicked his legs. "You're a Jedi, right? A former Jedi, at least—I don't know if you stopped following our ways after the Purges, I wouldn't blame you if you did—"
"The Empire would," Figment murmured.
Luke scowled. It was the fiercest, most unpleasant expression he'd worn since he first spoke to Figment, and he wondered if their slight shuffle was related to that. "The Empire are evil. I'm not them. I'll never be like them."
"You don't have it in you?" Figment observed.
"I don't know about that." Darkness was in all of them, Ben always preached. And Master Yoda—Ben didn't enforce the Master title, but Yoda did, the uptight frog—seemed to think there was a lot of it in Luke. He harrumphed at him whenever they visited him on that swampy planet Ben wasn't allowed to tell him the name of; made him do backflips with him on his back; sent him into that cave over and over. He was a lot of fun though, especially when Luke had been a kid. Pranking Ben with the live snake in his stew was one of Luke's fondest memories. "I could be. But I won't be."
He cocked his head. "So. Are you?"
"Am I what, young one?"
"A former Jedi, obviously."
Figment half-laughed, half-scoffed. But then he paused.
The breeze slowed and moved carefully around them: a physical manifestation of how the Force suddenly seemed to tiptoe.
"I used to be a Jedi, yes," Figment admitted. "Very astute."
"If you ever want to be one again," Luke offered, "Angler could always use another crew member. I can't keep her running on my own."
Figment hesitated. "I… should not."
Luke leaned forwards. "Don't be ridiculous. We're safer together."
"I do not think that is true, young one. All the Jedi enclaves were hunted down by Vader in the blink of an eye. They create too many ripples in the Force."
"Why do you sound proud?" Luke narrowed his eyes.
"I knew that it would be safer to be alone. That is why."
That was still unnerving, but Luke supposed that in a situation where there was nothing else to be proud of, one's survival was the only thing to hold onto. "Still. Vader has tried for years to catch us, he won't come near. My masters are too good for that."
"Masters, plural?" Figment leaned forwards, very interested, and the skin of his forehead crossed the threshold of the setting sunlight before he jerked himself back into the shade. Luke saw skin as white and rough as the sand around them, puckered with pinkish scars. "You have multiple?" He did not sound happy about that revelation.
"They're necessary. I'm not allowed to talk about them," Luke dismissed. He slid down from where he was perched on the edge of the pit, leapt down to the sandy floor below and used the Force to soften his landing. The air still felt odd here: too rich, too thick, like he was walking through foam instead of oxygen. Dreams were strange.
He took several steps forwards, glancing up at Figment. He was much taller than he'd seemed from above; he towered over Luke.
For a moment, they stood there. The frozen suns bobbed above the horizon, the light streamed over them, and Luke and Figment stood divided by it: one in the darkness, one in the light.
Luke held out his hand.
"Come on," he said, smiling. "Come meet us. Come join us. You don't have to be alone."
Figment lifted his head. Even up close, all Luke could see of his face was a sliver of scarred white skin.
"Very well, Luke," he said, and he took his hand. "Where are you?"
Luke screamed.
The grip on his hand wasn't the metal, clawed grip he'd seen—no, it was, but the clawed hands were covered in leather gloves, dripping with blood, which clamped down on his hand until it was just shy of crushing it. He tried to stumble back, to yank the hand away, but Figment followed him into the sunlight.
And where the sunlight touched him, he was transformed.
Luke stared up at what had been a mysterious, robed, scarred man, and saw his nightmare. The skeletal, bug-eyed mask, the deafening breathing, the cape that seemed liquid as the shadows it had formed off, flapping around them both.
"Vader." The terrified exclamation caught in his throat and sputtered out as a whisper. His arm still hurt and he could not tear it loose.
"Where are you, Luke?" Vader boomed, and Luke shied away.
"Kriff off, you—"
There was a sharp pain in his head and their surroundings flickered.
Gone was the desert. Gone was the homestead. Instead, they stood next to the Angler in a field of gold, the crops stretching to the horizon and back, the sky a pale blue. A dense forest bristled in the distance and two moons—one a crescent, another a misshapen knob—graced the sky.
Vader let go of him. "Dantooine," he said, the satisfaction rolling off of him. "As I suspected." He turned that horrible gaze on Luke. "I will be seeing you very soon, young one."
"No!" The desert snapped back into place and poured into the pit they stood in, responding to the hollowness in Luke's gut. The vacuum inside him pulled like gravity and the desert rushed to obey his command, showering sand on them both until Vader released his arm, stumbling back.
"Luke," he growled. "Luke, stop it."
Luke did not stop it. The storm of sand was up to his chest. It was piling up to his neck, his chin, and he was practically swimming away from Vader in it.
"Luke—"
His head went under and it all went dark.
He had managed to stay away for so long.
Since he'd woken up from the last dream of this horrible place, Luke had worked on his shielding. He'd woken Ben immediately, they'd escaped pursuit by the skin of their teeth, and then they'd worked on shielding. No matter the tug to communicate with the monster who hunted them, he resisted it, and stayed put in his own mind.
It was lonely there. But that wasn't important.
Even if it meant he felt a twinge of relief when he saw the red suns stilled in the sky again—a twinge of relief immediately followed by panic.
He was back sitting on the rim of the pit, and Vader was below, looking up at him.
"Luke," he greeted smugly.
Luke brought his shields crashing up. The land around them fractured—a great chasm split the desert, gobbling the landscape as the world spun like a whirlpool—but Vader held out a hand and forced the pieces of the dream back together. The sky ruptured, the reddish expanse suddenly bleeding from bright gouges, but Vader forced them shut as well, and the stars coming out overhead stitched the wounds closed with glittering silver threads.
Luke glared. "You won't find us, Vader."
"I will soon, young one," Vader promised, tone low. His fists were clenched at his side. "I was most displeased to find you gone from Dantooine."
"I wasn't about to stick around!"
"Would that you had. I would have liked for Kenobi to see it when you learned the truth, and finally turned against him."
Luke's mouth fell open, too outraged to speak. As he spluttered, he felt Vader's possessive gaze gentle, as if a fond memory was brought to mind.
"I will never turn against Ben! He is my master!"
"As he was mine," Vader agreed. "And now I am trying to kill him. One day you will be too. His teaching methods and blatant lies swaddled in half-truths do not warrant loyalty."
"Ben has never lied to me," Luke declared. "Whatever he said to you, you probably deserved it." He spat at Vader, even though he was too far away to hit him. The sand absorbed his attempt without a trace.
"Your faith in him is beyond foolish. There is much he has hidden from you. And he has hidden it because he is afraid."
"Even if he has hidden anything, I trust that it's for my own good," Luke snapped. "He's raised me since I was a baby, I don't remember a life before him."
"That is because you had no life before him. He killed your mother and stole you fresh from her womb, then fled before I could hunt him down. He is a coward and a liar, and his tactics are the most ruthless, underhanded tactics I have ever dealt with."
"That's rich coming from a Sith."
"Yes," Vader growled. "It is. Which is why you should listen to me."
"I'd rather not." Luke scowled, and pulled at the seams of reality again—it was all a very elaborate, very fragile set design, and with the right pressure in the right places…
Blueish red sky fell away like false walls, to reveal a fathomless darkness on either side, glimmering with perhaps the distant shadow of stars. Vader scoffed, threw out his hands again, and the walls snapped back into place, lashing around the dome of the simulated atmosphere like elastic.
He stormed forwards, until he was directly underneath Luke's swinging feet, glaring up at him. "We are having a conversation."
Luke wanted to scream. He wanted to throw something. In fact, he did.
"No, we're not." He seized a fistful of sand and threw it at Vader's helmet. It puffed and swirled around him; Luke thought he heard a grinding as it messed with the respirator's functions. Interesting, that that would still apply in a wacky dreamscape. "You're spouting bantha fodder about the man who raised me."
"He raised me as well, you know." Vader's tone was no longer loud and invasive. It was low, deadly, and purring. Something in it made Luke shiver. "I was nine when I entered his care, and I spent too many years under his yoke."
Luke threw sand again. Vader batted his hand irritably, and it glittered into falling stars, instead, fizzed out in silver bursts as they fell against his black cloak. "I don't believe you."
"I am sure you do not. Kenobi"—he ducked the helmet against the next barrage of glittery dust—"has lied to you—"
Vader was within spitting distance now. Luke got him right in the eye plate.
Vader slowly reached up to wipe it off. Luke hadn't seen so much disdain in a gesture since Ben had last deigned to drink what Uncle Hondo insisted was tea.
Vader genuinely sounded annoyed—not angry, unfortunately—now. "Luke."
"Ben isn't lying to me," Luke insisted. "You're the only one lying, here. You've said nothing but lies since we started meeting like this, for whatever reason we started meeting like this."
"Is that correct?" Vader dropped his hand. "And how, exactly, have I been lying?"
"You lied about who you are—"
"Saying nothing is not lying."
"—you let me believe you were Figment. You said you were a former Jedi—"
"Evidently I did use to be a Jedi, if your precious master trained me once, unless you're implying that the arrogant, sanctimonious Obi-Wan Kenobi was ever something else."
"—and that! You're lying about that. Ben never trained you."
Vader cocked his head. All of him had gone completely still. "Oh?" he said softly. "And how do you know that, Luke?"
"Because I'm his second padawan. And the only padawan he trained before me was my father."
Lightning forked in the distance again. A crimson dust cloud puffed out, blurring the air between Vader and Luke, but Luke still saw the way Vader's shoulders shifted, satisfied.
"That is true," he admitted—but not with the air of someone defeated. The certainty swelling in Luke's chest died. He sounded triumphant. "I was his only student."
The dust settled. Luke was covered in a fine layer of pinkish sand, but he didn't move to brush it off. He just stared.
It burst forth like a straining gas pipe. "What?"
"Have you not put it together yet, my son?"
Luke scrambled to his feet. "No!"
Vader threw out a hand. Luke tried to shove back against the Force pulling him, but he couldn't, and he thudded off the rim onto the ground below, inches away from the monster. Before he could move, there was a hand grasping his chin, lifting his face for examination.
"No…" he tried to say, but his jaw was caught in that bone-crushing grip.
"Do you think I hunt all Jedi with the fervour I have hunted you, Luke?"
"You're a monster. I figured so."
"I delegate those Jedi to lesser beings. As I said, Jedi enclaves have been wiped out, and the survivors are weak. I was hunting you, and you alone."
"No." A tear slipped out and ran down his cheek. Vader wiped it away with his free hand, but more kept coming. Luke's voice wobbled. "That's… that can't be…"
"Search your feelings. Think about why we meet here. From the moment we met, the bond between us was too strong to suppress, and the Force has brought us here." Vader's hand brushed his hair. "And now, the Force will bring me to you."
"No!"
Luke knew what he was doing before he did it: the same thing as before, tearing his location out of his mind to resume their eternal chase. Not this time.
Vader's mental fingers were flung back, hissing from the heat of his resolve, then Vader himself was flung back. His harsh grip had left bruises on Luke's chin.
"Stay away from me, monster," Luke hissed, even as his heart jackrabbited. The truth rang the Force like a bell and its reverberations were deafening him, rattling his brain in his skull.
They rattled the world, too. Here, on the edge of reality, the illusion around them trembled then started to disintegrate into a torrent of sand-like particles. They were whipped up into a storm that coursed through Luke's hair, flapped his clothes where they weren't taped to his wrists and ankles, sucked the air from his lungs.
Vader, panicked, flew to his feet and lunged for Luke, his steel hands massive and leering—
Then he too dissolved and spun in a whirlwind of ebony sand.
Luke closed his eyes against the chaos, and it was a long time before he opened them again.
He tried to convince himself it wasn't true.
He had ignored it. Tried not to sleep—used stim shots to keep himself awake. Done all the chores and errands Ben had assigned him, trained as hard as possible, enjoyed his monthly holocall with Leia, to get some company that wasn't his master and their beloved Angler.
It wasn't true. It couldn't be.
"It is true, my son."
Luke threw him a rude gesture.
"Are you so childish that you would respond to the truth with petty vulgarity?"
"I am a child," Luke hissed. Tears gathered at the corners of his eyes. He'd tried to avoid this for so long, but now it was staring him in the face, barely a metre below his swinging feet. He could see his own reflection in Vader's polished red eye plates. "I'm fifteen."
Vader paused, tilting his head up to look at him. "Indeed," he said. "You are."
"It's been fifteen years. If you're my father, where were you?"
"Looking for you, Luke. Not once have I slowed my search."
Luke didn't know how to respond to this, still. He was so tired in real life that he felt tired in the dream, his head spinning. Gravity felt stronger than usual; a weight tried to drag him down, and it wasn't just Vader wanting him closer this time. He was on the edge of a pit, yes, but he teetered on the edge of a precipice.
He blinked. The colours distorted: the sand was blue, Vader was yellow, the suns above were dark as two ink blots, seeping across the sky. Then he blinked again, and it was back to normal.
"I don't believe you," he said. He didn't know if he could believe anything he learned in this strange world.
"Yes," Vader replied, more gently than Luke had known he could speak. "You do."
"I don't."
"Lying does not become you."
"Nor does it you."
"I have never lied to you, Luke."
Luke scrubbed at his face with the back of his hand. "Alright then. Tell me more lies, until I believe them. If you're my father, tell me about my mother."
Vader stiffened.
A small sandstorm kicked up around him, briefly obscuring his features. Luke wondered if that was it, if he'd poked at the hole in Vader's story that would rip it right open, before the storm cleared and Vader's armour was gone.
His father looked up at him, and his head was as bald and scarred as boiled egg mutilated by clumsy attempts at peeling. His eyes burned yellow, then he closed them to let a tear trickle down his cheek, and when he opened them again they were pale and watery.
"I loved her," he rasped. His naked voice sounded like the shifting of the sands around them.
Luke swallowed.
"Why?" he uttered.
Vader glared at him. "Why did I love her?"
"Why did you kill her, then?"
His father's face tugged into a snarl, straining long pink stretches of unhealed scar tissue that looked agonising. "What did you say?"
"I know who my parents were. Anakin Skywalker and Padmé Amidala. I know that Vader killed Padmé, and nearly killed me. So why did you do it?"
Vader stared at him, mouth open. Luke wondered if he hadn't had to disguise his expressions behind the mask in fifteen years. He wondered if he knew that his devastation was written all over his face.
"I thought she had betrayed me. I lost control." Vader hung his head. "I did not intend to."
"But you killed her."
"And I have regretted it every day since!" Vader stormed forwards, the robes that had replaced his armour swirling around him. As Luke watched him rage, a mask flickered over his face again. "I loved her and I love you! You are my family, and Kenobi stole you from me!"
"If you loved her then why did you destroy the Republic she loved? Why do you support an Empire she would despise!"
"You did not know her. Do not presume to dictate to me whether or not she would approve of my actions."
Luke wanted to argue, but there was no foil to the unwinnable but shallow you are young and foolish argument. Ben and Master Yoda were fond of it; he knew it well. Leia had tried to teach him some tricks to talk around it, but he was not the orator she—or their mother—was.
So he said: "Perhaps not. But I know whether or not I approve. And I hate everything you are and everything you have done."
Vader stared at him. In a flash of light, all his armour was back.
"When I find you," he promised, "you will understand what I have done. Your Jedi conditioning cannot run so deep as to make you unreasonable."
"Unreasonable? I'm not the unreasonable one here—"
But Vader used Luke's own trick against him. Luke barely had time to look down at himself and yelp, before he dissolved into nothing on the edge of reality, and woke up.
The last time Luke found himself in the homestead that made no sense, he knelt on the sandy hills and screamed. His screams pierced miles away, echoing in the pit below, but there was no one to hear him. Everything was silent and still.
"Young one." Vader coalesced in the shadows again, and this time he did not seem eager to approach through the light.
Luke levelled a finger at him. "You."
"Luke—"
"What have you done."
"I have no control over—"
"What have you done with Ben!?"
It had all happened so quickly.
"I did not know what the Emperor had planned. Nor did I even know that he was tiring of my failing efforts to capture you both. I had no influence on what happened."
One single night of rest, nestled in the back fields of a kindly farmer's land on Saleucami. They'd been able to settle the Angler there, let her stop straining her engines for the first time in weeks of pursuit, and for once Luke had gone to bed with a full belly.
Then they'd gone into town the next day, and he'd barely seen the bobbing ivory helmets converging on them before it was all over.
"Do you know where they took him? He's a Jedi. Surely he's in your custody—I'm sure you can't wait to break and bruise him, in revenge for all the perceived wrongs he's dealt you." He sucked in a ragged breath. "Is that right, Father?"
Vader flinched, but Luke didn't care to see it.
Ben had shouted for him to flee. Luke had fled, the rooftops unstable but a welcome thing to focus on other than his master's screams.
He was probably dead.
And if he was dead, that meant the last conversation he'd had with him…
"I didn't want to go into town, you know," he spat, eyes still streaming. "He confronted me about my cagey behaviour over the last few months, and I finally got the courage to confront him about what you told me. He was full of excuses and I hated them all, and I hated him, and I was full of bitterness a Jedi should not feel."
"Then you know true strength—" Vader tried to say, but Luke's glower silenced him.
"Then he died with me hating him." He buried his face in his knees. "I spent my life loving him, and he is going to die with my hate."
Vader said, "That is exactly how it happened to me, young one."
Luke trembled.
With rage. With hurt. With hatred. He grabbed the Force with thick fistfuls and tried to let it flow through him, strange and colourful as it was here. There was a peculiar howling sound as wind moved through the homestead.
"Come with me," Vader urged. "Your master has failed you. I can keep you safe, I can protect you from Palpatine. No harm will come to you with me; you are my son. You are meant to be with me."
"But I'm not like you," Luke said.
Vader didn't hesitate. He held out his hand. "You are far more like me than you know."
"But I'm not like you." He pushed himself to his feet, his hands fists at his sides. "I don't care that you're my father. I don't care that we may be similar. The only thing these conversations have shown me is that you don't know how to be a father. Does it really not occur to you that I don't want to go with the man who killed my mother? Who hunted the closest thing to a parent I had for years? From the moment we spoke, you have been nothing but menacing, overdramatic and inexplicably dense, and I want nothing to do with you!"
Vader dropped his hand. He even staggered back a bit.
"I have a family," Luke bit out. "I have a master who lies sometimes, usually out of love. I have a friend who supports me. I have another master who pushes me hard but never forgets to make fun of life. I have an uncle with no care in the world but profit and ridiculousness. And I have more family out there that I can run to whenever I want." He looked down at Vader, and he suddenly looked very small.
Luke had been in control here, he realised. This whole time. Vader needed him, not the other way around.
He finished: "What use do I have for you?"
"Luke," Vader tried. He may have even pleaded, but it was too late: Luke was already gone, and the wind whistled a mournful dirge.
He had had family out there. But, as it turned out, they were dead.
This all must be some sort of sick joke.
Luke stared around at the homestead in the middle of the Tatooine desert, scoured by harsh winds and beaten by a harsh sun. It was identical to how they'd seen it in the dreams, save for the strange phenomena that seemed unique to that dreamscape, and all he could think about was the queasy hollowness in his gut.
Ben was gone, and Luke had had to fly the Angler himself for weeks just to get here. Just to find them. Owen and Beru Lars, Anchorhead, Tatooine, was the address on the file Ben had told him only to access if he was gone. They were his father's stepfamily, and Luke's grandmother was buried here.
He wandered around the ruined homestead—ruined, though he had never noticed as much in the dreams. At dusk, the scorch marks on the walls looked like shadows, and the damaged doors seemed like the normal wear and tear of a weather-battered farm. He was so focused on the devastation he'd somehow never seen that he nearly tripped over the two graves when he rounded the building and found them.
But he didn't. Instead, he kneeled in front of the small mounds of sand that had formed there and cleared them both away gently. Cliegg Lars one grave was revealed to read. Luke supposed that must be his step-great uncle. When he turned to the other one, he saw Shmi Skywalker.
A spare thought wondered what had happened to Owen and Beru, where they lay, but the rest of him fixated on that one name. Skywalker.
As he stared at it, his throat tightened.
"Hi," he said awkwardly. His mouth was suddenly as dry as the desert around them, and no more words were forthcoming. "Grandmother. Grandma."
Neither of them fit. He could try other synonyms, but he didn't want to.
He'd always known who he was. He'd known his parents' identities, his sister's, his own. He knew where he came from, and where he was going.
But it had all been a lie.
"How could you raise someone to be him?" he whispered. It came out unintentionally accusatory, and that sparked tears in his eyes. "I mean… How could the boy you raised, the person Ben told me about, be him? How…" He closed his eyes and the tears started to fall. They wet the sand between them.
"What do I do now, Grandma?" he whispered. He'd told Vader he already had a family, and he did. But Ben was gone. Leia was on Alderaan, and he couldn't risk them by going there. He didn't know where Master Yoda was. And no one ever knew what Uncle Hondo was up to. "Where do I go?"
Shmi Skywalker did not answer. Not even the desert answered. No wind stirred the sand, no shade marred the desert, and only silence reigned as the suns beat down on him like the weight of a thousand worlds.
Slowly, he climbed to his feet.
Coming here had been a waste of time—or, not a waste, but a dead end. His family here were gone. He wished he had met them. He wished he had known enough about them to mourn them.
But he did not.
He needed to go elsewhere—maybe if he reached out and connected deeply enough, the Force would lead him to Yoda. Maybe if he contacted Leia, she and Bail could help him, even if he couldn't go to Alderaan. He had other options.
But he didn't want to take them.
Ben was gone. Luke had no idea what to do about that. And he had no idea what it meant to be a Skywalker anymore, either.
He sighed and walked back around the homestead. It was late, he realised, and the suns were starting to creep towards the horizon in an eerie replica of his dreams. But it was different, seeing it in person: the colours were softer, rather than being as vibrant as a stained-glass window. The sensation of sand in his shoes was decidedly more unpleasant. It wasn't that harmless in-between temperature: it was too hot one moment, then he shivered the next.
Even so, he wandered up to where he had stood five times already and watched the suns set from there, the wind stirring his hair. It was a beautiful scene, and emotions he couldn't name swelled in his chest. That gave him hope.
What for, he didn't know.
But when he finally dared to look down into the pit below, he asked, "How long have you been standing there?"
His father did not answer.
Luke's lips folded down, but he slumped into a seating position on the lip of the pit. If reality seemed intent on following the fate of dreams, he was too emotionally exhausted to resist it. "How did you know I would be here?"
"My dreams have always been prophecies in the making. This is the only one that has not been unpleasant." Vader stepped into the sunlight and tilted his mask up, the rosy light dusting the plastisteel curves. "I knew, sooner or later, we would meet here."
Luke barked a harsh laugh. "Are you the one who killed them?"
"Killed who, son?"
"The Larses. My aunt and uncle."
Vader shook his head. "No."
Luke supposed he should be afraid, regardless of how careful and quiet Vader had kept, but… again. He was tired. "What do you want?"
"You."
"I know that already. And I've already given you my answer." He wrapped his hand into a fist in the sand, and let the grains trickle out of it one by one. He watched their slow descent rather than face his father as he said, "What have you changed? Why are you here?"
"I want to help you."
"I don't need what you call help."
Vader tilted his head. "Obi-Wan Kenobi is being held in a cell guarded by ysalamari on Coruscant, under the Emperor's watchful eye. Palpatine wants you, not your aging master; he is planning to use him as bait at some point in the future."
Luke's heart leapt. "He's alive?"
"Kenobi is alive."
"Why are you telling me this?"
Vader watched him for a moment, before he clasped his hands behind his back and half-turned away.
"I do not sleep, Luke," he said. "When I fell asleep hours after my failed attempt to kill Kenobi on Rodia, it was a fluke that served as a testament to my exhaustion. But since I have met you in dreams, I have slept every night, trying to see you again."
Luke swallowed. "Oh."
"I know that you do not need me. You have spent fifteen years happy without me." His respirator rasped in for three agonising cycles. "But I would like to help you anyway."
Luke creased his brow. Put both hands on the rim of the pit and pushed himself down into it. The Force softened his impact, but it was still jarring.
Now he was shorter than Vader, he looked up at him and asked, "You want to help me save Ben?"
"If that is what you want…" Vader flexed his hands. "…yes."
Luke hesitated.
"I know you do not need another father figure. Kenobi, and whatever other people you may know, have served that well enough. And I know that I am not the father you thought you had had, or the one you deserve." He held out his hand again. "But I will love you as my son until I die. And I may not yet know how to be that father, or even how to deserve a second glance, but I will dedicate myself to trying."
Luke's tears were making a comeback. He blinked them away.
Then, in three long strides, he had his arms around Vader.
His father stiffened, dropping his proffered arm. But it wasn't a moment before he had wrapped that arm around Luke in return.
"I'd like that," Luke whispered. "You'll… you'll help me?"
Vader tightened his hold. "Always."
Luke gazed up at him, and gaze him a watery smile. "Then welcome to the family."
