No. 4—Dead on Your Feet
Hidden Injury | Waking Up Disoriented | Can't Pass Out
"Wake up! You're not allowed to sleep until you tell us how to find the Rebels," the Imperial officer barked.
Luke started upright. Exhaustion weighed his head down. Stun cuffs trapped him to a metal table. The hard metal chair he sat in was not comfortable, but he still kept drifting to sleep in it. He'd lost track of time since his capture during a failed Rogues mission where he had desperately flung himself at the Imperials to occupy them while his squadron escaped, but he had to have been in their grasp for at least a couple of days, maybe even a week.
And he hadn't been allowed to sleep once.
The Imperials that had captured him wanted to interrogate him without waiting for Vader to come pick him up, especially since Vader was clear on the other side of the galaxy and had been at least two weeks out when they contacted him—in front of Luke, to prove to the Sith Lord they really had the right man. But there was the "alive and unharmed" stipulation his father had put on him. So they had settled on this technique.
And of all the techniques he'd been tortured with, this was the one most likely to break him.
The Imperial officer, something Brailith, smacked Luke. "Where is the Rebel base?"
Luke shook his head. "I don' know, I don' know," he slurred. They didn't really have bases anymore, he was pretty sure, just rendezvous points. Made…made capture harder.
Brailith grabbed Luke's cheeks and dug his fingers in. "That's not good enough. You're Luke Skywalker, I know you know where the Rebel base is."
Luke wrenched his face out of the man's grip. "I don't… I don't know where it is." He squeezed his eyes shut. "I don't think we have one anymore." He hadn't meant to say that, hadn't meant to let anything slip, but his thoughts had just spilled out into words.
With his eyes closed, his shoulders began to slump again. He sank down, intending to pillow his head on his arms. If only he could be left alone to sleep for a couple minutes…
"Wake up!" Brailith barked. He shook Luke. "You can't sleep yet." He dug his fingers into Luke's hair and wrenched his head up. "What are the plans for the Rebels' next mission?"
Luke's head pounded, sending his body into a slow spin. He wasn't sure when it had started, but he grimaced regardless. "I don' know. I don' remember. If you'd…juss let me sleep…" He couldn't tell them anything, he knew that, but that was getting harder and harder to remember. He wanted to be helpful, he wanted to answer the questions, and it took him longer and longer to remember why he couldn't.
It took him longer and longer to remind himself that he couldn't give in so they'd let him sleep. Just a little. Just enough to rub away the horrible grittiness in his eyes, the pounding, stabbing, spinning in his head, the nausea that rocked him, the shakes that threaded through his hands. Just enough to clear away the pervasive fogginess that was muddying all his memories.
"You can sleep, you can." Brailith knelt next to Luke, his hand on his shoulder now. "Just do your duty as a citizen and tell us about the Rebels."
Luke nodded automatically. His duty. He could do his duty.
He started. No! His duty was to the Rebellion, not to this Imperial. "I…can't."
Brailith sighed, standing up. "Do you really think you can keep doing this to yourself? You can't last forever, Skywalker. All you have to do is give us the information and you can sleep."
Luke squeezed his eyes shut. He couldn't give in. He had to remember that. He couldn't give in.
"Wake up!" The butt end of a blaster rifle prodded Luke's back. "You can't sleep yet."
Luke jerked up. A stormtrooper stood behind him, blaster rifle at the ready in case of his drifting off. At first, they hadn't put any stormtroopers in with him during the night shifts—or rather, the non-Brailith shifts, whenever those were—in fear of Luke using mind tricks to escape from custody. Han would have laughed at that, making a joke about how the Empire gauged their average trooper's level of intelligence.
Luke was far too tired to attempt a mind trick now. And they knew it.
"Please," he whispered. "Just let me sleep."
"You can't sleep until you tell us the information," the stormtrooper said.
Luke dropped his head down and groaned. "I can't. You know I can't. You wouldn't if you were me, would you?"
The stormtrooper sighed. "That's not important. Don't you want to put an end to your pain?"
"I can't…betray my friends," Luke said.
Something crawled up his leg. He jumped and glanced down.
Nothing.
He could feel a snake crawling up his leg, but he couldn't see it. Nothing was there.
One time when Han was telling a story, he had thrown out, "I was so tired, I had started to see things."
Luke was starting to hallucinate.
He bit down on his tongue, his heart hammering. It's not real. It's not real.
The snake slithered up his leg. Luke clamped his mouth down on a scream.
Once the hallucinations started, they didn't stop. Large white craggy crablike spiders crawled up his back, black bugs crawled out of the stormtrooper's eyepieces, the smoking skeletons of Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru stood in the corner of the cell and shook their heads at him.
"Where is the Rebel base?" Brailith demanded, bracing Luke up with one hand on his shoulder.
"He's more machine now than man," Obi-Wan's voice bounced around in Luke's ears.
A skeletal metal hand settled down on Luke's other shoulder. Heavy mechanical breathing hovered above him. Luke didn't dare look at the space where Vader wouldn't be standing.
He gasped for breath, almost hyperventilating. "Please, I need to sleep. Just let me sleep. I can't… I can't…" Tears filled his eyes. Even that small act grew his desperation for rest. He almost never cried. When he was at the end of his rope, he got angry, not upset. "Please, I just want sleep."
"Just tell us what we need to know." Brailith grabbed Luke's chin and turned his head to the soft bed in the corner, warm fuzzy grey blankets covering the cot. "All you have to do is speak."
One lone tear dropped down on Luke's cheek.
The stormtrooper slid the regular plate of food over to Luke. Instead of feeding him, like he had before—and the officers had before him—then dragging him to the 'fresher, he unlocked Luke's stun cuffs.
Luke was so exhausted, they felt safe freeing him to feed himself.
He dragged the plate to him and picked up the fork. He tilted into the plate, his head slamming into the bread. His eyes drifted closed.
The stormtrooper grabbed his hair and jerked him upright. "No sleeping."
Luke shook hard. He wiped his face off with his sleeve and dug into his meal. His hand shook so hard, the beans slid off his fork. He gasped for breath like a fish held in the air. "I need…I need…I can't…"
"Here." The stormtrooper went to one knee and braced Luke up with one arm. "I'll do it." He took the fork from Luke and fed him.
Luke's head was too heavy to keep up. He leaned his cheek against the plasteel helmet of the stormtrooper.
"I'm sorry," the stormtrooper said.
Luke swallowed a forkful of beans. No Imperial had ever apologized to him before.
Which meant, though no other one had united sound, touch, and sight before, this had to be a hallucination.
"Where is the Rebel base?" Brailith demanded. He held up Luke's head for him. Luke couldn't do it himself anymore.
The door hissed open. A black cloaked, helmeted figure loomed in the doorway, his respirator rasping. Darth Vader. He was here.
"Father," Luke breathed out. "Help me." Even if Vader wasn't real, Luke couldn't take this anymore.
Brailith fell to his knees, grabbing his throat.
Luke tilted sideways, falling into leather-clad arms. He leaned his head on black plasteel armor and finally dropped off to sleep.