This was written for this prompt on tumblr:
AU where Luke overhears Owen and Beru talking about how his father is Darth Vader. Luke, who is still kinda ignorant about how bad the empire is but knows they're evil, sets out to save his father. A few months later, Darth Vader is kidnapped by an Imperial engineer :)
You may ask, "Spell, that's a cute prompt. Why is there a whump tag?" The answer is that I wanted to beat Luke up today so I did 😂 My sincerest apologies to the prompter.
The title naturally comes from the chorus of From Eden by Hozier:
Honey, you're familiar, like my mirror years ago
Idealism sits in prison, chivalry fell on his sword
Innocence died screaming; honey, ask me, I should know
I slithered here from Eden just to sit outside your door.
Hope you enjoy!
Vader knew the stowaway was there before he even got onto the shuttle. The troops who were meant to accompany him on his diplomatic mission to Tatooine stood to attention when he strode into the hangar and didn't dare to question him when he waved them away. They could take a different shuttle.
He was bored. He was angry. If he had to spend the afternoon negotiating with Jabba rather than simply rolling into Hutt Space with the Imperial Navy and taking what he wanted, then he would at least spend the morning finding out what pathetic sort of trap this was and crushing it. The presence on board was clearly Force-sensitive: was this an attempt by the dregs of the Jedi to assassinate him? He would enjoy putting it—and the stowaway—to rest.
So, pretending not to have noticed the presence, he sat down in the pilot's seat and smoothly took off from the hangar, feeling his troopers' baffled stares after him. They would follow in a transport soon after. He wanted to have this chance, first. The presence sparked with joy and excitement when they took off: the Jedi must think their plan was succeeding.
It wasn't long before the trap he was waiting for was sprung. The controls of the shuttle started to wobble, and their trajectory pitched to the right. Vader growled. Their current course would take them away from Mos Eisley, towards the Jundland Wastes and towards…
His mother's grave.
The autopilot was engaged. That was exactly where they were taking him, when he checked: the programme had been fed coordinates that Vader well-remembered inputting once before, in another life. When he made to override it, the navicomputer beeped at him angrily.
Passcode protected. Vader spent a scant thirty seconds trying to break through, but the Jedi's tech skills were at least passable. He could work at it harder and correct their course, but first he wanted to see what plan they had shoved into actions.
He stood from the pilot's seat and looked behind him. In a lambda shuttle, there should be nowhere to hide. There was the cockpit, the engine room, and the hold, where both cargo and troopers would be stored. Nowhere else should be large enough to hide a humanoid.
The cockpit was empty other than for him, and to enter he had had to come through the cargo hold. That left the engine room—but at a first glance, that was empty too.
A challenge then. And one with a time limit, before they reached his mother's grave and whatever nefarious plot this was came to full fruition. He let rage soak his chest, lit his lightsaber, and stalked forwards.
"I know you are here, Jedi," he boomed. "What game do you think this is?"
A flicker in the Force—almost like a giggle. Vader snapped his gaze around the engine room and peered behind the engine itself. Wires tangled in and out of his peripheral vision, tubes interlocked throughout like a grid, but the Force saw clearly. The Jedi was directly behind—
He stopped. He'd reached the back of the room. There was only a metal wall.
He reached out to rap his fist against the wall.
The resounding echo was hollow. The Force betrayed the wince and discomfort from the Jedi, but more importantly, his own ears betrayed the moment when they started scrambling through this vent they'd found to hide in and ran.
Darth Vader was never going to let his prey escape. He drove his lightsaber into the rigid metal like it was water and slashed down. The Jedi screamed. Vader slashed along the other side, uncaring as to whether he amputated a limb, or a head, or a torso, and the metal buckled and bent as he seized the Force in his fist and flung it backwards.
The panel slammed past him, into one of the metal tubes throughout the engine room, and clattered to the ground in a twisted, charred mess. The Jedi tumbled out of the vent in the wall to land at Vader's feet. He didn't have the time to lift his chin before the edge of Vader's blade lingered at his throat.
The Jedi was a boy. He couldn't have been more than fifteen, so the Imperial engineer's uniform he was wearing was laughable: it was several sizes too large for him, and it horrified Vader to think that his men could have let such an obvious imposter infiltrate the Devastator without noticing. Heads would roll for their incompetence. The boy's hair was long and shaggy, as sun-bleached and yellowed as bones forgotten in a desert. His pale eyes moved slowly along the length of Vader's lightsaber, from one line of smoke that snaked up from his uniform collar where the blade was at his throat, to the other line of smoke that rose from where the tip of the blade punctured the floor.
"What did you hope to achieve by this, Jedi?" Vader spat. "Why are you taking me here?"
The boy swallowed, set his jaw, and glanced up at Vader. "To bring you home," he said earnestly.
Vader extinguished his lightsaber. The boy didn't have time to telegraph his relief on his face before Vader telegraphed his rage on his face instead. Feeling cartilage crunch under his durasteel fists was a satisfying sort of violence, second only to seeing someone squirm in mid air as they realised how fragile their grip on oxygen was. Vader lowered his fist, and the boy's knees rammed into the floor. He spluttered blood.
"What?" he asked. "I—"
Vader seized him by the throat. The boy stopped talking. His nose twisted in on itself like an ingrown jogun, and his cheekbone didn't exactly look straight, either. He audibly gulped—for air, perhaps, as the blood blocked up the access through his nose, though his terror was a sudden bright, sharp thing.
It cut Vader to the bone in an instant. He didn't know why. He didn't want to.
"This," Vader hissed, his fury crashing like cymbals through his helmet, through the Force, until the boy looked dazed from the experience of it, "is not my home."
"But—"
Vader threw him. In the engine room, there were many things to hit, and he hit at least three of them. His head slammed into a pipe, his spine into another one, and his foot even crunched with unpleasant finality against the thrumming engine itself. He lay limp on the floor. Consciousness flickered out for him for a moment—but only for a moment. Vader reached out to seize him and drag him back to the waking world with an ease that surprised even him.
He was not yet finished.
"What do you know?" he demanded, stalking forwards. The boy jerked sluggishly upright, staring blearily at him—then scrambled backwards as fast as he could. "Where did you find out—"
The boy got to his feet and made a run for the door, back to the corridor. Vader indulged him: he made it to the doorway of the cockpit before Vader seized his neck with the Force and yanked him into the air, kicking and lashing out. A hand gouged deep scratches in his throat, as if he could unpick Vader's grip on him, Vader's grip on the Force, Vader's grip on reality and the truth of how he had lived for nearly sixteen years. It did nothing. A strangled cry was all that escaped Vader's chokehold.
Vader stopped in front of him and quieted himself to speak almost calmly. "Where," he said, voice still with promise, "did you find out about this place?"
The shuttle set down with a resounding thud. They had landed. Vader didn't bother glancing out of the viewport: it would be the same desert, the same worthless farm, and nothing of import would ever be found there again.
The boy was trying to speak. Vader gritted his teeth—if he did not control his frustration, he would kill him and lose any chance of discovering what the Jedi knew about Skywalker's past—and loosened his grip.
Tears streamed down the boy's face. They cut through the mangled mess of blood left behind from Vader's attack. White bone gleamed in his cheek.
"I…" he got out. "Live here."
That was unexpected—and insulting.
"Why?" he demanded. "Why would the Jedi settle here?" His mother had remarried, had she not? Perhaps whatever farmers had dared to monopolise her affection had decided to throw in their lot with random Jedi, in memorial to the Jedi who had failed to save her from her fate…
"Not. A Jedi."
"Not a Jedi?" Vader tightened his grip again, and the boy's cry was near-silent. "Your presence is unmistakeable. Who are you, what do you know, and what do you intend by bringing me here?"
He loosened the grip to let him speak.
"Skywalker," the boy said.
Vader threw him into the viewport. The whipcrack of his skull against transparisteel was also satisfying. He slid down onto the console, several functions of the ship whirring into action as he landed on them.
A cool breeze blew through the cockpit—increased circulation. He'd opened the vents, and the eddies blew his hair back from his face, so that his eyes were clear and uncovered when he locked them on Vader's mask and finished, "Luke Skywalker."
Vader's fist froze halfway to closing.
"I'm—not a Jedi." He coughed; Vader could see the muscles in his throat spasming from here. "Don't know what that is."
Vader lifted a finger. "You—"
"Thought you were my father." Luke's eyes spilled fresh tears down his cheek. Down his soft, ruined cheek. "Must've been wrong."
When Vader reached out to connect to that Force presence, as powerful as any Jedi's but—now—blaringly obviously untrained, he felt it settle somewhere in his chest. Pain followed. Pain, he was used to, but not this pain.
"You are Anakin Skywalker's son," Vader said.
"Overheard my aunt and uncle saying you were… him. Empire's evil. Like Hutts. Thought you'd be… a slave again." His head lolled, the effort of keeping it up clearly gargantuan. "Didn't realise you'd be a Hutt."
"What do you mean by that?" Vader snapped. Luke flinched. "I am here to negotiate with Jabba, to destroy him if necessary—"
"I came to save you," Luke muttered. "Didn't—didn't even let me explain…"
"You were a stowaway on my ship! What sort of naïve, ignorant child are you? Have you no concept of danger? Of violence?"
"Didn't expect a Hutt," Luke muttered again. "Seen them get violent, but—"
"I am not a Hutt!"
Luke didn't respond—because he didn't want to, or because he couldn't, Vader didn't know. He just kept looking up at Vader through pale lashes, head lolling without the strength to be lifted.
"Thought you were my father," he said.
"I am your father."
Luke closed his eyes, then. A thin wisp of a sigh wheezed from his lips. "Oh."
Vader stormed up and towered over him. "You are a fool," he hissed. His finger sprang out to jab in his face. "You—"
Luke flinched and turned his face away.
Vader's tirade stumbled to a halt.
"Maybe," Luke mumbled. "Dunno what I was thinking."
But Vader knew what Luke was thinking. It was written into Luke's thoughts, projected into his mind like a slide-by-slide presentation. It was something that Vader would never, ever have considered. He had never thought he'd get away without being caught. He'd just trusted his father, a man he loved without knowing him, not to hurt him.
He'd had no idea how capable his father was of violence. Now, though…
Now he knew it intimately.
"You require medical assistance," Vader said awkwardly.
Luke coughed. "Probably can't afford it."
"I will provide it."
"You don't have to. I…" His heart was audibly breaking. "I get it."
"You most certainly do not."
"I—"
"You do not have a choice." Vader moved for the comlink set into the console and typed in the frequency for his personal medic on the Devastator. "You will require urgent attention if you are to be saved."
Luke snorted. "I came here… to save you."
"You cannot save me, Luke," Vader said. "What was done to me, and what I have done, is written in blood. Anakin Skywalker is dead. You are not."
Luke cracked his eye open to peer at Vader for a moment, just as his personal medic responded. "No," he said, almost with amusement. "I'm not."
Vader wouldn't realise what that meant until later.
Later, when they returned to the Devastator, and Vader realised a few minutes into Luke's surgery that he had to get painkillers or anaesthetics for Luke, because Vader's own droids were not equipped to provide them. He ran for the first time in over a decade, because he could not interrupt the surgery, but Luke was screaming, screaming, screaming, and the sound tattooed itself on his eardrums. He heard it even as he sat in the chair beside Luke in the medbay and watched his sleeping son.
Anakin Skywalker was dead. He had long since been exposed to the violence of the galaxy, the betrayal it was capable of, and he had returned it tenfold.
But because of him, Luke Skywalker was not.
Vader had long since lost any innocence. He had torn it from the hearts of civilians in his campaigns. He had beaten a lot of Luke's out of him, as well. But not all of it.
Protecting someone had never been something Vader cared about. Even the Empire was not something Vader protected; it was something he served. But after all he had done, Vader would crawl through another universe of torment to sit at his son's bedside and listen to the beep, beep, beep of the heart monitor assure him that he still lived.
Luke had wanted to bring him home. He had succeeded in that, at least.