Identity Crisis
"...Luke?"
His son's name escaped Darth Vader's cracked lips before his eyes even opened. One eye opened first and he was met with the familiar sight of the inside of his oxygen chamber. He meditated there, and he slept there. But something had woken him up, and he knew it had to do with his son, and the bond they shared through the Force.
He knew a few things it was not. It had not been Luke reaching out to him, not consciously anyway. It hadn't been Luke reaching to him because he was in trouble. No, there was no sensation of danger in the Force...not danger, but there was something that Luke was distressed about. Enough so that he didn't even seem to be aware that his shields were down.
A father's work was never done.
Groggily, Vader had his mask and helmet reattached, and exited his chamber to see what was going on with his teenage son.
Luke's room was across the hallway and several doors up from his own quarters. Using the Force to override the control panel, the door slid open and he entered his son's room, and was not entirely surprised to see his 17-year-old son, Luke was standing in the middle of the room, still dressed, though the boy definitely looked surprised to see him.
"Father!" Luke couldn't conceal his shock, "what's going on?"
"That's what I was hoping you could tell me," Vader answered as he stepped further into the room.
He didn't miss a slight look of panic in Luke's eyes as he considered his options.
"I didn't mean to wake you up," the boy insisted.
"Be that as it may," Vader responded, "Here I am. So why don't you tell me what is troubling you?"
Luke looked like he was seriously contemplating it, but something was holding him back.
"I don't know," he replied.
He probably should've figured it wouldn't be anything easy.
His mind started working backwards, remembering the events of the last few days to see if he could pick up on any likely culprits.
"Is this about that girl you've been seeing?"
"Um..." Luke looked towards the floor for a second before looking up at his father again, "sort of...maybe...it..." a look of disappointment formed on his face, "you don't get it."
"Not yet," Vader answered as he found a chair to sit on, "just start where you can."
Obviously that was easier said than done. Luke looked completely lost for a few seconds before he finally answered, "Well...Kari and I have been out a few times, and...the other night...it, I...we..."
A particular sensation of panic hit the dark lord through their bond.
"Something happened," he hazarded a guess.
"No," Luke shook his head. "Well, not really anyway..."
Behind his mask, Vader felt one eye rolling in mild frustration. Slowly they were getting closer to whatever it was, but he still felt lost on the subject.
Luke sensed his father's irritation and tried to get to the point. "We...broke up."
That would explain why he was upset, but not why he was having so much trouble explaining it.
"Why?" Vader asked, hoping that answer would get him closer to the real issue.
Luke didn't answer. He was quiet and particularly somber looking for several seconds before he finally told his father, "I think...something's wrong with me."
Well he wasn't expecting that as an answer.
"What do you mean?" Vader asked.
Luke looked just as confused as he felt.
"That's the thing...it doesn't feel like anything's wrong with me...but I think there is."
"What?" Vader asked simply.
"Well...we'd gone to see a holo film the other night, and after that we...came back here...you were out."
He remembered, he'd been at a meeting with other members of the Empire and hadn't returned home until long after Luke was in bed.
Oh dear.
"What happened?"
His vocoder made it virtually impossible for most verbal cues to work their way through, but on the other side of the mask, he'd asked the question as softly as possible. There was no judgment in the two words, no preconceived insinuations, just a genuine curiosity, and the unspoken permission for his son to fully confide in him. All the while he reminded himself that things happened when teenagers were alone together, it was only natural, it was a part of life as children started to become adults, and Luke was certainly at that age, in fact Vader was actually surprised it had taken this long. Assuming it had taken that long anyway. Luke had been very good over the years at shielding most of his private thoughts, Vader relied heavily on the boy's willingness to tell him about what was going on in his daily life and who was a part of it, and in return he had done his best to let his son know he could confide in his father about anything, however uncomfortable it was to talk about. Luke had actually offered very few names and very little details since he had started dating, he kept most of those facts to himself. Vader understood the boy had a right to privacy, and to respect someone else's privacy, he only hoped that Luke hadn't gotten in over his head on some such 'private' matter.
"We..." Luke started, then stopped as if he'd thought better of it, then he resumed, "we started kissing...or...I guess more to the point, she kissed me...an-n-nd...I didn't want to...but I thought if we did that maybe it would change something, but it didn't."
"I'm afraid I don't understand," his father told him.
"I knew you wouldn't," Luke said.
It would've been very easy to come out as an accusation, but there was no hostility in Luke's words, only a trace of disappointment, and frustration at himself for not being able to explain himself better.
"Luke," Vader raised a gloved hand and curled the durasteel fingers, "come over here."
Luke looked puzzled but did as he was told.
The same leather clad hand grabbed his, as softly as was possible, and instincts replacing conscious decisions, he pulled Luke to sit across his lap like he had many times when he was a little boy. This way they were at least able to look one another in the eyes.
"Now tell me what happened," Vader gently prodded.
"I did," Luke replied, sounding slightly confused. "We broke up, after we got into a fight because I didn't want to kiss her. I knew I didn't want to, but I thought maybe if I actually did it, that something would change, but nothing did." He sighed in frustration, "I really liked her, Father. I liked being with her...but I'm just not...I..."
Absently, Luke's hands raised to cover his face.
Vader could feel through their bond how difficult this was for Luke. He patted his son's shoulder and assured him, "You can tell me anything, Luke."
"I'm trying, but you're not going to get it," Luke told him. "When you told me about sex, I accepted that was part of life, and I figured when I got older it would make more sense and I'd find a girl that I wanted to...do that with...remember, Father? I asked you how you know when you've found the right person, and you said when I was older I would just know, you said to trust my instincts...and I've been trying to do just that, but my instincts are telling me that...I don't want to...with anyone."
The red unblinking lenses stared at him. One leather clad hand reached up and calmly stroked over the top of Luke's hair.
"I mean I thought about it, but not enough that I'd actually want to do it, it...it's awkward when I try to imagine actually doing that with someone...and for a long time I thought it was just because..."
Even with everything permanently tinted red, Vader could still see Luke's face turning a brighter shade as he grappled with the embarrassment of this conversation.
To an extent he thought he understood. Luke had gone through a particularly rough ugly quad duck phase once adolescence hit. Every day he'd found something new to hate about the way he looked. Many days had been a fight between father and son for Luke to even go to school. That had continued until Luke was 15 and he started to feel more comfortable in his changing body. That was also around the time he'd gotten his first girlfriend, which had lasted about three weeks and had never been serious. And now he was starting to realize that Luke hadn't been shielding that part of his life from his father all these years, there just simply hadn't been anyone in Luke's life, least of all none that he hadn't known about.
"Umm..." Luke closed his eyes for a second and ran the back of his hand across his mouth, visibly struggling to continue, "a couple years ago at school, I heard some of the other kids talking about somebody has to have sex first because they said nothing would ruin the experience more like two virgins who don't know what they're doing, that the whole thing would be so awkward and painful and humiliating, that they'd never get past it." Now through the red lenses, Luke appeared to be losing the color in his face. "And then I started thinking what if I meet a girl who has, and then she'd know that I'm not any good at it? Or...what if she laughed at me because I don't look like the other guys? And for a long time I thought that that put me off of the whole idea. But then a lot of other thoughts occurred to me. I see everybody at school pairing up, and it's like one day you have a best friend, and the next day you forget about them because you have a girlfriend. And so then I started thinking...what if you married your best friend? That way you wouldn't have to lose them. But the more I thought about it, that seemed like an awful idea too, because what if you broke up? Then you wouldn't even be friends anymore, because that would be too awkward..."
"Breathe, Luke," Vader softly patted his son on the shoulders, as the boy grew increasingly upset the more he tried to explain. "Calm down...go on..."
"Well I just had all these thoughts about why...it just seemed that being in a relationship...having sex with someone...it just seemed like more trouble than it was worth." Something new seemed to occur to the boy and his eyes got big and his voice climbed a couple octaves as he suddenly threw out, "Father, do you know how common space herpes is getting? There are more cases every year!"
Behind his mask, too low for the vocoder to pick up, Vader almost laughed. Not because there was anything funny about this conversation, there really wasn't. It was just that Luke had always been able to get worked up about so many things, and there was just something in the way he honestly reacted to them that was amusing to his father. He'd been the same way as a small child, his eyes would get large and his voice would get higher the more excited he got about something that he would randomly bring up, from his perspective it was just, and he knew Luke would not appreciate hearing it, adorable. He understood why so many parents had trouble letting go of their children, they grew up, they became adults themselves, with lives of their own, but no matter how old they got, they were still your children. It wouldn't matter what Luke did, in Vader's eyes he would always be his little boy.
"Anyway," Luke huffed, "for a long time I just thought it was all these things that made me not want to. I kept figuring when I got older, it would just happen, that it would occur naturally, that I would just know when I wanted to. And now I'm thinking that that, was all just a coincidence, or maybe not entirely, but maybe not a real motivating factor. I...just can't see myself, ever, wanting to have sex with a woman, Father. I...the girls I've been with, I've never been tempted...I never even thought about it. They did, they wanted to...Kari and I didn't break up because I didn't want to kiss her, we got into a fight about that, we broke up because she wanted us to sleep together...and I didn't, and I told her that, and she stormed out of here. Father...this isn't just a phase...this is who I am...and the thing is, I don't feel like there's anything wrong with it."
"There isn't."
Luke did a double take and cocked his head to the side, his eyes nearly doubled in size when he heard that.
"You are a very smart child, Luke," Vader told his son. "I did teach you to trust your instincts, and you've always followed them. There is nothing wrong with not wanting to be in a relationship...there are however, many things wrong with rushing into one you're not prepared for, or that you're not dedicated to."
"But everybody else is with someone, Father, doesn't that mean there's something wrong with me?" Luke asked.
Vader paused before answering. "You said you think something is wrong with you."
Luke nodded. "There has to be, doesn't there?"
"If you don't feel like anything is wrong, there is nothing wrong," Vader answered simply. "You would know more than anyone."
"But there must be," Luke said. "Because at this rate, I'm never going to get married, I'm never going to have kids, which means you'll never have any grandchildren, and the Skywalker bloodline is going to die out with me."
Aha. Now they were getting at the real problem.
"Is that what's troubling you?" Vader asked.
"I know it's what I'm supposed to do," Luke said, "but I just don't think I can do it...I don't want to do it...I'm sorry, Father."
Well this was certainly an unexpected turn in the conversation.
It was also a punch in the proverbial gut as he saw through the redness, Luke's face getting flushed again, coinciding perfectly with the tears starting to build up in his eyes, and the ones audibly swelling in his throat as he spoke.
"Luke, I never said you had to get married."
"But it's what I'm supposed to do," Luke replied with a heaving breath, "everybody does, and if you don't...everybody acts like there's something wrong with you. Everybody wants to know why you don't. And they're never satisfied with the truth, that you're just not interested. They think there's another reason, and they never let up."
An extra piece to the puzzle.
"Someone has been bothering you about this?" Vader wanted to know, feeling all the same parental instincts kick in from when Luke was a boy and came home crying because an older boy tormented him.
"Do you have any idea what school's like?" Luke asked. "Everybody's bragging about who they've been with, and how many, and if you don't take part in it, you're a target because you're the problem."
His first instinct was to ask who, unfortunately Vader had sense enough to know this problem was more than one or two isolated instances.
Luke didn't notice the shift in his father's mood.
"Everybody thinks they're doing me a favor by offering to set me up with someone just so I can get it over with," Luke told him. "Nobody listens when I tell them I'm not interested."
Luke dropped his head on his father's armored shoulder.
"Father, why do people act like you're diseased when you aren't bothering anybody and just want to be left alone?"
He felt the comforting if not slightly rough sensation of his father's durasteel hand patting the top of his head.
"I can't answer that, Luke. I can only speak from my own experience. All I know is the day I met your mother, the day I married your mother, that was when my life became complete. Anyone who has a good marriage hopes their children will grow up to be as fortunate as they were."
Luke picked his head up and looked at the red lenses.
"That's just it...I always thought I wanted what you and Mother had...I mean...I like girls, Father, I'm attracted to them...but I don't want to have sex with them. Is that really so horrible?"
That question stung the dark lord in the chest like a blaster bolt. There were few things more painful as a parent than to have your child asking what was wrong with them when nothing was.
"There is nothing wrong with it, Luke, and there is nothing wrong with you," he tried to assure his son. "People simply don't know how to react to someone who isn't like them."
"Why?" Luke asked, pressing his cheek against his father's shoulder armor again. "They're the ones in relationships and their lives are supposed to be complete because of it, so how do they find all this time to harass me about not wanting one?"
He wanted to laugh. That was an unintentionally clever observation on his son's part.
"I am sorry you've had to go through all of this alone, Luke. Why didn't you tell me what was going on?"
"Because there's nothing you can do about it," Luke said. "Apparently the problem is me. The thing is I don't feel like it's a problem, but everybody else does."
"I did not raise you to concern yourself with what everybody else is doing," Vader reminded him.
"I know," Luke replied, "and I try not to, but it's not always easy."
"I know," his father responded as he held his son tighter against him.
"Maybe it's stupid," Luke said, the tears still audible in his voice though it was stronger now, "but I'm satisfied with my day-to-day life. I'm...happy with the way my life is. I don't feel like I'm missing anything."
"You would know if you were," Vader told him.
Luke met the gaze of the unblinking red lenses. "But I feel guilty because of what it means for you. I couldn't care less what everybody else thinks, but I don't want to disappoint you."
Ouch. He hadn't seen that one coming.
"Luke, there's nothing you could ever do to disappoint me. You know that."
"But I'm supposed to marry a girl, have kids, continue our family name."
Vader was starting to wonder if this was his fault, if all those years back when Luke was a child he should've explained that these things were not mandatory. The problem, he knew as he futilely tried to sigh, was nobody thought about that, simply because it was naturally assumed of all people, barring specific reasons, like being a Jedi which didn't allow for one to marry, to have children, something he'd never agreed with, and was thankful he hadn't listened to the people who taught him that.
Luke's voice drew him out of his thoughts.
"It's not fair to you if I don't."
"To...me?"
Luke looked at him. "It's my job to make sure our bloodline is continued. I was the first free Skywalker born in our family, it can't die out now."
Vader felt like a massive weight had been hurled against his chest as that sunk in.
"Luke, you're the only thing that's ever mattered to me, and all I ever wanted was for you to be happy."
"But what about-"
"Listen to me," Vader cut him off, "now it's just possible that you haven't met the right person yet."
Luke shook his head, "You're not hearing me, I don't-"
"Let me finish," Vader told him. Luke's mouth closed. "It is possible. If that is true, you will know it when you meet someone. If there is a girl you're meant to be with, there is a good possibility it won't be anyone at your school, it could be someone you haven't even met yet. If however, that is not the case...it does not matter."
Luke looked at him uncertainly. "Really?"
"If not, you may prove better off than most people because it would mean you don't need another person to make you whole," Vader said. "You are already luckier than most that you know who you are, what you want out of life, and what you don't. That already puts you far above most people in the galaxy who spend a lifetime trying to find those answers."
Luke pursed his lips together and looked at his father sheepishly. "I wouldn't mind being married, having someone to spend my life with, and I want to have kids...I'd love to have the kind of life you and Mother had...but no girl's ever going to marry me once they know about me."
"You don't give yourself enough credit, Luke," his father told him. "Do you really believe you're the only person in the galaxy who feels this way?"
Luke's eyes got big again. "I hadn't really thought about it. I just know I'm the only one where I am."
"You are still young, Luke, I know this is an overwhelming time for you, but you must be patient with yourself. What is supposed to happen will happen when the time is right."
Luke sucked in a slow, uneasy breath. "I love you, Father."
He reached an arm around his father's armored shoulders and hugged him as tight as he could.
"I love you too, Luke. Never forget that."
Through their bond Vader could feel the weight this conversation, uncomfortable though it had been for both of them, had taken off of Luke. The boy dropped his head on Vader's shoulder, and within a couple minutes he was fast asleep.
Vader held Luke as he slept, much like he'd done when Luke was a small boy. It was a sensation he had dearly missed for many years, and he knew he would miss it completely when Luke finished growing and moved out and started his own life.
No parent ever wanted to hear anything was wrong with their child's life, and when they did, it was their natural instinct to want to fix whatever was troubling their child, and it was a hard lesson for the parents when they realized the problem was one they couldn't fix. The only thing harder was trying to convince their children that they were not the problem, that they were perfectly normal, even when it didn't feel that way.
Deep behind his chest plate, Vader's heart hurt for his son. It was already hard enough to be a teenager as it was, especially so close to adulthood, still so much a child with a child's brain that wasn't fully developed and had no idea what they were going to do. It was harder to be a teenager who had anything that made them any different from anyone else, because then they became an easy target for everyone else to wail on. They were like carnivores smelling blood, anything that made a child any different, they would settle for anything and everything they could find. Often it was things they couldn't help, trivial matters like their physical appearances, their names, hair color, eye color, skin color. Other things that they had no control over, the marital status of their parents, where they lived. And anything that made them different from the mold. Anyone who thought differently, acted differently, did anything differently from the rest. The way their brain was wired, what and who they were interested and were not interested in, if they were shy, if they were introverted, if they just wanted to be left alone, it was all used against them.
How ironic considering Luke was actually the kind of child most parents would kill for. His whole life he'd been polite, civil, considerate towards others, he didn't go looking for trouble, he was a little high spirited on most days, that was the worst of his traits. Respectful was a slur to adolescents, but that's what Luke had always been. Had he been like all the other kids at his school, Vader knew, even if he had had sexual relations with any of the girls he knew, he would've been too respectful to advertise it for anyone else to know. This little announcement...well, past the initial shock, if anything it would've made him an even more ideal son for anyone to have. There were too many young men in the galaxy who discarded girls, going through them like star systems in hyperspace. Too many who helped conceive babies they then refused to stay and raise, or have any part of their lives. That very idea always sent a cold chill through his own body, even now that most of it was replaced with durasteel prosthetics. He looked at the sleeping face of his son, and remembered it much smaller, younger, brighter eyed, so innocent and loving and happy, his work took him away from his family more than he'd liked, but he'd done his best to always be there for Luke when he was growing up, especially after Padme had died when Luke was nine. He couldn't imagine missing a single day of Luke's life, let alone the boy's entire existence. To know people like that existed in the universe made Vader want to track them all down and personally disembowel them for the pain and devastation they caused to so many innocent lives. He felt a certain amount of pride swelling in his chest to know that his son would never, could never be one of those people.
Vader held Luke while he slept for a few minutes more before standing up and carrying the teenager over to his bed. Luke was in a dead sleep and didn't respond whatsoever to his father easing him down against the pillows and pulling the covers up over him. He stood over his son and watched him as he slept, his breathing slow and rhythmic, and for the moment he didn't appear to have a care in the galaxy. As gently as possible, he patted Luke on the top of his head.
"Goodnight, my son," he said as he turned and headed towards the door.