Chapter 2
Luke couldn't feel anything.
Surroundings floated around him in globs of pale light and grainy color. There were no words, no sounds, just the mirage of life behind his eyelids.
His mind acted like a desperate pair of hands, groping for something, anything to hold onto that would remind him of reality. Thoughts shifted through the sands of unconsciousness until one floated to the surface.
Open your eyes, Luke.
Blue eyes opened.
He saw but did not understand.
What were those objects?
Chair. Floor. Hands.
More words flooded back to his grasping brain.
Han. Leia. Chewbacca. Lights.
He wanted to reach out, for even though his brain was sluggish he could sense the worry written on his friend's faces. In unison the three held grim frowns. Frowning at him.
His legs were the next movement he gained use of. He managed to steadily bend and point his aching toes. His hearing slowly returned next. Soft voices surrounded him.
"Luke, talk to us."
"What's going on, kid? Luke?"
"I'm calling the medics on ground. Something is wrong."
"Arrrhggh!"
They overwhelmed him.
Sinking lower, Luke curled up his legs and scrunched up his face, working to block out the noises he had thought he wanted to hear. Wherever he had come from—the oblivion—was warm, and he remembered that smell—like the best vase on his Aunt's table, or Leia's perfume. He choked now; his surroundings smelled like…
Piss.
Luke gained the use of his arms just in time to prop himself up and groan. The sudden movement made the three sets of worried hands grab onto him, push him back to lying down.
He had wet himself. As if he was three years old again.
His face flushed.
"Shh, Luke. It's okay. Everything is going to be fine. We have a medical droid charging. Just stay put, and try not to move," Leia said. She held the side of his face, him barely feeling her finger pads rest against his feverish skin. Han's hands were less gentle, calloused palms against his shoulders.
"Please." Luke felt anger, somewhere near his solar plexus, but his voice cracked, sounding pained and desperate. It felt as though he has swallowed molten glass shards. He wanted privacy, he wanted a change of clothes, or even just to move out of the wet, ammonia-smelling puddle would be enough for now. He looked desperately from Chewie to Han, Han to Leia. His friends only stood there, wide-eyed and loudly protective.
The anger took hold, blossomed.
Luke cried out, twisting in their grips. "Please, I just want to be alone."
Han only adjusted his grip pinning him to the floor. "Listen here kid, we're trying to help—"
Leia scolded him. "Be gentle, Han!"
"He's just going to hurt himself more if he gets up!" Han shot back, his sweaty palms still pressing him down. "Look, Luke, we're not going anywhere. Something is seriously wrong—"
"Han," Leia cut him off again.
A clicking noise came from behind him. More words started to fill his once empty brain.
Endor. Jedi. The Force. Vader.
Vader's death.
The last thing Luke could remember was his father's face, and his words:
"Don't be afraid, my son."
Luke let himself untense, eyes sliding closed, trying to bring this memory close to the surface of his chiaroscuro consciousness. His father's face appeared, all pale and broken and scabbed beyond recognition: the most comforting face he had ever seen.
Han lessened his grip, taking a step back. "There, kid. That's more like it."
A burst of cold stung the side of Luke's neck, and he jerked out of Han's hands. A distinct numbness followed.
No. No, no no.
His eyes found Leia's.
He didn't have time to be drugged—to be drifting out of one conversation only to find he had drifted through a day, two days. He didn't want what was left of his energy to be drained away, his pool of Light dim and simmering beneath the drug's effects.
"Stim or sedative?" Luke asked hoarsely.
"We're almost there." Leia's words.
"Was it a stim or a sedative?" he demanded. "Please, Leia, I—" His voice broke again, and he was left staring into his sisters deep brown eyes. His sister, who held a hypospray in her hand. It was trembling slightly, her lips pursed tight.
"Pain blocker. There's not much else I can do for... for all your injuries."
Luke swallowed hard. Reaching inward, he tried to catalogue where the bright burn of agony stemmed from, finding he couldn't. Ben would have been able to pinpoint it, speaking the slightly cryptic language he tended to use whenever he told him about the "Jedi way." He'd tell him to sort through his emotions, search for his pain and let it swim to the top of his consciousness.
Or, Luke thought as he craned his neck. Or I look for myself.
Han was at his forehead is seconds. "Hey, hey, hotshot. We don't have a tyrant to kill or a battle station to destroy right now. Just rest. We're almost to Endor, kid."
"I'm cold," Luke only half-lied. "I-Is there a blanket?"
His anger was already wearing thin, leaving only bone-weary tiredness in its wake. He was cold—cold and wet—and miserably achy and filled to the brim with lead. The world went from red to a dismal gray in a shockingly short amount of time.
Luke watched Han hesitate, then nod once. "Okay. Yeah, okay, Luke."
He walked out of Luke's line of sight.
Leia sat down on his left, her hand slipping into Luke's, feeling the notch where his lightsaber had begun to make a permanent callous patch. In her pulse, he felt her anxiety; in breath he sensed her anger. She fiddled with his hair just above his ear, and he turned his face away.
The pain blocker was starting to weigh him down.
Leia pressed his hand gingerly to her lips. "I'm sorry," she whispered into his knuckles. Even that seemed unusually abrasive.
Luke lifted his head, successfully if slowly, ignoring her unfounded apology.
His chest was bare, with gauze and thin tan bandages as his only covering, though the ship's first aid seemed to have run out before they finished. As his eyes flicked over his ribs and abdomen, down to his naked legs he found harsh scratches and burns pocking his figure. His knees were black and blue, scrubbed clean from debris that left their indents in his skin. Lifting a heavy hand he found his arms to be in the same condition. Working to turn his head, Luke saw across his left bicep laid a single bacta patch, though it didn't nearly protect the length of the wound. Wincing, he realized it must snake up the entirety of his neck.
"I should have been there."
"It's not your fault," Luke croaked.
There was a beat. "How's the pain?" Leia asked. Luke shook his head carefully, as to not upset his carefully healing wound. "Good."
"Is-is there anything for the smell?" Luke blushed as he said it, sure that Han would be laughing from wherever he was. Against his intuition, there was silence.
Leia got up, replacing his hand at his side. And he was left alone.
What had happened between the throne room and here, as he lay on the floor in the cramped medbay of a ship? His father's warning hadn't done him much good, seeing as now that he had started, he couldn't stop shaking. Luke Skywalker—son of Lord Vader, Jedi Knight—laid in his own mess and did not even have the strength get up. He was not strong, not heroic, and definitely not willing to admit that he was alight with pain from every limb, no matter the pain blocker injected.
"Luke?" Leia asked, grappling for Luke's spacey attention. "Chewie's lifting you up for a few seconds while I… clean you up."
Luke wanted to argue back. Instead, as the Wookiee picked him up, he buried his face in Chewie's soft neck fur and cried. He cried for Vader, for not being strong enough to fulfill his father's last words. He cried for the absolute ache he had deep in his bones, and for his friends' creeping anxious auras. He cried for Ben, because Ben would have been so disappointed in his lack of strength.
Chewie didn't know why he cried, but he held the boy tighter to his chest and murmured a low, comforting rumble.
He was aware of a warm cloth sweeping over his legs and back, but lacked the energy to find out who it was. After that, a thin blanket was wrapped around his trembling shoulders, ending with a soft squeeze to his bicep. Luke resisted the urge to yelp at the tremor it sent up his arm.
Half-aware, he was placed onto a soft-pillowed cot. A medical droid stood over him, emotionless yellow eyes scanning his nearly-naked body. Instinctively, Luke tried to pull the blanket tighter around him.
The droid's examination whirred to a stop before it spewed its findings out in an androgynous droll. "Patient, male, twenty-three years of age. In considerable disrepair to unknown computed cause," the medical droid recited. Luke could have sworn at the last sentence he glared at Han. "Is there any other data you wish to input, so that I may have a greater success in diagnosing the patient?"
Han snarled. "I don't trust you more than a Hutt."
The droid bristled. "Very well. According to my data collected and available to me, it seems as though patient, male, twenty-three years of age is in the postictal stage of a seizure."
"Seizure?" Leia breathed, carefully gauging her reaction.
"Caused by massive electrical input in an unprepared state."
"That emperor piece of chisszk—"
The medical droid repeated his sentences like a mantra. "Caused by massive electrical input in an unprepared state. Of my database, I suspect—"
Han snorted. "Suspect? I'll tell you who the most likely suspect is—that son of a blaster Vader is who it was."
Leia rubbed a hand over her mouth. "We should have forced him to take one of us with him."
"And what? Been shot up with lightning too?"
"At least we would have been there! We could have done something!"
"We'd both have been dead in seconds, you know that Princess. Luke's a Jedi who's got—"
"Enough!" Luke rasped over the heated argument.
The room quieted for a breath, enough for Luke to wheeze out a gasping breath, clutching for his ribs with his aching arms.
Leia squeezed her hand back into his as he rode out the pain.
When he found he could uncurl himself by a fraction, all beings present seemed to release a collective breath.
"You good, hotshot?"
"Nhh," Luke hissed, finding his voice had been reduced to scratchy nothingness. When he opened his mouth again not a sound came out.
The droid droned over top of the hollow feeling in Luke's gut. "The only course of action I see fitting to the current situation is seeking the nearest medical facility. I am an emergency first responder, and am not qualified for—"
"Save it, scrap metal," Han said. "We're on route now, I'm pushing her as fast as I can in the shape she's in."
The droid rattled off more prescribed pain blockers and their dosages, asking for his allergen list. Luke felt his stomach plummet as the injections were prepared, along with an IV line for fluids.
And, Force, it wasn't Vader's fault.
As if it was an image glued behind his eyelids, Luke saw the Emperor's hands contort as the white hot lightning came spilling forth, igniting Luke's insides and melting away every thought but pain.
He felt the pinch as the IV port was inserted into the crook of his elbow.
Vader was innocent, Luke thought suddenly, and while the words weren't true in every sense, they resonated deep inside him. His father, someone he had looked up to since he was a youngling unknowing of his heritage, had overthrown an empire to save him.
Luke was just the weak remnant of a greater past.
Luke's emotions coasted fast from one to another, but in the end, he was left only with exhaustion. He was only Luke Skywalker, the boy from Tatooine who lost so many family members and friends in the last four years of his life.
As his usual paranoia of falling asleep melted away behind a fog of medication, Luke found himself squeezing Leia's hand once again.
Three squeezes. I love you.
She returned the words with a single kiss on his pounding forehead.
Before the pressure valve released in the first hypo, Luke was already in the clutches of sleep. The ache that plagued him made his eyelids heavy, and his body sagged into the cot.