Active Headcanons: Trans Skywalker twins, Autistic Force-sensitives

Active AUs: Only the events of the story

Trigger Warnings: mentions of child abuse,

Luke's comm buzzed, and he sighed happily, setting aside his freshly-completed lightsaber. Probably Leia. Checking on him for the thousandth time. He shook his head at the repeated calls, but had to admit to himself that it was a relief to be distracted from the doubts pushing to escape his head.

He'd requested this time uninterrupted though, he thought, lifting the comm and checking its time display. He'd wanted to put his lightsaber together in peace. It was a lengthy and delicate process, and he'd decided that if anything interrupted him, he'd start again for good measure.

Not that it mattered, now that he'd completed it, but…

"Luke."

It was a harsher greeting than she usually chose, but he smiled nonetheless. "Hi, Leia, I-,"

"We have Vader."

"You what?"

Luke scrambled for his lightsaber again, taking a mental inventory of the things he'd have to grab from Ben's home before he left. He wasn't ready to face Vader again, he knew. He'd barely escaped their last encounter alive, and if Vader was already with Leia, he'd certainly have the advantage.

"He's demanding to speak to you," Leia said, and Luke heard her voice strain with buried emotion, and looked back at her to see that she was struggling to look reassuring. "But he doesn't pose a threat."

"What happened?" Luke asked, letting himself sink fully back to the floor, huddling closer to the comm, pleading with his friend to give him good news.

"He just handed himself over." She looked apologetic, overworked, and exhausted, and Luke felt a little stab of guilt that he had come to the privacy of Ben's home and left her to grapple with the Empire on her own. "He knew where we were, Luke. He just showed up in the hanger in a stolen ship. I thought we were all dead."

"Leia," Luke offered weakly, reaching out uselessly for the holoprojector, as if he could really grip her shoulder. Accompanying the useless stretch, he reached out in the Force, dropping Tatooine away behind him as he reached for her familiar presence, and brushed against it.

Feeling her lean into him, allowing him to lift some weight from her shoulders, he sighed. This had been one of the only personal benefits to learning to access the Force. For the most part, it had only done him harm, but as he felt her mirror his breath, he caressed her presence, glad of the closeness it had allowed them.

The warmth of the desert around him was familiar, and having her close was right, and he needed to take just a moment to prepare for seeing his father again.

She sighed, and he felt her jerk away from his comfort. "He wants to comm you."

He groaned in return, looking at the holo of his friend in distress. He wasn't interested in trading her familiar face for the Sith's mask, but he nodded tiredly.

"Luke, I know you don't want to speak to him. I know what he did to you."

She was trying to empathize for him, and he managed a little smile. She always tried to ensure he didn't feel that she thought his pain was somehow less than hers, even though it was.

"What he did to your family," she added, and he felt his heart ache.

"Leia," he began, before the words died in his throat, and he cast his gaze aside.

"He's a monster," she agreed softly, and now it was her presence that reached for his. "I know. But you're strong enough for this. You'd make your father proud."

She was smiling, and for a second, the ache in his heart threatened to tear him away from her, to throw up a new wall between their souls. He'd hidden it this long, and he wanted to continue to ignore the truth, and let her believe that Anakin had been a good man who had died for the good of the galaxy.

"I wouldn't." He hesitated, feeling his throat close, "I mean… I don't."

He barely whispered it, his gaze falling to his lap.

"What?" Her voice was concerned, but already she was leaning away from him. As if she could sense the truth, and was already repulsed by it.

"He wouldn't be proud of me," Luke said, struggling to keep his voice level. "I know, because he's not. Because he's Vader."

He'd imagined telling her a thousand times. Ever since he'd found out the truth, he had rehearsed this conversation in his mind in every quiet moment. He'd tried to decide when it would be least painful for her, but his conclusion had been that it could only be once Vader was dead, and even then, only if he had been the one to kill him.

He'd tried not to think of his own comfort in that scenario, committing himself to it. If he'd paused to think about it, he would have said that this was less painful. His father was alive, was in Alliance custody! It was an unlikely opportunity.

But it hurt more than he would have expected.

It would have been easier, he suspected, if they had not just been so intimately linked, and their emotions had not been quick to flow back and forth.

As it was, her shock pervaded his senses, blocking out Ben's hut, and his freshly completed lightsaber, and even the thought of seeing his father again.

"It's got to be why he's asking to see me," he continued, hoping that rationalizing it would ease the pain.

"I thought…" Leia whispered, pressing her hand to her forehead, and turning away, "Because you're a Jedi..."

"It's probably partially that, too," he hurried to reassure. It was easier to manage this if he told himself that he was unrelated to the problem and this was only a strange quirk of their enemy, not the bond he'd wished for since birth. "He knows more about me than most other agents, and maybe he thinks I'll go easy on him."

"Will you?"

The look wasn't exactly accusatory. It was only fearful, and anxious, and everything he didn't associate her with.

"I'll try not to," he promised. "Leia, I… It's still me. I'm still Luke. But that doesn't mean I won't; it might mean the opposite. You know how much he's meant to me." He pushed his hand through his hair, casting his gaze to the floor before capturing a fistful of his bangs. "I only… I only found out at Bespin."

"I'm sorry."

His stomach seemed to turn over, and he forced himself to release his hair, his hand slipping back to his lap. "I'm sorry too. I know what he's done to all of us, I haven't forgotten."

"He nearly killed you at Bespin."

His arm throbbed suddenly, and he swallowed roughly, nodding. He'd have liked to forget that, going into this. He didn't want anything to set Vader on his guard, which meant that he would need to be as calm as possible.

"I don't want to ask you to do anything you're not ready for," she said finally.

Luke laughed roughly, "It doesn't look like I've got that much of a choice, if he's insisting!"

Her frown deepened, and he struggled to regain his composure, knowing that his frantic laughter had unnerved her. "I'll be alright, Leia."

She sighed, bending her head until he could only see her crown, her braids starting to slip from their stylings as the day wore on.

"I love you," she croaked.

He smiled sadly, reaching out to her again in an offer of comfort. It was hard for her to think about Vader, after all he had done, and he wished she hadn't been Vader's first point of contact. "I love you, too, Lei."

She gave a ragged chuckle, and Luke watched as she swatted blindly at the comm, missing her first attempt, before succeeding. For a moment, her image was replaced with static, before it vanished altogether.

"Luke."

The voice scratched its way into his head, and burrowed into his bones, infecting him with an icy cold. He imagined he could feel it eating at the healing stump of his arm, and threatening to shake loose the prosthetic. Perhaps it would eat away the very fabric of his being, and unmake him.

He didn't want to answer. He wanted to sit there, perfectly still, and wait for Vader to speak again, and somehow fix it. Take back what he had done to him, even take back that slim chance of having a parent.

He took a breath, and steeled himself. This wasn't the time to fall apart.

"Vader."

Maybe it would have been right to greet him as 'father', a part of Luke whispered. They could have avoided some explaining, and cut to the chase. Perhaps there would even have been some flicker of emotional response to the word.

Vader didn't answer, and Luke ached, struggling to breathe normally. He must have displeased his father, he thought, and now his whole body was alight, from his arm to the thin scars his uncle had left on his back. He needed a distraction, something else to say, anything to break the silence.

"Why can't I see you?" he asked. There was a quality to his voice of a man close to tears, almost choking, but he did what he could to balance it.

Slowly, a single, metal fingertip moved into the view of the receiver. Its motion spoke of someone weakened, the intake almost out of their reach.

"Surely you didn't believe I was able to move," Vader said, a hint of tired amusement in his tone.

The finger waved slightly for a moment, before sinking back out of the camera's range.

"Your friends are not stupid, child." Vader said, before Luke sensed a flicker of alarm from him, enough to set him reaching for his weapon again. "Are they aware?"

Luke let out an unsteady breath, letting his saber slip back to the floor. "Leia is."

"The princess," Vader answered. Again, silence stretched, and Luke began to fidget, wishing he could feel safe in the knowledge that he was systems away from his father. But instead, he was uncertain about Vader's containment, and his attention was so fully focused on their conversation that he could hardly see the dark basement he sat in.

It had seemed comfortable, cool, and secluded when he had come down, but now he felt as if Ben's remote home was only the perfect place to be ambushed.

"Can you see me?" he asked finally.

"Hardly."

Luke sighed, burying his face in his hands. "What did you need to talk to me for?"

"I've given myself up," the Sith said, before drawing another long, rattling breath. "I have no interest in serving the Emperor, as long as you live." He paused for a time. "I wanted to ensure you knew."

Luke gaped. "So, what now? You're a prisoner, and you just had to call me?"

"My son?" Vader asked. A swell of exhaustion swept over Luke, as if the Sith shared the same room. It was unnerving how powerful Vader's presence was, even bound a galaxy away. "Perhaps it is absurd. But your friends will benefit from the information I have, and if you wish…" The words trailed off, and Luke didn't dare interrupt. "I'm the reason you can never know her, but I would not leave you with no knowledge of your mother."

His father may as well have taken a blade to his chest.

Luke took a ragged breath and stared wildly at the empty hologram. He'd forgotten about his mother in the rush and terror of discovering his father. She had always been a mystery to him, his aunt and uncle knowing nigh-on nothing about her. She had been an offworlder, rich enough to own an enormous starship with which she had returned his father to Tatooine.

One day, she had descended into the Lars's lives, and the next, had vanished again, taking Anakin with her. They hadn't heard from her again, until her baby had been brought back, an orphan.

"She does not deserve to be overshadowed by whatever Kenobi told you of me."

"What was her name?" Luke asked, his voice trembling, before he scrambled to collect the things sitting within reach of himself, and continued. "I'm coming back. To the Alliance. I'm done out here, I'll come back when Lando is in position."

"Padmé," Vader answered, and as he began to inhale, Luke hurriedly deactivated the comm.

He didn't want to hear anything else his father had to say until they could have a full conversation. For now, he only wanted his mother's name to mull over on the flight back.