Title: Ignite the Stars
Authors: rhonderoo and Jedi Trace
Timeframe: TESB, SOTE, ROTJ
Genre: Canon, drama, angst
Keywords: Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker
Summary: This ficlet is an introspective piece that interprets the events of the Original Trilogy as they may have happened in light of the Revenge of the Sith background.
Disclaimer: Thanks to George Lucas for these two wonderful characters and to Matthew Stover for enriching the character of the dark lord even further.
A/N: Thank you for reading! Feedback is appreciated.
"I care about this person, regardless of what it means to me. I will throw away everything that I have, … and throw away my life to save this person. And I'm going to do it because he has faith in me; he loves me despite all the horrible things I've done. I broke his mother's heart, but he still cares about me and I can't let that die." - George Lucas on Anakin Skywalker's feelings about his son, Making of Revenge of the Sith, 2005
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"I love you, Anakin. I am yours, in life, and in death, wherever you go, what ever you do, we will always be one. Never doubt me, my love. I am yours."
– Padme Amidala Skywalker, Revenge of the Sith novelization by Matthew Stover.
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PART I – Reaching for Hope
Darth Vader watched as the young man's world crashed around him, and rather than take his place at his father's side, he fell. The boy had chosen to plunge to possible death rather than take his outstretched hand.
A knot formed in base of Vader's breastbone. This time was no different than before, when he'd offered the galaxy to another. Another who would not take it. The darkness coiled inside of him, pushing at the sickening feeling that had started to take hold. Something had started eating away at him and burning from inside as he held his hand out to Skywalker. Your son, something inside corrected. He fought to contain his feelings, finally damping down the swelling nausea and burning in his heart. He would not be swayed in this. Luke would join him, or die.
The feeling returned, hot and white. He grappled with his balance and closed his eyes inside the mask. He shut it out as he did everything else. At this, he had become quite adept in the last twenty years. Calling the dark to him, he turned from the parapet.
The ease in which he had been able to reach out his hand to the boy unsettled him, and he desperately tried to tamp down the beginning of something that had been foreign to him for decades.
Hope.
Hope for the child he had wanted so many years ago. Hope that had been shattered by the lies of the Jedi. He had not expected his son's rejection to hurt. Surely he was beyond pain by now.
This is the happiest moment of my life.
The whisper of that ancient memory flittered through his mind like a nabug and brought a heavy, leaden feeling to his heart. Lord Vader pushed away from the banister, pulling himself upright. Luke was his. The Jedi could no longer have him. It had almost seemed natural, this connection he felt with the boy, and he knew without a doubt that this was a place he could not go...however much he desperately wanted to have the boy beside him. It did not matter that his life had taken on new meaning; he knew what he must do. The only way he could keep him away from the malignant fire that was the Emperor was to first bring him closer to the flame. Luke must be turned or he would be forced to kill him.
Luke spiraled downward, his plummet an insignificant consequence of his soul's collapse. It was fitting that he should end up hanging off the end of the world. The wind whipped the antennae of Bespin's weather vane, a cold weapon against Luke's leg. An appropriate punishment for his arrogance in not heeding his master's warnings.
He called to the only person who could possibly hear him.
"Ben!"
No answer came. He had not thought it would.
Instead, he heard the voice of another Jedi master.
Mind what you have learned. Save you it can.
Mind what he had learned. Luke reached further into the Force, and into himself. Images, voices, faces rushed past his mind's eye. Pushing past the pain in his heart that cut deeper than any lightsaber ever could, he found feelings...thoughts…
A voice came to him from somewhere beyond his consciousness, beyond time. Like a memory that hadn't happened. Elusive. Something deep in his soul stirred and tingled against the flutter of remembrance…
…Leia…
The cry escaped his lips without thought, "Leia!"
He knew, somehow in his soul, that the mysterious voice had spoken in certainty and he pictured Leia in his mind, reaching across the barrier of space.
"Hear me! Leia-"
Like a distant refrain, he felt Leia's presence in the retreating Falcon. He groped desperately in the Force, and was rewarded with a glimmering, tiny flicker. He felt the hesitant connection take hold, something as elemental and comfortable as the warmth of the Tatooine hearth in his childhood home. He felt her familiarity flow over him, comforting him as if she had been there his whole life.
She felt him. Luke breathed an inward sigh, his mind still reeling from the events that had thrown him on this course of denial and uncertainty. His heart crumbled as pieces of Anakin Skywalker, the hero, broke apart and flowed away on the current of his thoughts.
He fell into the Falcon and into Leia's waiting arms. Her presence soothed him, washing over his battered soul like a balm.
He did not struggle as she laid him on the medical bunk and bound his maimed arm. It had gone numb. Numb like his heart which had stilled around the pain and beat now only out of habit.
Drifting in and out of consciousness, Luke's thoughts returned involuntarily to Bespin's reactor shaft. To the hulking image of Darth Vader looming over him on the gantry.
He had felt Vader's anger and hatred, emotions he had expected from the dark side. But he had felt something else. Desire. Again, something he would have expected from a Sith...but not like he'd felt. There was a desperation in his bid to have Luke beside him, ruling the galaxy.
Luke had not expected that.
The dark side was alive beneath that armored façade, curling around Darth Vader's heart and permeating his soul.
Yet in that moment – the moment when Vader had reached across the chasm for him, his hand offering Luke the galaxy, if only he'd take it - he'd felt something else.
A place apart from the darkness. A thing exiled from Vader's soul, lying still and dead but not buried. It had been alive once.
A star gone nova…then cold.
All things die…even heroes.
The dark feared it. Coiled away from it as if that dead, black rock could somehow spark to life.
A memory stirred, drawn from his mind by the place the darkness could not touch. Luke's skin tingled this time as the voice that was not his own permeated the storm clouds of his thoughts with a single pinpoint of light…
…there's good in him…
Good in him? Luke's mind railed against the thought.
As if beckoned by the plea in the foreign voice, an unmistakable baritone pushed its way into his mind, almost beseeching in its entreaty.
"Luke."
Emotion from an unnamed and primal source pulled Luke from the bunk to respond.
"Father!"
"Son. Come with me."
With these words, tendrils of something both dark and light, hesitant in its reach and confused in its desperation, groped naively for him. Luke collapsed onto the bunk, stunned by the bond being extended to him by the dark lord. Son. All his life, he had wanted nothing more than to hear his father call him son. He had not expected it to hurt.
"Ben," he spoke to nothing. "Why didn't you tell me?"
Luke pulled himself from the bunk and stumbled to the Falcon's cockpit, warily examining the command ship looming outside the viewport.
Vader's pleading voice reached again into his mind, "Luke! It is your destiny."
He was too weary to resist. Sinking into the seat behind Leia and opening himself to the Force for strength, he heard it again – the voice from his own most intimate memory…
…I know. I know there's still…
He gasped. A pained sigh of resignation.
"Ben. Why didn't you tell me?"
to be continued…