Revenge (5/17)
Sep. 16th, 2011 11:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anghraine---------------
Title: Revenge of the Jedi (5/17)
Fanverse: Revenge of the Jedi
Blurb: Luke discovers how he called to Leia on Bespin (maybe), comes to an uncomfortable realization, and meets a long-lost relative.
---------------
Chapter Five
Yoda was, to put it gently, less than delighted about Luke’s newest vision.
“Certain, you are?” he asked again.
Luke sighed. “Yes, Master Yoda. I know the difference between the Force and my imagination by now, and the Force is telling me it’s true. Besides,” he added, “I meditated on it all morning, just to be sure.”
Yoda shook his head.
“I know this Jerjerrod is planning to move at least a dozen fighter ships to Dantooine.” Luke paused. “Which . . . sounds incredibly stupid, but that’s nothing new for the Empire. I have to get word to the Rebellion.”
“Familiar, this conversation is,” Yoda said, resting his chin on his cane and scowling up at him. “Remember, do you, what happened last time?”
“What? I’m not going anywhere!”
Yoda straightened. “Hm?”
“It’d take me weeks to get there and then, weeks to get back. I can’t afford to lose that much time out of my training for some idiot moff.”
“In agreement, we seem to be,” said Yoda, looking surprised for perhaps the first time since Luke had met him.
Luke shifted his weight onto his flesh hand, and pushed a few sticky tendrils of hair out of his face with the other. “I thought I could send Artoo, but there’s nobody to go with him. I could set the coordinates on my ship and send him in that, but there’s no guarantee that something wouldn’t go wrong. And I wouldn’t have my ship, when I did need to leave.”
“Trust in the Force, you must,” Yoda said obscurely.
It felt like he’d done nothing else since he fell on that weathervane at Bespin. He’d been upside-down then too, Luke thought, apropos of nothing. But everything else had been different. His wrist burned and he couldn’t breathe and the Dark Side was right there and he reached in desperation for anything else, anyone other than Vader.
Luke’s eyes widened. Obi-Wan had either been unwilling or unable to help him, but Leia had heard. He’d never wondered why -- assumed, perhaps, that Jedi could make themselves heard by anyone they deigned to address. But it wasn’t like that with his father.
With Vader, he automatically corrected, then frowned. He had accepted the truth, however unpalatable. At least he had told himself so. Why did he continue to deny it, even in this small, private way?
Luke thought of the few moments when he’d left his mind open to his father. If he were honest with himself -- and a Jedi could afford nothing less -- it wasn’t Vader’s presence alone that horrified him. By now, he’d almost grown used to it. No, it was that instinctive sense of familiarity, of affinity, that made it feel right to call out son and Father and hear their thoughts spilling together.
That, more than anything else, terrified him. Luke had to maintain a careful distance, ignore the ties between them, most of all those within his own mind. Otherwise, he would never manage to do what was necessary -- for himself and for the man his father had been. But editing the truth out of his private thoughts accomplished nothing.
So. In all probability, he and his father did not hear one another merely because Vader chose to speak to him. They were family; that changed everything. But Leia, as much as he loved her, was nothing of the kind.
Luke looked down -- or rather, up -- at Yoda.
“Leia rescued me at Cloud City,” he said. “They were trying to escape from the Imperial ships, and I called to her, and she heard me. I still don’t know how.”
An indefinable expression came over Yoda’s face. “Attached to her, you are.”
Luke hadn’t known he could blush while standing on his head.
“When a Jedi feels attachment . . . hm. Many opinions there are, on this. But all are agreed: dangerous it is.”
“Yes, but -- ” Luke began, and paused. “Wait. We can only speak this way when we’re attached to each other? Jedi, I mean?”
“Limited, is my knowledge of this,” Yoda said slowly. “Done it I have not.”
It took Luke several seconds to realize what that meant. He tried not to look too horrified. Nine hundred years old, and --
I’ll never be the Jedi you are, he thought, and forced himself to regret it.
Luke felt Obi-Wan before he heard his polite cough. He lifted himself on to his fingertips, twisting to look at him.
“Hello there,” he said brightly.
“Good morning,” said Obi-Wan, with a suspicious twitch of the mouth. “I gather that you could use some advice?”
“I was just telling Master Yoda that I contacted Leia at Cloud City, and he says it’s because we’re attached. That it’s the only way people can do it. And I’m wondering -- ” Luke frowned, his eyes dropping to the tree tops. “Have you done it?”
“Several times,” said Obi-Wan, almost reluctantly. “Yoda is quite right. However, only one attachment is required; it not be . . . reciprocal.”
For the first time in weeks, Luke lost his balance. He barely managed to keep himself from landing face-first in the mud.
Yoda gave him a sour look. At any other time, Luke would have been humbled, even embarrassed, but right now he couldn’t spare the attention. He simply stared at Obi-Wan, the blood draining out of his face.
For a moment, he couldn’t even speak. Then he said, his voice jerky, “You -- you’re saying that -- that communicating like this only means the person talking is attached? The other person might not even know who he is?” He caught himself. “Or if . . . she did, she might not feel anything towards him?”
Obi-Wan seemed amused, and faintly pitying. “Possibly,” he allowed, “though rather unlikely, I’d say.”
“I -- ” Luke glanced from Obi-Wan’s shimmering features to Yoda’s disapproving face. “I have to go -- try and tell Leia. What I saw. I can’t -- not here, I have to go think. Alone. Just a little to the south.”
“Hm!” said Yoda.
“I understand,” Obi-Wan told him, and added lightly, “Don’t worry -- there’s no hurry.”
Luke just looked stricken and fled. He hardly even noticed that he’d slipped into contact with the Force as he ran, his preternatural speed taking him well beyond Yoda’s patch of swamp. He didn’t pause until his chest and thighs twinged, a little, and he stopped long enough to realize he’d never been quite so far before.
He didn’t bother releasing the Force; it wasn’t worth the inconvenience, and he’d be needing it soon enough anyway.
He did need to contact Leia. Before -- anything else. Luke ran on a ways, remembering the despair that had nearly consumed him when he’d spoken to her, last time. He couldn’t do it that way now -- or he shouldn’t. But the Force was blazing cleanly through him, and -- well, if he could accidentally leak his thoughts into someone else’s mind, this shouldn’t be that hard. Luke reached through the Force, as far as his strength and discipline permitted, and filled his mind with her, with the day he’d met her.
Leia bolting out of her cell, grabbing his blaster and prodding them into the garbage compactor. Leia pressing her lips against his cheek, for luck. Leia, survivor of planetary genocide, comforting him when Obi-Wan died. Leia, solemn and thoughtful as she told him that Han would find his way in his own time. Leia rushing up after the battle, so small that her feet flew off the ground when she hugged him and Han. The three of them running off together, like children, or friends. Leia at the celebration, her gravitas breaking down when he grinned foolishly at her and she beamed back.
Leia, Leia, he thought, his eyes wide and blind as he searched through the galaxy for her. Leia, I have to tell you something. Are you there?
“Leia.”
Her presence flooded his mind, fierce and comforting. “Luke?”
“Leia, I -- ” He gasped for air, his limbs trembling. Something was wrong. Or was it always like this? He wouldn’t have noticed before. “I can’t explain, I don’t have time. Moff Jerjerrod is planning to move a good part of his private fleet to Dantooine. I thought you should know.”
“Jerjerrod? He’s always been a troublemaker; we’ll investigate it.” She was scribbling something, and his sense of her faded and crackled, like a bad holocall. “Luke, you sound awful. Is everything all right?”
“This is -- difficult,” he said thickly. “I’m sorry -- ”
She vanished. Luke reeled back, his mind greying over as he fell to the base of a tree. For six or seven minutes, he laid in a sluggish, uncomprehending heap. He might have f -- have been unconscious, though he didn’t think so. Even like this, he couldn’t miss the sense of his father’s attention, remote and diffused, narrowing to an intense focus on him across all the distance of space.
Father. He stirred, tiredly closing his mind, and forced himself to sit up.
A woman was standing across from him.
Normally, he’d have been on his feet and brandishing his lightsaber at so much as a hint of intrusion. His legs, however, didn’t seem quite up to it. Or his arms. Or his brain.
Luke just blinked at her, instead. Between the Force and the swamp-mist, he couldn’t clearly make her out, but she didn’t seem threatening. Unsettling, the way she peered at him without a word, but not threatening. Just . . . familiar?
He squinted through the mist. She definitely seemed older than he was, but not by more than ten years or so. Her face, pale and fine-boned, was half-hidden behind her long dark hair, and she wore a sturdy gown that somehow reminded him of his aunt, even though Beru had mostly worn trousers.
He hadn’t met her. He knew he hadn’t. But he knew her from somewhere.
“Hello?” called the woman, drawing closer. She didn’t sound alarmed so much as -- bemused? “What’s your name? Who are you?”
“Skywalker,” Luke said blankly.
“How extraordinary,” she said, laughing. “So am I.”
Luke’s jaw dropped. “What? No, that’s -- ”
No! That’s impossible!
He snapped his mouth shut. It shouldn’t be too hard to recognize her; her face was getting clearer as she took hesitant steps in his direction, though the mist didn’t seem to be clearing, and the Force still swirled around him. He let his thoughts drift, back ho -- to the homestead of his childhood, the . . . kitchen?
No, the room beyond that, where Luke sat at Beru’s knee, learning to mend his own clothes. Owen stood at the mantel, stern as always, but without the usual tension around his eyes and mouth; Luke hadn’t wandered off in nearly a week.
The mantel. The framed flimsiplast resting on it, upon which was printed an image of a woman and two teenage boys. The elder boy was the young Owen, of course, already gruff and broad. Beside him stood a child of perhaps twelve, with a familiar mop of dark blond hair, wide, solemn blue eyes, and an open expression, who towered incongruously over all the others. And the woman, long hair coiled at the back of her neck, her pale face worn before its time, but her dark eyes kind, rested a hand on each boy’s shoulder.
The same woman who, impossibly, stood before him at this very moment -- younger now, but gazing at him with that same wistful kindness, and -- and --
It wasn’t mist. She was glowing.
“Grandmother?” Luke gasped. Either he was much less exhausted than he thought, or Owen and Beru’s lessons were no respecters of human limitations, because he immediately scrambled to his feet.
“Oh, Luke, it is you,” she said, in a tone of immense relief. “I hoped so, but there are cousins, and I’ve been trying to find you for years.”
“I,” said Luke, “uh, I’ve moved a lot. Ma’am. Um. You’ve been looking for me?”
“I wanted to explain everything to you,” she said.
He choked back a helpless laugh. “Then you’re the only one. You and Father.”
Shmi flinched.
“I’m sorry -- I didn’t mean -- ”
“You may mention my son to me,” she said calmly. Then her face tightened. “No one else will. Luke, I was brought up to serve the Force and honour the Jedi. I have always done both. But you need to know more than they will teach you.”
She perched on the edge of a log, and Luke -- though most of his energy had crept back by now -- dropped back down to the exposed roots of the tree.
“More?”
Shmi gave a decisive nod. “You must not fail in this. I -- cannot tell you all the reasons. The dead do have sources of knowledge that we are not permitted to share with the living, just as you may walk freely where we cannot tread.”
“I didn’t know anything could keep out a ghost,” Luke said, trying not to think too hard about her exhortation.
“I am a Force-ghost,” Shmi reminded him. “I cannot abide the presence of the Dark Side. None of us can. It’s why we are unable to help you, when you draw near to Anakin. I attempted it -- I thought, if I could speak to him, that perhaps -- but it is impossible. I have not seen my son in eighteen years.”
“I’m sorry,” Luke said again. “I’ve only seen him twice, myself, so I can’t tell you much except what Obi-Wan has told me.”
“I am quite aware of what he told you,” she said, her gentle voice hardening. “We have . . . spoken on the matter, on a number of occasions.”
“I think Obi-Wan wants me to kill him. But how can I? I can’t let him -- I have to do something. I know I do. But he’s my father. Grandmother, I don’t think I can kill him. Not my own father.”
“I should hope not,” said Shmi.
Luke gave her a solemn, surprised look. “Then what am I going to do? Am I just being weak? I know his life must be torment, if there’s any part of him that even still exists. It might be kinder -- but I can’t. Not my father.”
“It is anything but weakness, Luke,” Shmi told him.
“I didn’t think it mattered at first. I mean, it did, of course -- it was awful! But I told myself he just wanted a . . . an apprentice. And Master Yoda thought so too. So I tried not to even think about it. But I kept remembering what he said. Not just about ruling the galaxy. He said he’d have to kill me if I didn’t join him, but he didn’t. I still don’t know why. And he spoke to me as we were escaping.” Luke dropped his head into his hands. “He called me son, and I could tell he meant it.”
“Anakin spoke to you in your mind?” Shmi asked sharply.
Luke lifted his head, resting it against his curled fingers. “Vader did, at any rate.”
“Vader is not his name,” she said, in much the same way that Leia might say that the Empire was evil, or Han that he’d be leaving any day now, or Threepio that the odds of survival were almost nil. It was not a tone that allowed for any argument. “He is my son, and your father, and his name is Anakin Skywalker, whether he remembers it or not.”
“He keeps telling me I’m his son,” said Luke, “so I think we can safely say that he remembers.”
Shmi smiled. “There are many ways of remembering.”
“You’re as cryptic as Obi-Wan, Grandmother.”
“A prerogative of the dead,” she said, almost lightly.
They sat in silence for a moment. It didn’t seem to matter that Luke kept his mind firmly closed to Vader’s presence; his father was there in every way but the actual. Then Shmi's form wavered, as Obi-Wan's did when he’d exhausted himself, and Luke hurried to speak.
“Grandmother? Do you know why -- that is, I managed to talk to a friend, in her mind. Obi-Wan says it’s because I’m attached to her. I mean, she’s attached to me too -- in her way -- but she didn’t have to be. So -- Father talking to me . . .”
“Yes,” said Shmi, and flickered even more wildly. “Luke, I can’t stay much longer. I will return as soon as I can.”
Luke managed to smile at her. “Thank you, Grandmother. I’ll do my best, I promise.”
There was a brush of something like wind against his cheek, and then she was gone.
So, his father was -- attached to him, after some fashion or another. It shouldn’t matter. Vader remained Vader, a traitor and a tyrant. It made perfect sense, Luke told himself, that such a man would value his -- his offspring, as extensions of himself. An extension: of course Vader felt a certain possessive attachment to his only child. It wasn’t -- it didn’t mean --
Luke squeezed his eyes shut. Perhaps his inability to commit patricide was not a flaw, any more than Vader’s inability to commit filicide was in him. But even apart from that, he felt a weakness in himself, passed down with all his father’s power and will. At Cloud City, he’d come so near to turning his vision in the cave to reality. He couldn’t do that. His father might be attached to him -- for whatever reason -- but Luke couldn’t be attached to Vader. He couldn’t.
It was just -- he’d idolized his father for as long as he could remember. Oh, not as he really was. The bold pilot, the valiant, noble knight, the brilliant warrior -- the hero. Luke knew it wasn’t true, that if his father had ever been that paragon of virtue, that time had long since passed and so had the hero. His father was Darth Vader, the murderer he had loathed for the last two years.
Yet twenty years’ devotion couldn’t be overthrown with a single revelation. He couldn’t seem to separate them out, to excise the false father from his consciousness, and see only the monster. Instead, everything just muddled together in his head, until Father meant all of it: victim, tyrant, Jedi, Dark Lord, hero, villain.
Vader and sentimentality didn’t mix well at the best of times. Right now, with that strange, effortless connection constantly running between them, Luke’s confused idea of his father was worse than foolish -- it was dangerous, and to more than him. He knew it, but that knowledge changed nothing. He remained as bewildered as ever.
Title: Revenge of the Jedi (5/17)
Fanverse: Revenge of the Jedi
Blurb: Luke discovers how he called to Leia on Bespin (maybe), comes to an uncomfortable realization, and meets a long-lost relative.
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Yoda was, to put it gently, less than delighted about Luke’s newest vision.
“Certain, you are?” he asked again.
Luke sighed. “Yes, Master Yoda. I know the difference between the Force and my imagination by now, and the Force is telling me it’s true. Besides,” he added, “I meditated on it all morning, just to be sure.”
Yoda shook his head.
“I know this Jerjerrod is planning to move at least a dozen fighter ships to Dantooine.” Luke paused. “Which . . . sounds incredibly stupid, but that’s nothing new for the Empire. I have to get word to the Rebellion.”
“Familiar, this conversation is,” Yoda said, resting his chin on his cane and scowling up at him. “Remember, do you, what happened last time?”
“What? I’m not going anywhere!”
Yoda straightened. “Hm?”
“It’d take me weeks to get there and then, weeks to get back. I can’t afford to lose that much time out of my training for some idiot moff.”
“In agreement, we seem to be,” said Yoda, looking surprised for perhaps the first time since Luke had met him.
Luke shifted his weight onto his flesh hand, and pushed a few sticky tendrils of hair out of his face with the other. “I thought I could send Artoo, but there’s nobody to go with him. I could set the coordinates on my ship and send him in that, but there’s no guarantee that something wouldn’t go wrong. And I wouldn’t have my ship, when I did need to leave.”
“Trust in the Force, you must,” Yoda said obscurely.
It felt like he’d done nothing else since he fell on that weathervane at Bespin. He’d been upside-down then too, Luke thought, apropos of nothing. But everything else had been different. His wrist burned and he couldn’t breathe and the Dark Side was right there and he reached in desperation for anything else, anyone other than Vader.
Luke’s eyes widened. Obi-Wan had either been unwilling or unable to help him, but Leia had heard. He’d never wondered why -- assumed, perhaps, that Jedi could make themselves heard by anyone they deigned to address. But it wasn’t like that with his father.
With Vader, he automatically corrected, then frowned. He had accepted the truth, however unpalatable. At least he had told himself so. Why did he continue to deny it, even in this small, private way?
Luke thought of the few moments when he’d left his mind open to his father. If he were honest with himself -- and a Jedi could afford nothing less -- it wasn’t Vader’s presence alone that horrified him. By now, he’d almost grown used to it. No, it was that instinctive sense of familiarity, of affinity, that made it feel right to call out son and Father and hear their thoughts spilling together.
That, more than anything else, terrified him. Luke had to maintain a careful distance, ignore the ties between them, most of all those within his own mind. Otherwise, he would never manage to do what was necessary -- for himself and for the man his father had been. But editing the truth out of his private thoughts accomplished nothing.
So. In all probability, he and his father did not hear one another merely because Vader chose to speak to him. They were family; that changed everything. But Leia, as much as he loved her, was nothing of the kind.
Luke looked down -- or rather, up -- at Yoda.
“Leia rescued me at Cloud City,” he said. “They were trying to escape from the Imperial ships, and I called to her, and she heard me. I still don’t know how.”
An indefinable expression came over Yoda’s face. “Attached to her, you are.”
Luke hadn’t known he could blush while standing on his head.
“When a Jedi feels attachment . . . hm. Many opinions there are, on this. But all are agreed: dangerous it is.”
“Yes, but -- ” Luke began, and paused. “Wait. We can only speak this way when we’re attached to each other? Jedi, I mean?”
“Limited, is my knowledge of this,” Yoda said slowly. “Done it I have not.”
It took Luke several seconds to realize what that meant. He tried not to look too horrified. Nine hundred years old, and --
I’ll never be the Jedi you are, he thought, and forced himself to regret it.
Luke felt Obi-Wan before he heard his polite cough. He lifted himself on to his fingertips, twisting to look at him.
“Hello there,” he said brightly.
“Good morning,” said Obi-Wan, with a suspicious twitch of the mouth. “I gather that you could use some advice?”
“I was just telling Master Yoda that I contacted Leia at Cloud City, and he says it’s because we’re attached. That it’s the only way people can do it. And I’m wondering -- ” Luke frowned, his eyes dropping to the tree tops. “Have you done it?”
“Several times,” said Obi-Wan, almost reluctantly. “Yoda is quite right. However, only one attachment is required; it not be . . . reciprocal.”
For the first time in weeks, Luke lost his balance. He barely managed to keep himself from landing face-first in the mud.
Yoda gave him a sour look. At any other time, Luke would have been humbled, even embarrassed, but right now he couldn’t spare the attention. He simply stared at Obi-Wan, the blood draining out of his face.
For a moment, he couldn’t even speak. Then he said, his voice jerky, “You -- you’re saying that -- that communicating like this only means the person talking is attached? The other person might not even know who he is?” He caught himself. “Or if . . . she did, she might not feel anything towards him?”
Obi-Wan seemed amused, and faintly pitying. “Possibly,” he allowed, “though rather unlikely, I’d say.”
“I -- ” Luke glanced from Obi-Wan’s shimmering features to Yoda’s disapproving face. “I have to go -- try and tell Leia. What I saw. I can’t -- not here, I have to go think. Alone. Just a little to the south.”
“Hm!” said Yoda.
“I understand,” Obi-Wan told him, and added lightly, “Don’t worry -- there’s no hurry.”
Luke just looked stricken and fled. He hardly even noticed that he’d slipped into contact with the Force as he ran, his preternatural speed taking him well beyond Yoda’s patch of swamp. He didn’t pause until his chest and thighs twinged, a little, and he stopped long enough to realize he’d never been quite so far before.
He didn’t bother releasing the Force; it wasn’t worth the inconvenience, and he’d be needing it soon enough anyway.
He did need to contact Leia. Before -- anything else. Luke ran on a ways, remembering the despair that had nearly consumed him when he’d spoken to her, last time. He couldn’t do it that way now -- or he shouldn’t. But the Force was blazing cleanly through him, and -- well, if he could accidentally leak his thoughts into someone else’s mind, this shouldn’t be that hard. Luke reached through the Force, as far as his strength and discipline permitted, and filled his mind with her, with the day he’d met her.
Leia bolting out of her cell, grabbing his blaster and prodding them into the garbage compactor. Leia pressing her lips against his cheek, for luck. Leia, survivor of planetary genocide, comforting him when Obi-Wan died. Leia, solemn and thoughtful as she told him that Han would find his way in his own time. Leia rushing up after the battle, so small that her feet flew off the ground when she hugged him and Han. The three of them running off together, like children, or friends. Leia at the celebration, her gravitas breaking down when he grinned foolishly at her and she beamed back.
Leia, Leia, he thought, his eyes wide and blind as he searched through the galaxy for her. Leia, I have to tell you something. Are you there?
“Leia.”
Her presence flooded his mind, fierce and comforting. “Luke?”
“Leia, I -- ” He gasped for air, his limbs trembling. Something was wrong. Or was it always like this? He wouldn’t have noticed before. “I can’t explain, I don’t have time. Moff Jerjerrod is planning to move a good part of his private fleet to Dantooine. I thought you should know.”
“Jerjerrod? He’s always been a troublemaker; we’ll investigate it.” She was scribbling something, and his sense of her faded and crackled, like a bad holocall. “Luke, you sound awful. Is everything all right?”
“This is -- difficult,” he said thickly. “I’m sorry -- ”
She vanished. Luke reeled back, his mind greying over as he fell to the base of a tree. For six or seven minutes, he laid in a sluggish, uncomprehending heap. He might have f -- have been unconscious, though he didn’t think so. Even like this, he couldn’t miss the sense of his father’s attention, remote and diffused, narrowing to an intense focus on him across all the distance of space.
Father. He stirred, tiredly closing his mind, and forced himself to sit up.
A woman was standing across from him.
Normally, he’d have been on his feet and brandishing his lightsaber at so much as a hint of intrusion. His legs, however, didn’t seem quite up to it. Or his arms. Or his brain.
Luke just blinked at her, instead. Between the Force and the swamp-mist, he couldn’t clearly make her out, but she didn’t seem threatening. Unsettling, the way she peered at him without a word, but not threatening. Just . . . familiar?
He squinted through the mist. She definitely seemed older than he was, but not by more than ten years or so. Her face, pale and fine-boned, was half-hidden behind her long dark hair, and she wore a sturdy gown that somehow reminded him of his aunt, even though Beru had mostly worn trousers.
He hadn’t met her. He knew he hadn’t. But he knew her from somewhere.
“Hello?” called the woman, drawing closer. She didn’t sound alarmed so much as -- bemused? “What’s your name? Who are you?”
“Skywalker,” Luke said blankly.
“How extraordinary,” she said, laughing. “So am I.”
Luke’s jaw dropped. “What? No, that’s -- ”
No! That’s impossible!
He snapped his mouth shut. It shouldn’t be too hard to recognize her; her face was getting clearer as she took hesitant steps in his direction, though the mist didn’t seem to be clearing, and the Force still swirled around him. He let his thoughts drift, back ho -- to the homestead of his childhood, the . . . kitchen?
No, the room beyond that, where Luke sat at Beru’s knee, learning to mend his own clothes. Owen stood at the mantel, stern as always, but without the usual tension around his eyes and mouth; Luke hadn’t wandered off in nearly a week.
The mantel. The framed flimsiplast resting on it, upon which was printed an image of a woman and two teenage boys. The elder boy was the young Owen, of course, already gruff and broad. Beside him stood a child of perhaps twelve, with a familiar mop of dark blond hair, wide, solemn blue eyes, and an open expression, who towered incongruously over all the others. And the woman, long hair coiled at the back of her neck, her pale face worn before its time, but her dark eyes kind, rested a hand on each boy’s shoulder.
The same woman who, impossibly, stood before him at this very moment -- younger now, but gazing at him with that same wistful kindness, and -- and --
It wasn’t mist. She was glowing.
“Grandmother?” Luke gasped. Either he was much less exhausted than he thought, or Owen and Beru’s lessons were no respecters of human limitations, because he immediately scrambled to his feet.
“Oh, Luke, it is you,” she said, in a tone of immense relief. “I hoped so, but there are cousins, and I’ve been trying to find you for years.”
“I,” said Luke, “uh, I’ve moved a lot. Ma’am. Um. You’ve been looking for me?”
“I wanted to explain everything to you,” she said.
He choked back a helpless laugh. “Then you’re the only one. You and Father.”
Shmi flinched.
“I’m sorry -- I didn’t mean -- ”
“You may mention my son to me,” she said calmly. Then her face tightened. “No one else will. Luke, I was brought up to serve the Force and honour the Jedi. I have always done both. But you need to know more than they will teach you.”
She perched on the edge of a log, and Luke -- though most of his energy had crept back by now -- dropped back down to the exposed roots of the tree.
“More?”
Shmi gave a decisive nod. “You must not fail in this. I -- cannot tell you all the reasons. The dead do have sources of knowledge that we are not permitted to share with the living, just as you may walk freely where we cannot tread.”
“I didn’t know anything could keep out a ghost,” Luke said, trying not to think too hard about her exhortation.
“I am a Force-ghost,” Shmi reminded him. “I cannot abide the presence of the Dark Side. None of us can. It’s why we are unable to help you, when you draw near to Anakin. I attempted it -- I thought, if I could speak to him, that perhaps -- but it is impossible. I have not seen my son in eighteen years.”
“I’m sorry,” Luke said again. “I’ve only seen him twice, myself, so I can’t tell you much except what Obi-Wan has told me.”
“I am quite aware of what he told you,” she said, her gentle voice hardening. “We have . . . spoken on the matter, on a number of occasions.”
“I think Obi-Wan wants me to kill him. But how can I? I can’t let him -- I have to do something. I know I do. But he’s my father. Grandmother, I don’t think I can kill him. Not my own father.”
“I should hope not,” said Shmi.
Luke gave her a solemn, surprised look. “Then what am I going to do? Am I just being weak? I know his life must be torment, if there’s any part of him that even still exists. It might be kinder -- but I can’t. Not my father.”
“It is anything but weakness, Luke,” Shmi told him.
“I didn’t think it mattered at first. I mean, it did, of course -- it was awful! But I told myself he just wanted a . . . an apprentice. And Master Yoda thought so too. So I tried not to even think about it. But I kept remembering what he said. Not just about ruling the galaxy. He said he’d have to kill me if I didn’t join him, but he didn’t. I still don’t know why. And he spoke to me as we were escaping.” Luke dropped his head into his hands. “He called me son, and I could tell he meant it.”
“Anakin spoke to you in your mind?” Shmi asked sharply.
Luke lifted his head, resting it against his curled fingers. “Vader did, at any rate.”
“Vader is not his name,” she said, in much the same way that Leia might say that the Empire was evil, or Han that he’d be leaving any day now, or Threepio that the odds of survival were almost nil. It was not a tone that allowed for any argument. “He is my son, and your father, and his name is Anakin Skywalker, whether he remembers it or not.”
“He keeps telling me I’m his son,” said Luke, “so I think we can safely say that he remembers.”
Shmi smiled. “There are many ways of remembering.”
“You’re as cryptic as Obi-Wan, Grandmother.”
“A prerogative of the dead,” she said, almost lightly.
They sat in silence for a moment. It didn’t seem to matter that Luke kept his mind firmly closed to Vader’s presence; his father was there in every way but the actual. Then Shmi's form wavered, as Obi-Wan's did when he’d exhausted himself, and Luke hurried to speak.
“Grandmother? Do you know why -- that is, I managed to talk to a friend, in her mind. Obi-Wan says it’s because I’m attached to her. I mean, she’s attached to me too -- in her way -- but she didn’t have to be. So -- Father talking to me . . .”
“Yes,” said Shmi, and flickered even more wildly. “Luke, I can’t stay much longer. I will return as soon as I can.”
Luke managed to smile at her. “Thank you, Grandmother. I’ll do my best, I promise.”
There was a brush of something like wind against his cheek, and then she was gone.
So, his father was -- attached to him, after some fashion or another. It shouldn’t matter. Vader remained Vader, a traitor and a tyrant. It made perfect sense, Luke told himself, that such a man would value his -- his offspring, as extensions of himself. An extension: of course Vader felt a certain possessive attachment to his only child. It wasn’t -- it didn’t mean --
Luke squeezed his eyes shut. Perhaps his inability to commit patricide was not a flaw, any more than Vader’s inability to commit filicide was in him. But even apart from that, he felt a weakness in himself, passed down with all his father’s power and will. At Cloud City, he’d come so near to turning his vision in the cave to reality. He couldn’t do that. His father might be attached to him -- for whatever reason -- but Luke couldn’t be attached to Vader. He couldn’t.
It was just -- he’d idolized his father for as long as he could remember. Oh, not as he really was. The bold pilot, the valiant, noble knight, the brilliant warrior -- the hero. Luke knew it wasn’t true, that if his father had ever been that paragon of virtue, that time had long since passed and so had the hero. His father was Darth Vader, the murderer he had loathed for the last two years.
Yet twenty years’ devotion couldn’t be overthrown with a single revelation. He couldn’t seem to separate them out, to excise the false father from his consciousness, and see only the monster. Instead, everything just muddled together in his head, until Father meant all of it: victim, tyrant, Jedi, Dark Lord, hero, villain.
Vader and sentimentality didn’t mix well at the best of times. Right now, with that strange, effortless connection constantly running between them, Luke’s confused idea of his father was worse than foolish -- it was dangerous, and to more than him. He knew it, but that knowledge changed nothing. He remained as bewildered as ever.