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“Lord Vader—”
“It is certain that he will come.” His voice invited no debate.
Piett bowed. “Of course, my Lord. Very good.” He left, steps stiff yet quick.
Vader looked out the window. The landscape was dark, but the stars shined over everything, illuminating the fact that there were no humans on the grassy plains. No Luke.
He reached out with the Force…
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“Luke, are you okay?”
Luke turned around, ignoring the shivers that wanted to wrack him. “What?”
“You look pale, Commander.” Tycho’s face was pressed with worry.
“Oh, uh, yeah. It’s just…” He hesitated. Should he say it? No, his pilots deserved to know. “I think Vader’s nearby.”
Tycho swore. “What?! Are you sure?”
“Unfortunately, yes. The Force is…distinctive around him.” Luke took a deep breath, and let it out. “I have to go to him. You guys have to leave.”
“Is there nothing we can do? Our X-Wings—”
“No. I doubt he’s alone. I can’t in good conscience risk it. Vader wants me, although I don’t know why. I’d rather give myself up so that you guys can flee than the Imps have all of us; or worse, have all of us that survive the battle.”
Tycho went quiet. He closed his eyes for a minute. Luke could feel him steel himself through the Force.
Tycho opened his eyes. “The princess won’t like it. I don’t like it.”
Luke smiled sadly. “I know. Now go. Tell the others. Get out of here, whatever it takes.”
Tycho saluted. “Come back to us, Commander.”
“I’ll try.”
It felt like a forest of vines were creeping up to him in the Force, surrounding and staring at him. A forest of darkness, trying to pull him in. He kept his breathing even, didn’t let it show on his face. Through the darkness, a whisper.
Come to me, Luke.
Tycho’s footsteps faded as he rounded the corner in their makeshift base. Now alone, Luke let himself shiver.
He wasn’t surprised that he’d visibly paled. Emotions swam through the darkness, flitted through him at their leisure. Fear, pain, anguish, anger, hatred. Loss. A sadness so deep it swallowed worlds. Desperation that bled into more anger. And, threaded through it all like a strong ocean current, possession. It made his skin crawl.
Luke couldn’t bring himself to reach back through the metaphysical vines to respond to the voice he knew to be Vader’s. It felt too much like giving in. Like accepting the darkness into his mind. Vader would know Luke’s answer to his devil’s bargain when Luke arrived at the landing pad.
He walked to the window, rubbing his face.
Stars, he was tired. This planet, Kaln, was supposed to be the last on their reconnaissance mission. The Rogues had been to six planets in five days, checking each one for its suitability for a base. They must have picked up an Imperial tail somewhere along the way. They’d have to deal with that when they got back to base…
Well. The rest of the Rogues would have to deal with that. Luke would be occupied trying to resist torture and the Dark Side.
He set his jaw.
He wouldn’t Fall. He would do Ben proud, do his father proud, do his pilots and his friends—Chewie, Han, Leia—proud.
Luke left his pack behind. It would just get confiscated by the Imps as soon as they took him into custody. Better for anyone who came to this abandoned factory later to have the rations and flares than for the Imps to take it.
He went into the fading light of the sunset.
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“Lord Vader!” His son’s voice.
Vader turned. The Force swirled around him in excited agitation at the sight of Luke, at long last, cresting the grassy hill. His son was dressed in a simple outfit; a white sleeveless shirt stained from days of use, brown work pants, tall black boots. When he spotted Vader, he raised his hands to show that they were empty, although Vader could clearly see the boy’s lightsaber— his lightsaber—in his pocket. His son carried nothing else.
He resisted the urge to leave the platform. A Sith had patience to allow their plans to play out. A Sith did not become overeager and ruin them before they could reach their ends.
Luke trekked up the last part of the hill, pushing his knees with his hands, visibly panting. Brilliant orange and purple light from the rapidly fading sunset drenched him. The boy took a deep breath, held it, and let it out before stepping onto the platform. He stopped smartly before his father. Beneath his mask, Vader smiled. In spite of the Rebellion’s notorious lack of discipline, it seemed at least someone had taught him how to behave. That would serve Luke well in his new role.
“Luke Skywalker,” Vader said.
“Lord Vader.” Luke spoke stiffly. “You called. I am here—”
“Like a well-trained hound.”
“Now let my friends go,” Luke continued, jaw set.
“Very well. Comm them. Tell them they may leave.” Vader gestured graciously.
His son looked at him shrewdly, eyes narrowed, and raised his wrist comm to his mouth with clear reluctance.
“Tycho, Wedge, you have the all clear. Supposedly. Be careful. Remember what I said.”
Of course his son had made some sort of backup plan. It would make no difference. Vader had one of his own.
They stared at each other for a tense minute, tension written in the line of Luke’s shoulders, in his carefully blank face. Then a pair of X-Wings roared into the sky. His son turned to them immediately like a plant to sun. The Force spoke of his fierce wish to be with his friends.
The fact that he was turned away meant he didn’t see Vader press a button on his belt.
Vader whispered, too quiet for the vocoder to amplify. “Capture those X-Wings. Alive.” He pressed the button again and tucked his thumbs into his belt.
The Executor, which had been hanging motionless just above the planet, a blue shadow, suddenly moved forward with more speed than a ship of that size should by any rights have. Satisfaction simmered in Vader’s chest. Good. His engineers had made his modifications. There had not been a chance to test them before this last-minute mission.
The X-Wings split and dove, but the Executor was already upon them.
His son screamed. “No!”
Before Vader could stop him, Luke threw himself into the Force so furiously and desperately that a shockwave threw Vader back several stumbling steps. Only his power in the Dark Side kept him on his feet.
The Executor stopped dead in atmo, and the galaxy went quiet.
For a moment, Vader heard and felt nothing.
It was perfect silence; perfect bliss. No pain. No anger. No regrets. No plan. For a moment, he could have been the only living being on Kaln.
Then there was a deep, bone-rattling hum that shook all the stars in all the skies.
A signature bloomed out of the void, and he turned to find his eyes working again—had he closed them? His son stood beside him, arm outstretched, fingers curved around nothing, straining upwards as if the yellow sky above them might reach back. Sensation blossomed across all of his senses, even those he thought long dead, all tangled together. Sparks of color in all shades danced through his vision, somehow brought on and perpetuated by the hum. The taste of blue coated his tongue like a syrup. In spite of the helmet sealed around his face, in spite of the fact that he has not had the ability to detect scent in over twenty years, the sight of his son smelled like a new rain.
Luke’s eyes were wide in desperation, and as Vader watched, blue light crept over them like a sun over a horizon until the natural color—white, blue, black—was swallowed whole, leaving only an otherworldly glow. A wind that Vader, in his armor, did not feel, whipped around them, throwing the tall grassy plants into a frenzy. Dead leaves and other loose matter soared through the skies as if weightless.
His son’s lips moved, but only moments later that the sound, many-layered, was translated in Vader’s brain.
“Do not move.”
The Force was thick around them, shooting up into the atmosphere to surround the Executor and hold all within it as still as nonexistence. The lightest tap on Luke’s signature gave Vader a glimpse of all that the boy held in his grasp, and he felt Piett’s fear and tightly contained panic from thousands of kilometers away.
Whispers of Jedi, of men and women long dead, drifted on the air. Vader batted them away without listening. There was nothing that the Light could offer that the Dark did not. He had chosen his path long ago, and his son’s desperate act to save his pathetic Rebel friends would not change that.
Now that he had been within the cyclone of power long enough to get acclimated to it, Vader sensed the lack of coordination in his son’s display of power. It was not the work of a Master; it was the work of a padawan with a near-bottomless well from which to draw from. He had known that himself, once.
And he knew what the price of such a use of it was.
Vader did not move. He simply waited.
Luke’s friends finished their hyperspace calculations and shot out of sight. The Force was so intense around them that the remainder of Vader’s skin tingled as if electrified. His son’s eyes glowed brighter, bright enough that Vader’s helmet automatically adjusted the light to avoid blinding him, and then they winked out. Luke collapsed like a droid with a restraining bolt shot onto it.
Vader caught his son in his arms as the Force yawned in a void that sucked at his very soul, sudden emptiness taking the space where Luke’s power had just been. He kept himself steady, feeding the Dark with his anger at Kenobi for stealing Luke, for allowing his son to be so untrained at such an advanced age. Perhaps one, two minutes had passed. He examined his son’s signature closely, searching for damage. Overstretching oneself could lead to—there. Luke drifted just outside the realm of human consciousness. Lost in the Light.
He nudged the boy’s mind closer to his body—overstretched, it was ill-fitting now and rattled just out of place—and adjusted him in his arms. He strode across the landing pad to the lambda shuttle waiting. Once inside, he set Luke carefully in the co-pilot’s chair and fastened the crash webbing around his son’s limp form before starting it up.
The boy would not awaken for hours, and he would not be in his right mind for days.
Vader angled the shuttle towards the docking bay in his private hangar.
Without the other Rebel pilots to use as leverage, it would be more difficult—although not impossible—to turn his son, but these circumstances could prove fortuitous as well.
The only necessary precaution he required was to stay as far from his Master as possible until Luke was recovered.
Until then, his son was his to use to his own ends. Out of his mind, on a hair trigger with one foot in the cosmic flow of the Force, he was a weapon to aim, easily manipulated.
All Vader had to do was decide how best to use him.
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Vader watched Luke sleep as long as he could.
The boy’s face was peaceful most of the time, features slack, as he lay in bed in the quarters Vader had had prepared for him. Vader traced them when the urge overcame him, gently touching the rise of his son’s cheek and the curve of his nose. Padme’s nose. His own chin. If they were open, Vader would see his own eyes staring back at him. His old eyes. They had been yellow for two decades now, and Luke, from what Vader could tell in holos, wore them differently anyway.
But when Vader used the Dark, just to see the boy’s reaction, he watched Luke’s face twitch in displeasure. And felt the quick death of an Ensign several floors below. Uncoordinated. His son was not a well-aimed weapon.
Unfortunately, Piett called him to the bridge after a mere handful of hours. Vader could have stayed at his son’s side for many hours more, without needing any other way to pass the time, but, reluctantly, he left. Not even his crew could know the true importance of the boy. Not yet. One day, they would all know.
Luke would ensure it.