Post by crystalcat on May 29, 2007 20:42:19 GMT -5
Luke lay his unconscious father gently down upon the boarding ramp of the shuttle he
intended to commandeer. He smiled weakly, glad the old man had finally found some measure of
peace, but worried all the same (although worry was not something a Jedi should indulge in, he
knew) that his efforts to save his body - as well as his soul - would all be in vain.
He tossed the dark helmet inside, then reached down and, grasping the cyborg beneath his
massive shoulders, tugged him roughly into the ship, his own tendons straining from the effort.
Once inside, he snapped the door closed, then ran to get the first aid kit, fumbling through it for the
oxygen mask, which he quickly slipped over his father’s scarred head before dashing off to the
cockpit.
He only barely made it away before the station blew. But close was good enough; it was
hardly the first time Luke had gotten the back end of his ship scorched. Setting the controls on
automatic, he scaled back on the acceleration and returned to his father’s side.
Anakin lay motionless on the floor in the same position Luke had left him. For a moment,
fear pierced the younger man’s heart, then he breathed slowly out. His father was not dead; not yet.
He could feel his life through the Force. He knelt down with his hand on the breastplate of the
breath suit, trying to piece together his options. The old man needed medical attention badly; the
oxygen mask was only a temporary solution at best. But he knew if he delivered the patient to the
rebel sickbay, he would only be saving his father for an inevitable execution. A close examination
of the suit controls told him what his father had no doubt known all along: they were shorted out.
The suit would do him no good whatsoever; in fact, it had basically become a deathtrap; a normal
person would have suffocated in it. And I had to tell him he’d die if the mask came off, he
remembered with chagrin.
It was then the idea came to him, though he wasn’t sure it would be possible. And even if it
were possible, it might not work. Still, the suit was no good, and the suit weighed a fair amount. He
peered curiously at its fastenings.
Twenty minutes later he had freed his father from his prison of twenty-four years and sat
staring in shock at the mangled wreck of his body. Virtually nothing but a head and torso with
crudely mechanical limbs attached, he still wore a thermal body suit. And though Luke was sure
that no longer functioned any more than did the breath suit, he reasoned it did some good by virtue
of being a wrapping. Nevertheless, as he lifted Anakin into a bunk, the older man began to shiver
violently. Luke piled four blankets on him, then returned to the cockpit, his plan formed.
“Sky base, this is zero-one-alpha,” he radioed as he keyed in his clearance code. “Request a
medical capsule be standing by.”
“Luke, are you okay?” his flight coordinator asked, worry edging his voice.
“I’m fine,” he replied. “But I’ve got a former prisoner of the Empire with me who isn’t.”
“Copy, zero-one-alpha,” came the reply. “You are cleared for emergency approach.”
“Can you take me in on automatic?” Luke asked. “I need to get back to him.”
He waited until he felt the computer take over, then dashed back into the bowels of the ship,
frantically searching for a place to hide the remains of the breath suit. Nothing presented itself. He
looked again. Finally, hearing the landing gear lock in place, he settled for shoving it into three
crewmen’s lockers. He’d just returned to his father’s side when the hatchway slid open and the
medteam rushed in.
They were as horrified by what they saw as he had been. And none of them suspected the
patient’s identity, he could tell. Darth Vader had been faceless. This man still had a face, albeit a
badly scarred one. They lifted him gently into the capsule and bore him quickly off to sickbay.
“Who is he?” Admiral Ackbar inquired during his debriefing. “Do you know?”
“Yes,” Luke replied, thinking, Here it comes. Do they know Darth Vader’s real name
or not? He still wasn’t even sure if his uncle had known or not, and there was no way to ask him
now. “He’s my father, Anakin Skywalker.”
The stunned silence following his statement caused Luke to fear the worst. But his fear
turned to puzzlement when Mon Mothma asked, “Anakin Skywalker was your father?” her voice
quiet, but obviously incredulous. “Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure,” he replied. As if I didn’t know, he thought, perplexed. But their
next question taught him he still had a long way to go before he lost all of his cockiness.
“Who was your mother, then?” Ackbar inquired.
“I ... I don’t know,” he was forced to admit, quickly explaining that he’d lived with his
father’s family his entire life. He was sure Leia knew their mother’s identity, but he didn’t think it
his place to reveal their relationship. She would do that in time if she chose.
“Is it possible you could be mistaken, then?” the admiral pressed.
“I’m not mistaken,” Luke assured them.
The sharp looks exchanged by the others - those old enough to have lived through the
dawning of the Empire - finally became too much for his curiosity to be contained.
“Why?” he asked pointedly.
Mon Mothma took a deep breath, glanced at the others around the table, and said, “Luke,
Anakin Skywalker was a Jedi Knight.”
Her statement, delivered as if it should be self-explanatory, did not help Luke’s
understanding in the least.
“Yes,” he replied evenly. “I’m aware of that. In fact, that was the initial reason I chose that
path for myself; to follow in my father’s footsteps.” The confusion he sensed from a few of the
others in the room - those too young to remember the old republic - emboldened him to add, “I’ve
never hidden my family name from any of you; didn’t you think there might be some relationship?”
“Yes, of course we did,” Ackbar admitted. “But - and I’m sure I speak for the others here
who remember the Jedi Order of the republic - we assumed he was probably an uncle, at most.”
As he spoke, Mon Mothma seemed to come to some decision.
“Luke, the knights of the old republic were celibate,” she said bluntly, adding, “At least they
claimed to be.”
It took a moment for the word to sink into Luke’s consciousness.
“Celibate?” he whispered.
Wedge, who was sitting next to him, quipped, “You want to re-think becoming one?”
quickly followed by, “Sorry,” at the shocked glances he received.
Luke, however, was now trying to fully grasp the concerns of those in the room. Would they
relate his father’s disregard of the Jedi Order’s rules to his fall and realize his identity? For that
matter, was his desire to have a family related to his fall? There seemed to be more to the matter
than simply a case of disillusionment over an order which hadn’t existed in 24 years. Or would they
now blame the order itself for the republic’s fall, and would that affect his ability to re-build it? His
head spun with the possibilities, compounded by the fact that he couldn’t simply ask; he was certain
that many of them, at least, weren’t sure of the reason behind their reaction themselves.
“Obi-Wan never mentioned that to me,” he told them, wondering, How many other things
didn’t he say? “However, I refuse to agree that it’s wrong for me to exist.”
Mothma was taken aback.
“I never meant to imply that, Luke,” she told him, sounding somewhat injured.
“The old order may have had celibacy as one of its tenets,” he said. “But obviously my
father, at least, did not hold to that. When ... if ... he recovers, you can ask him about it, if you
feel it’s necessary. But I can assure you that, as of right now, I have no intention of carrying on that
tradition with the new order.” He glanced meaningfully at Wedge, who smirked back as no one was
looking at him at the moment. “If you will excuse me, I’d like to look in on him to see how he’s
doing.”
He strode from the room without waiting for a dismissal, and no one stopped him. But
Mothma’s bombshell repeated itself in his mind as he made his way to the deck that housed the sick
bay. Why hadn’t Obi-Wan told him?
He stopped in an empty section of corridor and quieted himself, hoping to draw out the old
Jedi’s Force ghost once again for an explanation, but only silence greeted him. It occurred to him
that, since the tide of war had turned, he might not see Ben’s ghost again. He was still
contemplating that possibility when he got to sick bay.
“I knew the Empire practiced atrocities,” the doctor on duty informed him, “But I never
really expected to be faced with treating someone who’d been through them. I don’t know why; I
suppose because I never expected anyone to survive their methods.”
“Then he will survive?” Luke asked hopefully.
“I believe so,” the man answered. “We have him in a bacta tank now, more to treat the
shock than anything. Most of his worst injuries are quite old. Unfortunately, they’ve been
compounded over the years by whatever means was used to compensate for them. I still can’t
believe the method that was used to attach his artificial limbs.” He shuddered. “And I doubt his
lungs fared much better.”
“Will he ever be able to breathe without an oxygen generator?” Luke asked pointedly.
“I’m hopeful that he will,” was the answer. “If he hadn’t been kept on some kind of
substandard equipment for the last 20 years, I’d say absolutely. The technology’s existed to repair
that for some time. The sad thing it, it existed 20 years ago. I just can’t believe anyone would deny
it to someone. But then I can’t believe anyone would do what’s been done to him in the first place.”
“The Emperor used it to control him,” Luke said simply.
The doctor’s face told him what he thought of that.
Luke was still not prepared for the sight of his limbless father floating in the bacta tank. He
looked, Luke thought, for all intents and purposes like a long-dead preserved specimen of some
unknown species.
“He’s been unconscious since you brought him in,” the doctor related, “although his vital
signs are strong.”
Luke closed his eyes to see if he could find his father in the Force, and felt the barest touch of
his presence, though it seemed far away.
“We plan to keep him in the bacta tank overnight,” the doctor said.
Luke nodded.
Ten minutes later he had taken off in the Imperial shuttle he’d arrived in. When he’d first
arrived, he’d left orders that no one was to disturb the craft in his absence; since he’d known at the
outset that he’d be returning to Endor. At least, that was what he’d told them, anyhow. What had
most concerned him was keeping the Vader suit from being discovered. So far, at least, no one
seemed to suspect that Anakin Skywalker and Darth Vader were one in the same. Unless, of course,
Mon Mothma jumped to that conclusion based on his father’s apparent disregard of a tenet she
seemed to hold dear. Was it significant or not? It wasn’t something he felt he could examine
objectively.
The shuttle controls shook ever so slightly beneath his fingers as he entered the atmosphere.
The course to the Imperial outpost on which his father had met him was still encoded into the
onboard computer’s memory, but that wasn’t his destination.
“Did you find anything, Artoo?” he asked the small droid who’d been his companion since
he’d left Tatooine.
The astromech whistled affirmatively in response, and displayed the coordinates on Luke’s
screen.
“Let’s get this over with, then,” he said, preparing for the landing.
It was dark by the time he’d gotten everything ready. The suit was laid out like a body on a
pallet of combustible-soaked wood. He gazed upon it, thinking of the years his father had spent as a
prisoner within it - unnecessarily, according to the ship’s doctor. It would have been more fitting
had his father been able to attend the ceremonial burning with him - for that’s what this was - but he
couldn’t risk the suit being discovered while he waited. With a sigh, he lowered his flaming torch to
the mound. The wood took fire and the suit began to smoke. The vapor drifted skyward, towards
the stars ...
He found his sister later, still celebrating in the Ewok village with Han. Knowing her history
with Vader, he wasn’t sure how she would react to finding out Anakin Skywalker still lived, for all
that he had renounced the dark side and saved Luke’s life. So he said nothing about it, feeling this
was not the time or the place for such a discussion anyhow. He smiled as Han led Leia off to greet
some other just-arrived pilots.
A glimmer of light at the edge of the woods caught his attention. He looked up, mildly
surprised to see Ben standing there. After a moment, Luke realized that Master Yoda was standing
with him. Luke smiled and started to walk up to them, but something - he wasn’t quite sure what -
held him back. But when he saw the third figure appear, he understood.
Unlike Yoda and Ben, the man with them was quite young, at least as young as Luke. But
even more than that, he seemed ... different from them somehow. Without knowing how he knew,
for he’d never seen a picture of his father as an adult, Luke realized the man was Anakin Skywalker.
Ostensibly, his being here should have indicated that he’d passed away on the ship, but Luke knew
this wasn’t the case; he’d have felt it if he had. The image before him was not a ghost or a memory.
It was a dream...
But it was not Luke’s dream.
He smiled and walked back to join the others at the party.
intended to commandeer. He smiled weakly, glad the old man had finally found some measure of
peace, but worried all the same (although worry was not something a Jedi should indulge in, he
knew) that his efforts to save his body - as well as his soul - would all be in vain.
He tossed the dark helmet inside, then reached down and, grasping the cyborg beneath his
massive shoulders, tugged him roughly into the ship, his own tendons straining from the effort.
Once inside, he snapped the door closed, then ran to get the first aid kit, fumbling through it for the
oxygen mask, which he quickly slipped over his father’s scarred head before dashing off to the
cockpit.
He only barely made it away before the station blew. But close was good enough; it was
hardly the first time Luke had gotten the back end of his ship scorched. Setting the controls on
automatic, he scaled back on the acceleration and returned to his father’s side.
Anakin lay motionless on the floor in the same position Luke had left him. For a moment,
fear pierced the younger man’s heart, then he breathed slowly out. His father was not dead; not yet.
He could feel his life through the Force. He knelt down with his hand on the breastplate of the
breath suit, trying to piece together his options. The old man needed medical attention badly; the
oxygen mask was only a temporary solution at best. But he knew if he delivered the patient to the
rebel sickbay, he would only be saving his father for an inevitable execution. A close examination
of the suit controls told him what his father had no doubt known all along: they were shorted out.
The suit would do him no good whatsoever; in fact, it had basically become a deathtrap; a normal
person would have suffocated in it. And I had to tell him he’d die if the mask came off, he
remembered with chagrin.
It was then the idea came to him, though he wasn’t sure it would be possible. And even if it
were possible, it might not work. Still, the suit was no good, and the suit weighed a fair amount. He
peered curiously at its fastenings.
Twenty minutes later he had freed his father from his prison of twenty-four years and sat
staring in shock at the mangled wreck of his body. Virtually nothing but a head and torso with
crudely mechanical limbs attached, he still wore a thermal body suit. And though Luke was sure
that no longer functioned any more than did the breath suit, he reasoned it did some good by virtue
of being a wrapping. Nevertheless, as he lifted Anakin into a bunk, the older man began to shiver
violently. Luke piled four blankets on him, then returned to the cockpit, his plan formed.
“Sky base, this is zero-one-alpha,” he radioed as he keyed in his clearance code. “Request a
medical capsule be standing by.”
“Luke, are you okay?” his flight coordinator asked, worry edging his voice.
“I’m fine,” he replied. “But I’ve got a former prisoner of the Empire with me who isn’t.”
“Copy, zero-one-alpha,” came the reply. “You are cleared for emergency approach.”
“Can you take me in on automatic?” Luke asked. “I need to get back to him.”
He waited until he felt the computer take over, then dashed back into the bowels of the ship,
frantically searching for a place to hide the remains of the breath suit. Nothing presented itself. He
looked again. Finally, hearing the landing gear lock in place, he settled for shoving it into three
crewmen’s lockers. He’d just returned to his father’s side when the hatchway slid open and the
medteam rushed in.
They were as horrified by what they saw as he had been. And none of them suspected the
patient’s identity, he could tell. Darth Vader had been faceless. This man still had a face, albeit a
badly scarred one. They lifted him gently into the capsule and bore him quickly off to sickbay.
“Who is he?” Admiral Ackbar inquired during his debriefing. “Do you know?”
“Yes,” Luke replied, thinking, Here it comes. Do they know Darth Vader’s real name
or not? He still wasn’t even sure if his uncle had known or not, and there was no way to ask him
now. “He’s my father, Anakin Skywalker.”
The stunned silence following his statement caused Luke to fear the worst. But his fear
turned to puzzlement when Mon Mothma asked, “Anakin Skywalker was your father?” her voice
quiet, but obviously incredulous. “Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure,” he replied. As if I didn’t know, he thought, perplexed. But their
next question taught him he still had a long way to go before he lost all of his cockiness.
“Who was your mother, then?” Ackbar inquired.
“I ... I don’t know,” he was forced to admit, quickly explaining that he’d lived with his
father’s family his entire life. He was sure Leia knew their mother’s identity, but he didn’t think it
his place to reveal their relationship. She would do that in time if she chose.
“Is it possible you could be mistaken, then?” the admiral pressed.
“I’m not mistaken,” Luke assured them.
The sharp looks exchanged by the others - those old enough to have lived through the
dawning of the Empire - finally became too much for his curiosity to be contained.
“Why?” he asked pointedly.
Mon Mothma took a deep breath, glanced at the others around the table, and said, “Luke,
Anakin Skywalker was a Jedi Knight.”
Her statement, delivered as if it should be self-explanatory, did not help Luke’s
understanding in the least.
“Yes,” he replied evenly. “I’m aware of that. In fact, that was the initial reason I chose that
path for myself; to follow in my father’s footsteps.” The confusion he sensed from a few of the
others in the room - those too young to remember the old republic - emboldened him to add, “I’ve
never hidden my family name from any of you; didn’t you think there might be some relationship?”
“Yes, of course we did,” Ackbar admitted. “But - and I’m sure I speak for the others here
who remember the Jedi Order of the republic - we assumed he was probably an uncle, at most.”
As he spoke, Mon Mothma seemed to come to some decision.
“Luke, the knights of the old republic were celibate,” she said bluntly, adding, “At least they
claimed to be.”
It took a moment for the word to sink into Luke’s consciousness.
“Celibate?” he whispered.
Wedge, who was sitting next to him, quipped, “You want to re-think becoming one?”
quickly followed by, “Sorry,” at the shocked glances he received.
Luke, however, was now trying to fully grasp the concerns of those in the room. Would they
relate his father’s disregard of the Jedi Order’s rules to his fall and realize his identity? For that
matter, was his desire to have a family related to his fall? There seemed to be more to the matter
than simply a case of disillusionment over an order which hadn’t existed in 24 years. Or would they
now blame the order itself for the republic’s fall, and would that affect his ability to re-build it? His
head spun with the possibilities, compounded by the fact that he couldn’t simply ask; he was certain
that many of them, at least, weren’t sure of the reason behind their reaction themselves.
“Obi-Wan never mentioned that to me,” he told them, wondering, How many other things
didn’t he say? “However, I refuse to agree that it’s wrong for me to exist.”
Mothma was taken aback.
“I never meant to imply that, Luke,” she told him, sounding somewhat injured.
“The old order may have had celibacy as one of its tenets,” he said. “But obviously my
father, at least, did not hold to that. When ... if ... he recovers, you can ask him about it, if you
feel it’s necessary. But I can assure you that, as of right now, I have no intention of carrying on that
tradition with the new order.” He glanced meaningfully at Wedge, who smirked back as no one was
looking at him at the moment. “If you will excuse me, I’d like to look in on him to see how he’s
doing.”
He strode from the room without waiting for a dismissal, and no one stopped him. But
Mothma’s bombshell repeated itself in his mind as he made his way to the deck that housed the sick
bay. Why hadn’t Obi-Wan told him?
He stopped in an empty section of corridor and quieted himself, hoping to draw out the old
Jedi’s Force ghost once again for an explanation, but only silence greeted him. It occurred to him
that, since the tide of war had turned, he might not see Ben’s ghost again. He was still
contemplating that possibility when he got to sick bay.
“I knew the Empire practiced atrocities,” the doctor on duty informed him, “But I never
really expected to be faced with treating someone who’d been through them. I don’t know why; I
suppose because I never expected anyone to survive their methods.”
“Then he will survive?” Luke asked hopefully.
“I believe so,” the man answered. “We have him in a bacta tank now, more to treat the
shock than anything. Most of his worst injuries are quite old. Unfortunately, they’ve been
compounded over the years by whatever means was used to compensate for them. I still can’t
believe the method that was used to attach his artificial limbs.” He shuddered. “And I doubt his
lungs fared much better.”
“Will he ever be able to breathe without an oxygen generator?” Luke asked pointedly.
“I’m hopeful that he will,” was the answer. “If he hadn’t been kept on some kind of
substandard equipment for the last 20 years, I’d say absolutely. The technology’s existed to repair
that for some time. The sad thing it, it existed 20 years ago. I just can’t believe anyone would deny
it to someone. But then I can’t believe anyone would do what’s been done to him in the first place.”
“The Emperor used it to control him,” Luke said simply.
The doctor’s face told him what he thought of that.
Luke was still not prepared for the sight of his limbless father floating in the bacta tank. He
looked, Luke thought, for all intents and purposes like a long-dead preserved specimen of some
unknown species.
“He’s been unconscious since you brought him in,” the doctor related, “although his vital
signs are strong.”
Luke closed his eyes to see if he could find his father in the Force, and felt the barest touch of
his presence, though it seemed far away.
“We plan to keep him in the bacta tank overnight,” the doctor said.
Luke nodded.
Ten minutes later he had taken off in the Imperial shuttle he’d arrived in. When he’d first
arrived, he’d left orders that no one was to disturb the craft in his absence; since he’d known at the
outset that he’d be returning to Endor. At least, that was what he’d told them, anyhow. What had
most concerned him was keeping the Vader suit from being discovered. So far, at least, no one
seemed to suspect that Anakin Skywalker and Darth Vader were one in the same. Unless, of course,
Mon Mothma jumped to that conclusion based on his father’s apparent disregard of a tenet she
seemed to hold dear. Was it significant or not? It wasn’t something he felt he could examine
objectively.
The shuttle controls shook ever so slightly beneath his fingers as he entered the atmosphere.
The course to the Imperial outpost on which his father had met him was still encoded into the
onboard computer’s memory, but that wasn’t his destination.
“Did you find anything, Artoo?” he asked the small droid who’d been his companion since
he’d left Tatooine.
The astromech whistled affirmatively in response, and displayed the coordinates on Luke’s
screen.
“Let’s get this over with, then,” he said, preparing for the landing.
It was dark by the time he’d gotten everything ready. The suit was laid out like a body on a
pallet of combustible-soaked wood. He gazed upon it, thinking of the years his father had spent as a
prisoner within it - unnecessarily, according to the ship’s doctor. It would have been more fitting
had his father been able to attend the ceremonial burning with him - for that’s what this was - but he
couldn’t risk the suit being discovered while he waited. With a sigh, he lowered his flaming torch to
the mound. The wood took fire and the suit began to smoke. The vapor drifted skyward, towards
the stars ...
He found his sister later, still celebrating in the Ewok village with Han. Knowing her history
with Vader, he wasn’t sure how she would react to finding out Anakin Skywalker still lived, for all
that he had renounced the dark side and saved Luke’s life. So he said nothing about it, feeling this
was not the time or the place for such a discussion anyhow. He smiled as Han led Leia off to greet
some other just-arrived pilots.
A glimmer of light at the edge of the woods caught his attention. He looked up, mildly
surprised to see Ben standing there. After a moment, Luke realized that Master Yoda was standing
with him. Luke smiled and started to walk up to them, but something - he wasn’t quite sure what -
held him back. But when he saw the third figure appear, he understood.
Unlike Yoda and Ben, the man with them was quite young, at least as young as Luke. But
even more than that, he seemed ... different from them somehow. Without knowing how he knew,
for he’d never seen a picture of his father as an adult, Luke realized the man was Anakin Skywalker.
Ostensibly, his being here should have indicated that he’d passed away on the ship, but Luke knew
this wasn’t the case; he’d have felt it if he had. The image before him was not a ghost or a memory.
It was a dream...
But it was not Luke’s dream.
He smiled and walked back to join the others at the party.
