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The compacted ice that made up the surrounding tunnels groaned in protest, shards and dust crumbling from the ceiling from the force of the bombardment overhead. The ground rattled to the rhythm of the blasts, the vibration sending Luke tumbling to his knees and jarring his bones, teeth clacking from impact. He was quick to scramble to his feet and brace against the wall as another rebel rounded the corner and dashed in his direction.
“Skywalker!” she shouted. The ground shook again, nearly causing her to collapse if it wasn’t for the Jedi’s quick reflexes. He darted a hand out, bracing her elbow as the ice gave another moan of protest. “We need to get to the hangar. All other exits have been blocked.” Nodding, Luke hauled her upright and they took off towards the hanger.
The Empire was here. They’d found them.
“It’s the Executor,” she huffed without further explanation, a look of pity crossing her otherwise tense features. Everyone knew about the bounty, everyone knew what the sight of that ship meant. Every rebel knew that their young Jedi was the galaxy’s most wanted individual.
Vader was here. Vader had found him.
As if in greeting, a vacuum of cold space in the Force unfurled, revealing itself to Luke’s unskilled senses. Where there had once been nothing of note, Luke now realized there was the bottomless presence of none other than the Dark Lord himself. The Sith’s power had hidden from him and gradually pushed his significantly weaker and untrained awareness into a contained bubble until the time was right.
Luke grit his teeth, feet pounding faster on the metal grates lining the floor as he picked up the pace. He strengthened his mental shields and tried to ignore the feeling of a predator peering at him from distant shadows. The chase had started. “I need a ship. I’ll lead them away.”
The woman, her name slipping through his mind’s fingers amidst the chaos, didn’t bother to encourage him to do otherwise. When Luke’s bounty had inexplicably been changed from Alive Only to Dead or Alive and was accompanied by a sizable increase in payout it had been glaringly apparent that the Jedi’s time with the Alliance was going to be limited at best. Confused and numbly hurt, Luke had futilely tried to come to terms with this new development. There was no reason for him to feel anything other than unsurprised. He had destroyed the Death Star. He was a decorated member of the Alliance. He was a Jedi. He was the son of…
He tried not to overthink it - or think of it at all. He had more than earned the Empire’s ire. That was all there was to consider. He shouldn’t care that the Empire had come to the logical conclusion that Skywalker was better off dead.
As they rounded the corner into the hanger, there was no more time to dwell on the impending catastrophe that was hunting him, prowling ever closer. Blaster bolts rained down on them from across the expansive room, debris exploding outwards and raining icy shrapnel down on them.
“Get down!” another rebel shouted from behind cover. They had set up a loose barricade out of shipping crates. A handful of men were doing a lousy job of keeping the snowtroopers from advancing past the far door and out into the broader expanse of the main hangar. “We’ll hold them off. Get to a ship while you still can!”
Luke’s first instinct was to argue. He wasn’t one to back away from a fight, but it was then that an arm snaked around him and tugged him into a crouch and into the general direction of Red Squadron. To his relief he could see that all of his squadmates had already taken off. A quick dip into the currents of the Force confirmed that they were already airborne and making their way out of atmo, racing against time and the looming SSD and its entourage of accompanying Star Destroyers.
He hadn’t stopped to think about what else was waiting for him there. Caught off guard, crashing waves of bone-chilling Force presence nearly brought him to his knees, the touch not purposely malicious but the freezing cold of it was deadly regardless of its current intent.
He was close. He was horrifyingly close. How had he gotten here so fast?
“Luke, we gotta-!”
Luke.
He wasn’t sure if the rumbling was in the walls or just his head, the voice shattering what little remained of his mental shields and bouncing around in his skull, filling every nook and cranny of his awareness. This time he did tumble to his knees, Luke’s stomach twisting into knots and clenching unbearably tight in fear.
I’m not ready for this, the young Jedi thought frantically to himself. This is too soon. I can’t do this. I can’t see him.
Counterintuitively, Luke’s head whipped side to side, eyes scanning his surroundings. His gaze landed on the far door where snowtroopers were being pushed aside, a flash of black breaking up the monotonous white.
“Death troopers,” Luke said, sighing in misplaced relief. The accompanying rebel woman looked at him questioningly as she hauled him to his feet. “Just Death troopers.”
“Just Death troopers, huh?” she grunted, trying to force Luke’s feet back into motion towards the ships. “Our guys are gonna be dead in seconds. We gotta go - now.”
As if awoken from a spell, Luke jerked upright and into motion. “I have to help them.”
Racing back towards the crates, Luke rolled to cover just as a handful of Death troopers let loose a volley of blaster fire.Panting, the woman followed, dropping down beside him just in time.Someone in front of their position shouted before falling silent.
Lightsaber in hand, Luke leapt up to greet the most recent round of blaster bolts, yellow-golden blade snapping in front of his face and sending a shot racing back towards the trooper that had fired it. One, two, three, four shots found their marks, the troopers dropping to the floor or ducking behind cover to tend to wounds. A trooper shouted at the sight of the lightsaber, finger pointed in Luke’s direction. “Focus fire!”
Luke grinned, confidence flooding back to him, muscles relaxing and instinct taking over. This he could do.
Shots peppered the area that he stood but none managed to strike their target. Bodies of troopers, mostly donned in white, dropped lifelessly to the floor. The Death troopers proved to be more of a challenge.
A thermal detonator soared overhead. Luke caught it with the Force and sent it speeding back the way it came, the Death troopers stiffening in surprise.
A gloved hand reached out, the explosive stopping in mid air yet again. The fist clenched, the Force contracted, and the thermal detonator exploded. The fiery eruption was oddly contained, no fragments escaping a tightly wound sphere of energy. The fist dropped to the side, the ball of fire flinging itself at a support pillar and melting through the ice and metal. Part of the mouth of the cave leading outside collapsed, frightened gasps and screams echoing off the walls as escaping rebels scrambled to get around in the chaos.
Luke couldn’t be bothered with any of it.
Darth Vader stalked forward, thermal detonator dealt with and troopers already clambering to flank their commander. The behemoth of a man was indifferent to the violence around him, wading through it easily and falling into the flow of the blaster fire and explosions. Everything seemed to bend around him and throw itself at his mercy. The red blade dipped and wove through the air in the most deadly and beautiful of dances. Bolts meant to end the Dark Lord instead spun in the air and raced back to meet the rebels with stunning precision.
Watching a properly trained Force user was mesmerizing to all, but Luke watched with particularly rapt attention. It made Luke dizzy with disbelief when he realized just how far behind in his training he really was. Surely it was not possible for Luke to ever attain such skill. Vader was the best of the best and Luke could never hope to reach that level of mastery, not in a million years. It truly looked like dancing, the movements somehow both slow with measured intent and yet quick with practiced ease. It seemed as though Vader was enmeshed in the very fabric of the fight, knowing exactly where to be and when to be there to best bring about the most punishment on his foes.
Luke saw it now, the horrifying monstrosity that rebels had nightmares about. Darth Vader had his own section in the Alliance’s training handbook, with good reason. It was a notably short section, but not because of irrelevance. There was little that could be done to stop the man. Try fire, the booklet had suggested, or do what needs done to make sure your intel does not fall into enemy hands. There was a long list of confirmed abilities that Vader had showcased over the years, with an emphasis on his terrifying knack for pulling information directly from a person’s mind. Run, had been the overwhelming conclusion.
Unfortunately for the rebels guarding the entrance, there was no time to run. Vader made quick work of the nearest rebels, absently batting away blaster bolts as they shifted focus on him. One woman tried in vain to get a thermal detonator primed, only to be hoisted into the air by an invisible hand. She gagged and spit under the pressure on her windpipe, fingers dropping the grenade at her feet as she struggled to draw air.
Luke watched on in horror, frozen, as the woman dangled above the now rapidly beeping explosive. She was a safe distance away from Vader and his men, so the Dark Lord merely held her suspended as he finished off two more rebel soldiers. One dropped to his knees, decapitated head thunking down onto the cold floor beside his slowly slumping body. Another rebel made a horrifically wet splat as the two partially cauterized halves of his torso fell back on to a crate.
There were no calls to surrender, some far off place in Luke’s mind supplied. No attempts to end the bloodshed or offer mercy. Not as the thermal detonator exploded, tearing through the woman’s lower half and sending shrapnel through the heads of two nearby soldiers. Not when the woman, somehow still alive, started shrieking with what little strength she still had. Not when a boy only a few years younger than Luke tried to help her down from her spot dangling in the air, anything to get the screaming to stop, and was instead lifted into the air himself, head snapping forcefully to the side with a loud crack.
The boy’s body dropped heavily to the ground followed by what remained of the woman. Broken from his spell by the sound, Luke jolted back to awareness just in time to brace himself against another bone-rattling shake from the ground.
Nearly thrown off balance, there wasn’t time to bring his lightsaber up to protect himself from incoming blasts. A bolt tore through the air and with startling ease burned its way through the young Jedi’s fatigues and into the soft flesh of his abdomen.
“Luke!” his nearby rebel companion yelled. “I got ya! Don’t worry I’ve got you!”
Luke was struggling to understand why she was shouting, why his clothes felt so wet and his torso so cold. It wasn’t until he was clearly staring at the ceiling, no troopers in sight, that he realized that the shot hadn’t merely grazed him. There was fluid pooling in the inside of his jacket, trickling with alarming speed down his spine as he slowly collapsed back against the wall behind him. It took a frustrating amount of effort to prop himself high enough to watch the chaos carrying on around him.
Watching their very own Jedi fall before them, the rebels panicked. Most darted towards the center of the hanger, pushing futility towards the ships. They were cut down for their efforts. Vader’s lightsaber sizzled and snapped as it cut through limbs and sinew, the Dark Lord marching steadily onward. The bodies were strewn about with such a lack of care that the troopers were having a difficult time keeping up with their commander.
Is this man really my father? Luke couldn’t help but wonder, lightheaded and slowly being consumed by a fear and horror that was hard to quantify. It seemed impossible that Anakin Skywalker, the man he was so proud to call father, was standing before him now. Older members of the Alliance were only too happy to share grand stories about General Skywalker from back during the Clone Wars. What would they say now if they knew the truth? If they could see this monstrous man cut through rebels like wheat in a field? If they knew that he had cut off his son’s hand for reasons unknown to Luke before declaring himself family? Would they still feel the same about General Skywalker? Would they still feel the same about Luke?
Whatever the answer, Luke had never wanted to find out. The horror of it all was still far too much to process. Whatever glimmer of hope had sprouted was roughly torn out when Vader had switched gears and attempted to kill him on more than one occasion.Where once Vader had wanted an apprentice, now he wanted a dead Jedi. Luke wasn’t sure if it was his rejection that led Vader into this murderous mindset or if this was just the natural conclusion that a twisted mind would come to. Regardless, Luke knew what awaited him when the Dark Lord finally got his hands on him.
Surprisingly, Luke realized he had not been paying close attention to Vader’s movements, instead taking offhanded note of the blood pooling around his hips and coloring the snow and ice a pale pink. The man was not only making quick progress towards the fallen Jedi, but seemed to be mindlessly hacking his way in that singular direction. It was always hard to tell where the Sith was looking because of the mask, but in this case his intent was clear.
Luke.
“I gotcha,” a voice whispered, the rebel woman who had been accompanying him trying without success to get her arms under him. “We’ll get a ship and get out of here, get you to Home One to get patched up.”
“No,” Luke replied quickly, energy returning to him in the face of someone else’s imminent danger. He was losing blood far too fast. He wouldn’t make it out of atmosphere, let alone anywhere with the necessary equipment to save him. All they had at the base were leftover supplies from Hoth. “You need to get out of here. I’ll follow behind. Just go!”
Over her shoulder, Luke watched Vader raise a comlink to his mouthpiece, the behemoth's feet never stopping their treacherous path towards Luke. It was truly indescribable, watching a man larger than life hack his way single-minded towards Luke. To have someone’s entire focus, but not for anything pleasant. Soon after, the bombardment came to an abrupt halt.
“There’s no time. You need to go, now!” he shouted at her.
But it was too late. She noticed the Sith’s determined gait and pulled her blaster from its spot strapped to her hip. Just as Vader finished clipping the comlink back onto his belt, she pulled the trigger. Fingers numb and reflexes sluggish, Luke watched in tears as the bolt was sent careening back at the rebel. She went limp, body slumping over Luke’s where she was crouched protectively over him.
“Set for stun!” the rich baritone carried through the room. An odd time to start caring about lives, but Luke was in no position to give it much thought. The coldness in his body had crept to his limbs. His focus was gone, and with it his sense of self.
Cold. Everything was cold. The ground, the air, Luke’s very body, the swelling presence in the Force-
Luke! Focus! Look at me!
Explaining how things appeared in the Force was always difficult for Luke. How do you explain sight to someone who’s never seen? There are no truly accurate comparisons, But if pressed, Luke would compare Vader to a number of things, all happening at once. He was the whole of the ocean, moving freely of its own will and defying physics. It was vast and unknowable. Cold, dark, frigid in some ways but rushing with currents in others. He was a mountain, the whole of the universe mere vermin scuttling at the base of his towering height. Vader was the mightiest of storm clouds, eating up all the sky in all directions, blocking the light and any hope you might harbor of ever seeing anything else ever again. He was so immense and unfathomable that Luke could scarcely believe he had anything in common with this man, let alone anything as binding as blood.
He couldn’t do this again, Luke realized, panic lancing through him with what little strength he had left. His whole identity had been shaken more than he would ever admit to anyone. He didn’t want to know what kind of person Vader’s child was, and he certainly didn’t want to know what it would feel like to be killed by one’s own father.
Keep information out of enemy hands at all costs, the handbook had said. Luke had limited knowledge of Alliance secrets, but more than that he didn’t want to leave Vader with the satisfaction of his misery. Or, if mercy was on his side, Luke didn’t want to know if the complicated feelings surrounding filicide would follow him into whatever awaited him beyond the grave.
Hands shaking, Luke felt around for the woman’s blaster.
Nala, he thought absently, the name finally drifting to the forefront of his mind. Her name had been Nala.
His lightsaber had rolled somewhere out of sight when he had collapsed. Luckily for him, Nala had toppled over on top of him with her blaster clutched to her chest. Weeping, Luke grasped the barrel and tugged it loose.
And turned it on himself.
Luke! You will stop this at once!
The storm clouds thickened, the ocean rushed overtop of him, shrouding him in darkness every which way he looked. The waves roiled, lightning arced and crackled. All the vermin stopped their twittering to remain silent and listen to the mountain's words.
But not Luke. No, he was far beyond listening to anyone. Hope exists everywhere… except wherever Vader was. There was no escaping him, no running from the horror of the truth.
Listen to me!
The blaster jerked in his hands, the barrel tilting upwards towards the ceiling just as his finger pulled the trigger. Luke fought against the pull, throwing what little energy he still had into tugging the still smoking end back down towards his face.
“Help me Ben,” Luke begged. “Help me end this.” The fear was overwhelming. Luke couldn’t think of another way out and the helplessness of the situation was too much. Anything had to be better than this.
“Look at me Luke,” the last voice the young Jedi ever expected to hear whispered gently. “Just look at me, and let go.”
“I am looking at you,” Luke answered. His eyes were glued to Vader’s mask, now crouched before him. A gloved hand was wrapped tight around his, the blaster held immobile between them. Nala’s weight was being carefully shifted off of him, the Dark Lord’s free hand carefully exposing Luke’s wound. “I’m looking at you, and I’m afraid.”
“Get a medic, now,” Vader called over his shoulder. A trooper jerked into action, rushing towards the door.
“I need you to let go,” Luke whimpered, tugging futility at the blaster once again.
Vader froze, seeming to watch Luke closely for a moment, the sound of his respirator all that was left said between them. Somewhere far away from Luke, and yet not far enough, currents changed. Thunder quieted.
“Your fear, Luke. You need to let go of your fear. This is not the Jedi way.”
Stunned, Luke stared at his father, and the man stared back. The Force was no longer twisting and turning, but instead was hot and bright like Tatooine’s suns in a way he had never witnessed before. The enormous entity that was his father was still there, but instead of a force working against him, it was coaxing him into calmer eddies in the ripples of the Force, welcoming and clear as the dawn. The changes were hard to comprehend, but Luke wasn’t able to deny the bond connecting him to this powerful being. Somewhere in the distance thunder boomed, but not here. Not with Luke’s entire body going cold as the floor around him turned pink.
“Let go of the fear occupying your mind and focus on your connection to the living Force. Let it flow through you and anchor you to the life around you.” There was a sharp tug on their bond. “Focus on your connection to me, and let me guide you. Here you will stay - with me. I will handle the rest. There is no need to fear, my son.”
Too tired to argue, Luke sighed. “Okay,” he responded, head tilting back limply as he bled out in his father’s arms, curled against another being in the Force for the first - and likely last - time in his life.