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When the door slid open, water vapor spilled into the corridor like steam from a pot.
Vader stepped into his quarters, shutting the door behind him, careful not to let too much of the cold air escape. His son was slumbering two rooms away, but a drastic change in temperature could rip him from sleep harmfully fast, and that was a risk his father wouldn't take.
These were delicate matters, after all.
Lifting a hand, he used the Force to manipulate the dial on the thermostat across the room, raising the temperature imperceptibly, a fraction of a notch at a time. He made quick work of disrobing himself with his other hand meanwhile; helmet and gauntlets, cape and doublet all set aside, skin bared to the discomfort of the chilled room.
Even like this, in his human form, the urge to find somewhere dark and warm to curl up and sleep overcame him. But Vader shoved the feeling away, focusing instead on the thermostat. He still had ten degrees to go before he could retrieve his son.
When the time came, Vader entered his own sleeping chamber, and through it, Luke's. The cradle displayed in the center of the room beckoned him over icy floors, a lone altar in an empty shrine, illuminated by the twinkling lights of distant stars behind it, shining through foggy viewports.
His son lay where he left him, buried beneath crimson blankets, thick and heavy to preserve his body heat. The hatchling was curled into a ball, scales the shade of molten gold, a color that evoked a bottomless hunger within him. An ancient greed. A terrible, covetous love.
He had hoarded his son away as dragons had done since the dawn of time.
As the chill continued to seep from the room, Vader gently scooped the little bundle into his arms, pressing him to his chest, skin to scales. His dragonling didn't stir, still too cold to begin to wake, but that was just as well. It would likely be hours before his induced hibernation reached its end, after all.
Child in hand, he left the frigid nursery to the warmer rooms beyond, rocking Luke as he went. The heat of his body and scent of his skin would help to rouse the youngling as he thawed, and Vader had never turned down an opportunity to hold his son, besides. Too many of these priceless moments had already been stolen from him.
If there was one thing a dragon could not forgive, it was theft.
The fog had melted away to condensation and dripped down the length of the viewports by the time his hatchling began to wake. Vader stroked the underside of the boy's narrow jaw, soothing the ache of losing his milk teeth, remembering the long days after Mustafar — how young he'd been, how fiercely his own gums had throbbed, the isolation of his castle worsening the pain; the lothkitten-sized claw of a hatchling a poor masseur of his own jaw.
Luke would not suffer as he had. The aches and pains of his stiff muscles would be rubbed and massaged away, one by one, until his body was loose and relaxed once more. A week of hibernating held no danger of muscle atrophy or memory loss, but he could sense through the Force that the boy was still a little dazed, his tail firm like a board, the blood not quite circulating properly just yet.
"Good morning," he said, smiling as those sky-blue eyes blinked up at him, still hazy with sleep. "Someone had a good nap, I see."
The dragonling yawned, palm-sized jaw falling open to reveal rows of sharp little teeth, some looser than others. The boy's head swiveled on his long neck as he glanced around the room, his curiosity a bracing breeze through the Force, carrying the question that popped into his golden little head the moment he first woke.
"You've been sleeping all afternoon," Vader lied, bending down to kiss his son's glimmering scales. "I bet you worked up quite an appetite, sleeping through your lunch like that."
At the mention of food, Luke's doubt and disbelief were washed away, replaced only with the desperate hunger his father knew so well.
Let the few remaining dragons of this galaxy keep their paltry hoards of jewels and gems, while they still could.
Vader had all the gold he needed.