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Three weeks.
The endless weeks where the leads had gone cold and the boy’s pain burned ceaselessly in the back of his mind. So much energy expended, so much damage done, and Vader had nothing to show for it except for the now-mutual bond that wouldn’t let him forget how close he had come.
The bond – unlike any he’d ever shared with Obi Wan or Ahsoka – was a living, breathing thing that ebbed and flowed with Luke’s moods. It demanded his attention, and yet every time he reached out it retreated. He had taken to ignoring it as best he could, unwilling to relive the moment of Luke’s rejection over and over.
In the three weeks since his son had chosen death over taking his father’s hand, Vader had learned that the connection he shared with Luke was most muted when the boy was awake and trying desperately to shield, and the most open when Luke slept and his emotions ran free. When Vader sensed Luke’s fear and pain harden into resolve over the course of several hours, he dismissed it as the aftermath of yet another nightmare. When the pitch and dynamic of the emotions bleeding across the bond began to intensify, he gritted his teeth and resolved to ignore it.
Until a wild burst of panic flashed into his mind as clearly as if Luke had been standing next to him and he could ignore it no longer. The intensity of what he’d sensed couldn’t be explained away by nightmares. This was proximity.
Luke was close – very close. He was almost certainly on Executor, but why? After the choice he had made on Bespin, why would he voluntarily come onto Vader’s flagship?
There was no response from Admiral Piett’s com channel, which added an extra layer of alarm to Vader’s already heightened nerves. He dispatched orders to the presiding bridge officer immediately – tractor in any ship attempting to depart, all weapons on board set for stun – and began to the follow the thread of the bond towards its source. For once, Luke didn’t retreat.
Vader was surprised to find himself outside the door to his own quarters, the boy’s presence shining so brightly he was nearly blind. He was more surprised, however, to open the door and find Luke cross-legged on the floor next to his normally-locked desk, folders and flimsies from the desk drawers scattered around him, with Admiral Piett unconscious nearby.
For a moment Vader stared, too shocked to speak. Luke’s hair was unkempt and the lines of his face were sharper than Vader remembered them – he had lost weight. The boy looked up slowly from the folder sitting closed in his lap. The harried look in his eyes eased slightly and the intensity of his presence over the bond ebbed, although a slight flush crept over his face under the weight of Vader’s gaze.
“I’d say there was a reasonable explanation for this,” Luke said nervously by way of greeting. “But we’d both know that was a lie.
Three thoughts crossed Vader’s mind all at once. The first was that Luke was here, his son was right here, in front of him, and he didn’t care why – didn’t care if the child was here for espionage, to sabotage his ship, or if he had been thrown into the wrong place at the wrong time by a malfunctioning navicomputer. He didn’t care. The second was that if he kept standing right where he was, right here with the closed door at his back, there was no way for Luke to get out, and he would stand here until the end of the galaxy if that meant that Luke would stay here, willingly or not. And the third was that a wounded, clearly exhausted rebel who appeared to be wearing sleep pants along with his boots and military-issue jacket had managed to infiltrate his flagship and make it all the way to his quarters and into his private files, so security could stand to be improved.
“Reasonable or not,” he finally said, “what is the explanation?”
Luke looked back down at the folder in his lap. Vader leaned forward to try and see what the boy had found, but couldn’t bring himself to move any closer. He didn’t want to give Luke an opening for getting around him and back out the door, and he didn’t want to see the boy flinch as he approached. Finally, Luke inclined his head towards Piett and said, “he’s fine, by the way. Just stunned.”
“I was not concerned.”
“You should have been,” Luke said, heat coloring his tone. “This is your ship. You’re responsible for her crew.”
“You are my primary concern at the moment. In any event, my orders were to take you alive, and I know you would not kill someone trying to take you alive.”
Luke’s eyes flashed and he squared his shoulders. “You don’t know me.”
“Perhaps not,” Vader conceded. “But I know that much.”
Luke slumped, staring down at the files scattered around him. “I wanted…no, I needed to understand…”
“Understand what?” Vader prompted.
“Everything,” Luke snapped. The venom in his voice was startling, although not unwarranted, and Vader was surprised by how distasteful he found it. “Everyone lied to me and everything I knew about who I am is wrong. And there’s no one I can ask about you, so I thought there might be something in here that would help me.”
“Whatever you need to know, you could have asked me.”
Luke looked away and began to pick at the corner of one of the flimsies nearby. “I didn’t want to ask you.”
“And yet here you are. You must have known that breaking into my quarters would be easier than breaking out.”
“I hoped my luck would hold long enough to get me in and out safely. And if it didn’t…” Luke sighed and gave a small shrug. “I thought if I could begin to understand all of this, whatever comes next would be worth it.”
Vader took a cautious step forward, watching for any indication that the boy would recoil or try to run. “What don’t you understand?”
Luke rubbed a hand – his left hand – over his eyes and pushed his hair back off of his forehead. “Anyone who’s ever told me anything about you…about who you were…said you were a great hero who fought for justice and democracy. Ben said you were a good friend. I don’t understand how someone like that becomes someone like you. I don’t know how to reconcile what everyone told me with who you are now.”
“There is nothing to reconcile. Those people knew me many years ago. And even the ones who knew me best never understood me as well as they thought they did.”
Luke stared at Vader, looking stricken. That was clearly not the answer he had hoped for. But Vader couldn’t give the boy false hope. He was not the bright-eyed, idealistic hero that Obi-Wan and the Rebels had undoubtedly filled his son’s head with.
Drawing a shaky breath, Luke gestured vaguely towards Vader. “So you’re…this is all there is to you? Nothing more?”
“What more do you want?”
“I don’t know.” Luke shook his head. “Something more. More than a weapon, more than the Emperor’s enforcer. I want you to be more than that.” His voice dropped, barely louder than a whisper. “And I want to be more to you than just a tool to take the throne.”
Vader stared at Luke for a long moment. The boy’s hands – he noted that Luke had been fitted with a prosthetic and resolved to check the mechanics as soon as possible – were fisted into the loose material of his sleep pants. His eyes were downcast, avoiding Vader’s gaze, but his shields were crumbling and his emotions were open and raw. Vader could sense no deception; only the same fear and pain he had been sensing for the past three weeks. But now the fear and pain were entwined with a deep well of need. It was almost enough to give Vader hope.
He cast his gaze over the pile of folders scattered around the floor, located the one he wanted, and nudged it towards Luke with a mental tug. Luke rested his hand on it and looked up at Vader.
“Open it.”
Luke opened the folder and began flipping pages. “This is…” His hands began to tremble. “It’s all me.”
Although Vader had taken care to erase as much information about Luke Skywalker as possible from public records, Imperial databases and the holonet, he had kept hard copies of everything. Security stills from the Death Star, from Cymoon and Nar Shadda, a holo of Luke and Leia Organa that had been recovered from Hoth, stills of Luke creeping through Cloud City with his blaster drawn, written training logs from his time in Grakkus’ clutches, a list of everything Luke had left behind in his quarters on Yavin IV and on Hoth, reports on everything Boba Fett had learned from the boy’s friends on Tatooine…Vader had memorized the contents of the entire folder.
Luke held up the holo of him and the princess reverently. “I thought I’d lost this,” he said to himself, then looked up at Vader. “Why do you have all this?”
“You already know why.”
Luke frowned. “You’ve been looking for me for a while. You needed this information to figure out how to get to me.”
“Half right, my son.” Vader took a few more steps forward and carefully knelt beside Luke. He trailed his fingers over the small pile of pictures, all printed onto flimsies before the digital copies were destroyed. “You have demonstrated an uncanny ability to slip through my fingers time and time again. I thought the contents of this file might be all I ever had of you. I tried to create, for myself, as complete a picture of you as I possibly could.”
Luke’s head dropped and his shoulders started to shake. “Is that true?”
“You know it is. You have always been more to me than a tool.”
Luke closed his eyes and dropped his face into his hands. “I’m so tired, Father. I’m tired of all of this.”
And although Vader wasn’t sorry for any of it, for everything that had transpired had brought them to this moment here, together, he still felt an uncomfortable twist in his heart as he watched his son trembling on the floor. He had thought the boy’s pain was worth it if it got him what he wanted. Perhaps it wasn’t.
Slowly, Vader put a hand on Luke’s slumped shoulder, steeling himself for a rejection that never came.