hisfathersimage | PSL: Naboo

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psl: nouskaiananki

PSL: Naboo

Luke ignored Vader for the rest of the trip.

For a moment, he had almost forgotten who and what he was dealing with. A totally self centred, self absorbed creature of darkness, boiled in rage and suffering who wanted him to convert to his way of thinking and start up a second reign of terror and horror after killing Palpatine.

And in aid of doing that, they were going... to Naboo?

He wasn't really sure why they were on their way there. It was his mother's home world. It was Palpatine's home world. It was a paradise of water and greenery that had produced something so rotten and evil that the galaxy heaved to try and dislodge it from itself.

He stands in the cockpit's doorway, nursing his stump in his left hand and watching hyperspace, preparing for the shock of dropping back out again.

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That's not a plan.

That's barely a thought of a plan.

"... okay." What the hell. He's chased worse ideas for less reason. "We follow the Force."

It worked out pretty well for Vader, and when it didn't, he still managed to claw something from it.

Save once.

Except Luke lived.

"Do you not feel it? In motion, something building, loke a gathering storm." Vader questions while ushering Luke up the ramp, the brown suitcase following along, Vader using his foot to press it against a wall out of the way.

"I can't feel much past you."

Yes. He felt it. Like a pressure building in his chest as he drew closer and closer to that moment on Bespin.

"There's a moment coming." Yes, he knows it. "A series of moments. Decisions. Bespin was one."

"We will work on that." Because he would need to. He has to want to, right?

"Yes. Though the Force is our path forward." Not whatever superweapon the Empire, and Palpatine, favored.

And it's their path, for now at least.

"I won't help put you on his throne," is what he ends up saying.

"I never planned to sit upon it." Help rule? Yes - but that's what he does (is supposed to do) now. Not be punished to serve under Moffs who may be a monster of Vader's own making but who he far far outranks. And who care for power first, peace and security second.

"I won't support the Empire. It's corrupt to the core. Evil. No one person should have power over everyone else. Not him. Not you." It takes and takes and gives nothing back but suffering.

"Come." Vader beckons Luke while he sits in the cockpit, beginning lift off procedures.

"What would put in it's place? The Emperor is dead. Now what do you do?"

"I don't know." And he's comfortable saying that. "I'm a farmboy from Tatooine and a pilot. I don't know what I don't know. I would want to back people I can trust to make those decisions. People who understand different cultures and economies and all that sort of thing. I grew up with the political system of 'Hutt controlled territory'."

"The Republic was rotting." He continues ushering Luke, into the copilot seat. "Your mother lived it, when they told her to tell her people to accept invasion and occupation by the Banking Clan, for months or longer. Weeks left then repairing the damage for the entirety of her term as queen." He stops, remembering. "Four years and beyond, to repair an invasion which lasted mere weeks."

He takes his seat. "You grew up under a muzzled Hutt system, I did not. And the Republic allowed it to continue, because they needed to access their hyperspace lanes. Care to guess who they sent to treat for that, despite multiple attempts at abduction?"

"I didn't say we should put back the system we had, did I?" He knows there were problems in the Republic, listening to Leia talk and rant and only half understanding her. "But the Empire is morally bankrupt, corrupt, cruel and designed mostly to spread misery and perpetuate suffering. It's the system of a Sith to empower himself. It can't stay."

"It doesn't need to be. This is not what I intended it to be." And he knew how much the Rebels idolized the late Republic, ignoring the massive problems with. "He wants it that way, but it needn't be."

"Dictatorships don't work." Leia had said that one often enough.

"You sound like your mother."

Vader's hands stay light on the controls. They don't always - there's marring on the right especially - but they are now.

"There was no difference in who ran the government the minute Palpatine declared himself Emperor or with the hour before. There was little difference two days before that, only slightly more six months before. The Republic was dying, hastened along by the machinations of Darth Plagius and Palpatine." Someday, someday Luke may come to understand how much a slight that was. "Yes, he and I delivered the death blow. But someone will have to take over once he is dead, or you will have your Rebellion and it's splinter groups, a hundred moffs, at least a few of the ISB, and countless warlords all fighting for the corpse."

Luke can hear what Vader's saying, but he can't believe that Palpatine's trampling of the galaxy and institutionalised cruelty is the better option. People who better understanding than him have plans for what will happen and no, he doesn't know them, doesn't understand them and he's okay with that.

"There's worse people to sound like."

"Indeed there are." He can entirely and without pause agree.

"I detest slavery Luke. I abhor the practice, and wish to scrub its stain from the galaxy. The anti-alien sentiment of the Empire should not be tolerated." Those are in Vader's opinion the biggest flaws in the Empire. "Then you have Moffs and Directors wishing to glut themselves on Imperial credits, some vanity project or superweapon nonsense, enslaving entire systems to mine the resources and feast while their people starve and riot." There's a shift in Vader - he has a captive audience for once, one he never needs concern himself with tattling to Palpatine, and he has decades in resentment in the misgovernance of the Empire and its leaders seeking to serve only themselves.

He really didn't like politicains. Hated most of them in fact.

"Which has poisoned the Imperial military forces. Seeing their Troopers as nothing but cogs to use and replace, not men who will bleed and die for leaders they believe in." He knows - its why his men are so frighteningly effective. "Casualties are simply a total number, not people."

"I fought the first and last battle of the Clone Wars. I am not blind as to the cost of war my son. I want my people to have peace, security, justice. It is why the Hutts are muzzled, even if I would rather have be removed altogether."

"You were a hero. You were my hero."

And Anakin Skywalker was still his hero. Even if the man was mostly gone, crushed under decades of pain and hate and despair.

There's not much else he can say. Vader has literally just said what's wrong with the Empire, but he still seems to want to support it, in some form.

The Hero Without Fear-

He could almost hear the holonet again.

-look a krayt in the eye and never even slow down.

The ruined husk of his heart groaned response, the heart dragon snapping its jaws.

He surrendered that life, that being, on his knees, a stupidly expensive grey and black carpet crushing into the knees of his spats.

"This isn't what I wanted my empire to be." Because he can feel the judgement.

And now the man who should have been his son is standing here, judging much like his should have been mother would.

"Then stop supporting it."

He couldn't stop, but he doesn't know how to put into words about it. He can't, because he's too far gone, has been for decades. Has given too much, has bled too much, has taken too much.

Then you are truly lost!

"It's too late for that. With Sidi-" he catches himself but barely, "-Palpatine at the helm there is nothing I can do."

"Banthashit."

He stares up at Vader's blank mask, the red lenses.

"It's only too late when you give up or die."

Vader hadn't been looking directly at Luke as they talked. Mostly he was looking out the viewscreen of the transport, but honestly he wasn't really watching out of it. Paying enough attention they wouldn't hit anything or have an issue, but

Even while conversing with Luke, his mind is elsewhere.

Enough so that Luke's curse draws him back, so that he looks over at Luke directly, chin tilting down just a little to make eye contact. And the light from Naboo catches his lenses enough for Luke see inside, the ruined scared skin around Vader's eyes, his irises appearing almost purple as the natural blue combined with with red.

"I did die. And revived to have nothing." Until now.

"So no one else gets anything either? You're still alive, you can choose to fight. You know how bad he is? Then fight back. What have you got to lose?"

He has nothing of any worth. Why not fight?

"What makes you so sure I haven't tried to kill him?"

The fact is, Luke has barely an understanding of how deeply evil Palpatine is.

"Fighting back doesn't have to be killing him."

There's a thousand ways to undermine, to resist, to spread dissent. The fact that Vader jumps straight to 'I didn't manage to kill him so I must accept whatever he says' sounds to Luke a lot like some of the slaves from home.

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