PSL: Naboo

[hisfathersimage]

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.

Comments

[nouskaiananki]

"How?" A genuine interest.

"And how old were you?"

[hisfathersimage]

"We were swoop racing. He got too close, lost control. Had to work with some of the other boys to haul him free . I was about... eleven or twelve?"

[nouskaiananki]

"Did your aunt know what you were doing?" He can't reconcile what he knew of his stepbrother to imagine Luke was allowed to.

The man reeked of caution, which he probably learned shortly before they had met.

[hisfathersimage]

"Force no! I wasn't meant to be out on a swoop. I was only allowed to fly the T-16 unsupervised when I turned fourteen and Owen gave up trying to stop me." And swoops had never been approved of, because swoops were designed to turn people into smears, according to Owen.

"Aunt Beru was always more lenient about me driving and piloting."

[nouskaiananki]

"His listened to far too many of your grandmother's stories." About him.

All true.

Especially including the one where his legs ended up on backwards at the thighs.

Karking dug. Scare his mother like that.

"She was the better shot as I recall as well. She grew up there. Owen was raised off planet at least for a while." It doesn't occur to him be may know things about Owen and Beru that Luke doesn't. He'd only met them once, for a few days. Only spoke to them a handful of times after.

[hisfathersimage]

"She was. She'd practise on womp rats, took me out to teach me. I think it was my ridiculous confidence at shooting small targets that had them put me in an X-Wing to fly against the Death Star."

[nouskaiananki]

"It was the will of the Force." It's said with unshakable confidence, and only once it's out of his mouth does Vader realize he's said it aloud.

He certainly didn't mean to.

[hisfathersimage]

"... yes."

He wouldn't have put it that way, but he can feel the truth of it. The Death Star was an open wound in the Force.

"The Emperor can be stopped."

[nouskaiananki]

"Did you think I meant keeping him in a jar like a Felucian firefly?"

Together they can stop him, Vader feels he's been fairly upfront about that. Still, he can't quite help the snarky comment.

[hisfathersimage]

"I think you flip between thinking he's like, invincible and omniscient, and thinking that if only everyone did what you said, he'd be obsolete and vanish." Okay, not entirely true, but Vader's all over the place, flipping between rage, fury and despair.

"And I'm not going to turn. You can't stop evil by being worse."

[nouskaiananki]

In many ways, Luke isn't wrong. "He and his Master engineered the Fall of the Republic and the Jedi. I'm not sure you entirely appreciate that. Both were stagnating, bloated and routing under their own weight and tradition, with bureaucracy and politics fueling the problem, and entwining the two. But they wild have carried on slowly dying for many hundreds of years otherwise, with many suffering." Is not quite respect or awe at what the pair had done - but it's not quite not that either.

"You never lived the worst of Tattooine. No one your age has." He'd done that. It wasn't, isn't enough. But it's...a start? "Eventually no one will. Not there, not anywhere in the Rim."

"But I wild be further if people hadn't gotten in my way." Obi-Wan he means. He'd gone into hiding! Yes, Vader now understands why - the boy. In a strange way (for him) he's grateful, even if poisoniously jealous and angry. But he can't understand why then Obi-Wan left him (twice), why he didn't walk away when Vader gave him chance before.

"I'm not asking you to be worse. But you can't fight a war without bloodying yourself. Or getting dirty."

[hisfathersimage]

"Because what they put in place is so much better."

He sits himself down and leans his head to a wall and calls it good enough. "You haven't been to Tatooine in decades, what do you know about how it is now? The Hutts still enslave anyone who can't fight back. They still send their water tax collectors and take children in payment. And you know what? There's still a freedom run. There's still people who are kind when life hasn't been."

Vader has already told him to turn, to join the Dark side.

"Do you think I don't know about fighting a war?" He doesn't look at Vader. "Before you knew my name, you would remember that I was a rebel. I fought against your Empire. And I'm not going to stop because you know I'm a Skywalker."

[nouskaiananki]

"I meant it to be. I knew he didn't, wouldn't. That would have helped us." But Padmé turned on him. Because of Obi-Wan.

"Yes I have. He sends every few years to remind Jabba who is in charge." And to remind Vader where he came, where Palpatine could put him, and how much better Palpatine treated him. Something Vader knew but never admitted. To speak some things, even inside the roar of one's own mind was to make them real. "It is still terrible. But not what it was."

Join the Dark Side, not be worse than Palpatine. He didn't even need to go as far as Vader himself did. It's a Jedi lie that is an either or - it was like water. You didn't have to go in over your head. "I knew you were a Skywalker before I knew you were my son. You joined the fight against the Desth Star." There's a motion in his shoulder, not quiet a roll - he doesn't have that mobility - but he's brushing that off. Fighting against the Death Star. Not a big deal. "That doesn't matter."

[hisfathersimage]

"It matters to me," Luke says softly.

He's more than Vader's son. He's more than a lost heir that's been reclaimed by a man he doesn't want.

[nouskaiananki]

"Why?"

Outside the viewsceen, Theed's waterfalls are coming into view.

[hisfathersimage]

"Because I was a whole person before you caught me. This? Will have a huge affect on me going forwards, I know that. But who I was, the person I was, until that, had basically nothing to do with you."

[nouskaiananki]

Well that stung.

But who he'd been, before kneel on Palpatine's carpet had little to do with Vader too. Even the memory of moment made his insides twist and threaten to heave.

"I am aware. There is a reason I'm angry they stole you from me." Many of them.

[hisfathersimage]

This? Will change Luke. Had changed him. Has carved something into him that will never be the same.

"You might be. But I like who I am."

[nouskaiananki]

When he was a child, so had he. Never the circumstances, true
But who he was? Yes.

Adolescence had been full of growing pains, full of doubt and frustration, discontent and over confidence.

Adulthood has been misery. Peace, happiness, had really only occurred with Padmé.

Vader uses the route to have a chance to glance over at Luke, while still appearing focused on piloting. "You're still a boy. You'll come to understand the nessessity of placing duty over desire."

[hisfathersimage]

"I'm twenty three. I'm older than you were when you got married." According to Vader himself, anyway. "I think my duty and what I want fit together pretty nicely. I want to make things better for people who can't do it themselves."

[nouskaiananki]

"When you are twice your age, think on how you view someone that much younger." That Luke is also the same age Padmé had been when they married, the age Vader had been when Luke was born - it's irritating in a way Vader doesn't understand.

"You speak as if I do not want those things."

[hisfathersimage]

"Being younger doesn't make me a child, or mean I'm not... experienced enough or smart enough to have solid convictions and decision making.

"And I don't know what you want. I don't think you do either. But whatever you want, it's not what you're actually doing."

[nouskaiananki]

"If you believe so." Vader clearly doesn't, and it only had some to do with Luke being his son, his child, and the age Vader had been when he Fell.

Vader had always been...sonewhat biddable on matters of morality, adapting to his Masters as a matter of survival, not that he had the self reflection to recognize the pattern.

"I want what I accomplished on Mustafar when I slew the Banking Clan leadership although with the free others who made up the Separatists Leadership." Their handsome reward, no longer handsome. "Peace, freedom, justice, and security to my empire. Palpatine however has other plans."

[hisfathersimage]

And Luke... Luke was Freeborn.

"Empires don't tend to have freedom or justice." Peace? Of a sort, according to Leia. Security? That was more than abundant in the wrong ways.

[nouskaiananki]

Freeborn and Freeborn to a different world than had his father still been a slave. If the Hutts had controlled Tattoine as they had when Anakin had been a boy. Luke wouldn't have been a Skywalker, but a Naberrie. No one would have risked Luke having that last name. The Hutts would have put too many bounties on him, to enslave him too.

Vader had seen it happen, more than once. Sometimes it ended in death. Or multiple ones.

"Why can't they? It depends on the leadership."