Chapter Text
I am your father
Those words. Those awful, terrible words. They ricocheted throughout Luke's head like blaster fire. Tearing apart any and everything he believed he knew. What anyone had ever told him.
No... No. That's not true! That's impossible!!
He didn't want to believe what he was hearing.
Search your feelings. You know it to be true.
And he did. He did know it. He couldn't stop the force screaming it at him.
No! No! Nooo!
Someone was screaming.
Luke...
Oh, how he'd wished for his father to say his name like that. With all the love and emotion one would show their own son. But how could this... this man be his father? Darth Vader. His father.
You can destroy the Emporer. He has foreseen this. It is your destiny. Join me, and together we can rule the galaxy as father and son... come with me. It is the only way.
Vader had stuck his hand out in an almost desperate kind of manner. It only made Luke want to believe him even more. The emotion almost looked real...
But he couldn't. He couldn't! Pain radiated from his forearm, tucked under his armpit, the one where his right hand used to be. Where Vader had taken it.
As more tears threaten to fall in front of his supposed enemy, a calm passes over him suddenly, and numbness follows it. The Force whispers in his ears softly. Like a mother calming her child.
Jump.
It whispers.
Let go...
His left-hand starts to go slack against the pipes he was clinging to. Something seems to take hold of his body and he sags with it.
Jump Luke...
His eyes are locked onto Vaders mask, where he believes his eyes were. He briefly wonders what type of father Vader would be before his body moves on its own and he takes a step off the gantry platform into space.
The wind whipped past him as he fell. The figure of Vader leaning over the railing grew smaller and smaller he picked up speed. He closed his eyes, resigned to his fate, too emotionally and physically taxed to worry about anything else.
Suddenly he was sucked into one of the many exhaust pipelines on the side of the shaft.
He never sees Vader running off the platform.
A powerful current of air pushes him down the pipes, tumbling till he slides to the end of the slickly polished pipe.
When he stops, his feet hit a circular grill and it knocks open, sucking out. He clawed at the surface of the pipe trying to keep from falling into the open air. He slips and tumbles out, emerging at the undermost part of Cloud City.
His remaining hand reached out desperately for the electronic weather vane with closed eyes.
When he opened them, his hand clutched nothing, and he continued his fall towards the surface of the immense gas giant.
Tears were torn from his eyes by the wind and he couldn't find it in himself to scream. He was tired. So tired.
Luke...
That voice. His eyes widened for the second time that day.
Father.
He almost wished his fath- Vader would save him. It seemed too surreal for it to actually happen now. It was too late.
Son, come with me.
He didn't know, he realized dimly. Vader didn't know he was falling. He thought... he thought he was stuck up there. In the exhaust pipe. Or maybe hanging from the weather vane. Or with Han and Leia. If only that were true.
A detached sense of alarm flashed through him. It took a second before he realized it was Vader.
... If only he knew.
Ben, why didn't you tell me?
As the clouds of gas enveloped him and darkness caused by the fumes claimed, he swore he could feel both his hands curl around something before what he assumed was death, claimed him too.
LUKE!