Chapter Text
“He can chew, and swallow too,” he said, “but he doesn’t. I’ll make sure you have all the nutritional supplements you need to keep him healthy; he’ll usually tell you when he needs a fresh infusion.”
You were a healer, or you had been at one point. Since the fall of the Empire months ago, you’d felt a little bit as though you had been floating in a void: No specific role to fill; nothing much to call yourself. Nowhere, really, to be either... until, that is, you’d met a man named Luke Skywalker.
He was younger than you, although not by very much. He had first approached you with an air of seriousness; however, you felt in him a distinct naiveté, combined with a sense of fresh hopefulness. He was well-known across the galaxy by this point as both the last remaining Jedi, and a hero of the newly-victorious Resistance; despite that, he had come to you quite earnestly— almost humbly.
It made you more willing than you might otherwise have been to help him, although you certainly hadn’t anticipated the nature of the assignment he had in store.
“Does he like tea?” you asked.
“Huh?” Luke seemed confused.
“I have tea— all kinds of it; something different from every planet I’ve visited. People like your father tend to respond well to it,” you told him, which was true. “Do you know where he might have spent time in his youth?”
You didn’t know much of anything about Darth Vader, really, except that he had been a ruthless symbol of the Empire’s iron grip on the galaxy for nearly as long as you had been alive. His son, however, assured you that the masked emblem of fascism you’d envisioned at the mere mention of his name was as good as dead: ‘Anakin Skywalker’ was supposedly all that remained; an apparently broken husk of a once-great warrior.
Luke had informed you, in fact, that his father was now barely being kept alive by the machines on the small ship in which he’d been deposited for safekeeping after the Battle of Endor. It was currently situated on the unpopulated moon of a far-flung world, in the midst of a very dense forest. One thing you did happen to know about Darth Vader was that, throughout the Empire’s reign, he himself had forced many into hiding— but, you didn’t dare point out to his son the cruel irony inherent in his current predicament.
A look came upon Luke’s face; almost a nervous one. “He travelled a lot,” he answered you, “but, I don’t want him dwelling on his past.”
You smiled despite yourself. “You might be surprised— I’m sure he’s had better days than—”
Luke shook his head and cut you off, “Don’t bother with the tea— okay? Anyway, with everything I’m going to need you to be doing for him, you won’t have time for tea.”
“Do you have medical droids, then? In case I come in need of assistance?”
With eyes cast downward, “Yes, but... he... well... he destroys those— and I can only fix so many of them at once.”
You chuckled, “What makes you think he won’t destroy me, too?” You knew enough to be more concerned about that than you were allowing yourself to betray with your outward demeanour.
Vader’s son looked back up; narrowed his icy gaze at you. “He’s not a monster— you’re alive, and I know he’ll respect that.”
Again, you didn’t say so out loud, but the man for whom you had agreed to provide care did not have a reputation for respecting life. What had changed about him, in the aftermath of the explosion he’d survived?
“Besides that,” continued Luke, “you’re strong with the Force; it’s how I found you. He’ll feel that, too.”
You hoped he was correct. You’d always had the Force as your ally; for as long as you could remember, you’d been able to harness it— rudimentarily, at least. Your parents, however, had kept you to themselves in spite of your power: They had told you that the Jedi were not to be trusted as they’d once been, in earlier times. You had been raised to strongly detest abuses of power; aside from not trusting Jedi, your own deeply-held convictions had made you highly skeptical of the Empire’s rule as well. The mere existence of elevated positions, in fact, served to make you wary.
Luke hardly exuded the sort of complacent, self-righteous aloofness you would have expected of a Jedi Knight; anyway, you had desperately been seeking a job to do— a place to be.
“What does he prefer to be called now?” you asked, ignoring the younger Skywalker’s pointed evaluation of your abilities.
He looked taken off-guard by your question. “I— well, I call him ‘father’.” He seemed to think for a moment. “...Nobody else speaks to him,” he confessed. “I... I don’t know what he’ll want to be called.”
“I suppose I’ll have to ask, then,” you said, and at that you felt a rough bump: You were riding aboard a small-yet-nimble little starship of Luke’s right now; you were travelling quickly, and by yourselves.
You had just begun to pass through the thin atmosphere of the moon on which the man formerly known as Darth Vader was being kept away from those who still wanted him dead.
As the trees concealing his hiding place came into view, you couldn’t help wondering if anybody but his own son thought that the galaxy was better-off with him alive.