Chapter Text
Luke lifts his head to find only the shell of Vader’s armor left.
Every second that passes is a second closer to being caught in imminent destruction of the Death Star. The Force hums insistently within him, warning him of the danger. But Luke stares for a few moments, aghast. Ben’s body had disappeared when he’d died, as had Master Yoda’s, but between everything else happening, it hadn’t occurred to Luke that his father’s might as well. Now, the armor is empty, a facsimile of human form that still retains its basic shape and an unnerving sight, and all that Luke has left of his father is the brief memory of his pale, scarred face. It’s a sudden, stinging loss, impossible to process quickly when his mind and body are run so ragged, and Luke almost feels as if his own body is detached, no longer securely connected to himself.
Despite that, every part of Luke hurts; the pain that has taken root at the severed end of his right arm for the past year has spread to the rest of him, and it grasps at every inch of him with sharp, sinking claws. Even just carrying Vader this far had taken the deepest reserves of strength that Luke had left. He shakes uncontrollably, small tremors seizing him every few seconds, and it’s as if gravity has doubled down on his limbs, every movement three times as difficult.
He has minutes to get into the shuttle and get out. Nothing remains of Vader – no, Anakin – except the suit. Luke’s own sore, tired body is the only thing he has left to salvage.
He gazes at the suit a moment longer and then resolutely puts the helmet back in place. Aside from a few places where it seems faintly deflated, there is no way to tell that the suit is empty now, and when Luke lifts it again, too tired to do anything more than drag it up the ramp, there’s very little indication of that in the weight of it, either. Something is strange about that, but Luke has no room left in his mind to wonder about it.
He isn’t really sure how he makes it out of the Death Star in one piece. The world is hazy and narrow, at once distant and claustrophobic, and it’s as if there is no giant superweapon ringing with alarms and shouts. There is nothing beyond himself and his father’s armor and the invasive ache that seems to make its way down to his bones and the Force, always the Force, spurring him along with its whispers of impending threat. Luke is vaguely aware of dragging the suit up the entry ramp of an Imperial Lambda in the hangar and leaving the suit on the floor before staggering towards the controls. He has a few moments of difficulty with them, because his right hand is stiff and doesn’t move like he wants it to, but he drags whatever functionality out of it that he can and gets the shuttle up and running.
Explosions rock the hangar, dangerously close, but there is a foggy glass wall between Luke and reality, and he can’t summon up the energy to care about how narrowly he escapes death. He knows he’s clear of the threat of the Death Star’s destruction as he maneuvers out of the hangar, barely missing an eruption of fire from within. A bigger threat will be evading both friend and foe alike and hoping that no Rebels mistake him for an enemy long enough to shoot him down. Ordinarily, he wouldn’t be so worried about navigating a battlefield, but he isn’t confident in his reaction time right now, with his limbs so heavy and mind so tired and aching right hand resisting easy movement.
An A-wing enters his rear trajectory before he’s hardly cleared the Death Star’s shadow, seconds away from locking on to him. Belatedly, Luke flips on the shuttle's comm, pushing stumbling words out past the exhaustion and hoping that they form themselves into coherent order. “Rebel fighter, abort your run, repeat, abort! Friendly aboard, I repeat, friendly!”
“Friendly, Green Four, identify yourself,” a female voice responds, crackling across the comm. It sounds distant and unreal in a way that Luke knows isn’t just the static, in the same way that the controls feel unreal beneath his quivering hands, like he’s not actually touching them no matter how much pressure he applies. But the presence of another voice is something to latch on to, disembodied though it is. It’s something beyond the narrow space that his mind can’t seem to push itself past.
“Green Four, this is Commander Skywalker, repeat, vessel is under friendly control.” Even his own voice sounds strange to him, like the words are coming out of someone else’s mouth, someone far away.
“Commander?” Green Four says in surprise, her voice relaxing into something a little less formal. “Not your usual ride. Always heard you were an X-wing jockey.”
Luke smiles. “I was kinda in a hurry.”
“You’re going to be in a bigger one.” Green Four’s voice tightens. “You’ve got admirers.”
There are TIE fighters swooping in behind her, and whether their target is her or him doesn’t matter – they are seconds away from being under fire. Luke takes a breath, drawing up whatever willpower he can. But he doesn’t want a battle right now, not when he can hardly feel the controls beneath fingers that still tremble and hurt. “I’m making a run for the moon,” he ventures.
“Go for it, Commander,” Green Four says, and Luke wilts a bit in relief. “I’ve got you covered.”
Behind the Lambda, the A-wing makes quick, skilled work of their pursuers, and Luke files away the rank Green Four and hopes that the memory doesn’t become lost and unrecallable in the current haze of his mind. “Commander, you’re all clear,” the voice returns. “May the Force be with you, sir.”
Luke smiles again. “Thank you, Green Four,” he says, even though she’s already cut off her own end of the channel and the A-wing is veering away, watchfully prowling the space behind him and keeping it clear. Luke is once again alone with his father’s empty armor. But the space around Luke is a little less condensed, less constricted, the echo of Green Four’s voice bouncing off the glass walls of his senses, a little less opaque than they were before.
Endor spreads out below, and briefly, Luke considers heading straight back to Leia and Han and the others. He doesn’t want them to worry about whether he’s alive or not. But... Leia knows. Luke is suddenly certain of that. There is still a battle raging behind him, Rebel forces attempting to contain the last of the fleeing Imperials above Endor, but they don’t need him for that. In his current state, he’d be more of a nuisance than anything. And going back to Leia and Han now would just mean waiting for Lando and Wedge and the rest of the pilots to make it back alive; he's never been good at sitting quietly on something like that.
Besides, he isn’t quite ready to face other people yet; a voice across a comm is one thing, and talking face-to-face is another, and the very thought of the latter is tiring. He just… needs time to breathe. To get his mind into a better state.
He doesn’t think that Leia would be entirely appreciative of what he plans to do with Vader’s armor. He doesn’t think that anyone would. He understands that; he would've shared the sentiment a year ago. But as Luke’s shaking hands guide the shuttle down towards an area comprised of nothing but plant and animal life, he knows that it’s something he needs to do, and do alone.
Luke sits in the cockpit for a while, left hand cradling right as he stares through the viewport at the thick expanse of forest beyond and tries to reorient himself with reality. It’s peaceful here – there are no sounds of battle or people, and the sense of sentient life in the Force is muted and distant. Forest life, however, abounds outside of the shuttle, a pleasant, warm, golden hum that demands nothing and reminds Luke that there are things beyond the transparisteel in front of his eyes and the foggy equivalent in front of his mind.
The sensation of life should not feel strange, but it does. Or maybe it’s just Luke who feels strange, incompatible with it. It takes him a moment to work out why that is, and with a start, he realizes that he hadn’t actively planned to be sitting here, on the heels of some kind of victory - and he hadn't been planning on it for a long time. He’d known that he was most likely courting death today, but he'd certainly hoped that he could do something for the Alliance, for the galaxy, for his sister and Han and his friends, for his lost father. He’d hoped that his faith hadn’t been misplaced, for their sakes.
But, Luke realizes, he’d never really extended that to himself, and that had been long before he'd expected to die on the Death Star. His thoughts of the future beyond the Empire had not, as of late, featured himself in them as an active participant, and the belated insight chills him. It’s not like he’d wanted to die today. Or had he?
He remembers falling at Cloud City, ostensibly trusting in the Force but – if he is at last being honest with himself – not really. After that, after not dying, he’d just assumed that there would inevitably be something that he couldn’t come back from. He’d been determined to do whatever good he could in the meantime, even if it meant risking his own death. But he hadn’t seen himself existing beyond a certain point. His mind had just… not gone there, had danced around the subject and never truly engaged. Maybe that was why it had been so easy to walk into the Emperor’s hands.
He’d almost died at those hands, which had clued him in to the fact that he really didn’t want to after all.
Now, Luke sits on the other side of everything and knows that there is an entire future unfolding in front of him - uncertain, full of whatever war has yet to follow and last Jedi ringing like a thunderclap above it all, but there. He’s alive, and that feels strange, but it’s better than feeling like an inevitable end is all too close. And it’s better than the haze slowly clearing from his mind, the longer he sits there and listens to the drone of the forest outside.
When things feel a little more real again, Luke gingerly picks himself up from the pilot’s seat and turns to his father’s suit. It looks whole, and the knowledge that it is empty on the inside is still hard to process, but it doesn’t jolt him and practically displace him like it did before. Luke stares at it, his thoughts drawn back to the Death Star.
The empty armor had been almost as heavy carrying it into the shuttle as it had been when he’d carried his father out of the Emperor’s throne room.
Luke’s first, instinctive thought is to leave it alone. Something feels wrong about prying open a dead man’s suit out of curiosity. But Luke is alone, and the stump at the end of his right arm aches fiercely, and the shock of his lightsaber meeting his father’s arm and revealing cybernetics instead of flesh still reverberates within him. He’s painfully aware of just how little he knows about his own father. And rumors – Vader speaks through a respirator, no one has ever seen him without the armor, they say there’s nothing left underneath it, nothing human anyway – and Ben’s voice echo in Luke’s head.
“He’s more machine now than man, twisted and evil.”
Luke’s hands are still shaking as he crouches down, enough that getting the suit open is difficult, and he doesn’t think that it’s entirely due to the aftereffects of the lightning. But he manages, and the slow revelation of what the armor is constricts something in Luke’s chest.
It is – or had been – more like life support than armor. The insides are mangled, the Force lightning having ripped through the suit and fried the mechanisms, and Luke understands now why removing the helmet had made no difference in the end. He doesn’t recognize half of the internal workings and is only able to identify the things he shares, like biosensors. The technology is of a higher quality than he's used to; in fact, it's beyond anything he's ever seen. But it’s plain to see that the suit had not just been for show - it had kept Anakin alive and functional. Further exploration reveals that the legs and arms are almost fully prosthetic. All of them.
Luke rocks back on his heels, absently rubbing his right wrist, and takes a deep, steadying breath. Confirming that Anakin had lived mainly through the assistance of machinery only leaves more questions. How had he ended up in this state? When had he ended up in this state?
Luke glances down at his stiff, stinging right hand, covered with a glove.
Had living like that hurt?
His eyes roam over the suit again and again, taking in every little detail, because this is all that is left of Anakin Skywalker, a physical point of connection that Luke finds more painful than he’d thought it would be. It’s not pity that he feels, never that, nor is it dismay or revulsion. It is, again, that lancing feeling of loss, of something being abruptly snatched away – a feeling that he is not unfamiliar with. This one is intertwined with a physical ache, like Bespin and yet quietly, inexorably cutting deeper, and breathing with it is hard.
So Luke tears his eyes away and looks back down at his gloved hand.
After a moment, he pulls the glove off carefully, wincing as he does, and reveals a mess, much worse than the damage he’d sustained on Tatooine. The exoskin is charred black in places and past simple repair; jagged cracks run through it, the lightweight durasteel casing underneath unveiled by the lightning that had coursed through him. There are small cracks in the casing, too, and pieces missing, and Luke can glimpse part of the internal insulator and thermoplastic underneath. He realizes how lucky he'd been that the plastic fibers at his joints hadn't melted and rendered the hand immovable or that the hand hadn't fried his arm under the onslaught of the lightning. Some damage had likely been done to the biosensors within, however; the prosthetic is stiff and harder to move, as if the signals are transmitting from flesh to prosthesis sluggishly. He’ll have to get it recalibrated.
More than that, it aches, and Luke isn’t sure if it’s real or imagined pain. The stump usually hurts, more often than not – dull and sore, except for the times when it’s sharp and throbbing, when he uses the hand too much or when it takes a hit. But this… it’s as if the phantom hand hurts, too, its ghost trembling as much as the rest of him is.
Luke studies his ruined hand and doesn’t flinch. He flexes the fingers cautiously, and pain spasms every time, radiating outward from the stump. Yeah… that’s going to hurt more than usual for a while. He sighs, letting the hand fall but feeling no desire to pull the glove back on, and his eyes once again find his father’s suit.
It’s still difficult to look, but he needs to.
“Did you do this on purpose?” he asks casually, gesturing vaguely with his right hand. The thought makes him snort in amusement, even though there’s nothing remotely funny about it. “We match.”
The joke is… a change. He remembers going to a doctor when the pain of the wound had not fully subsided after a few weeks, remembers the prognosis: irreparable nerve damage, so sorry that it wasn’t addressed before, no one’s seen a lightsaber amputation in a long time, the pain will never really go away, there’s nothing we can do, so sorry. He remembers protesting, digging his heels in: surely there must be something. Anything.
The look of pity on the doctor’s face had been enough to drive him out before he’d quite finished working through the initial denial.
Luke drops the glove on the floor and spends a few minutes returning his father’s suit to order. His eyes are repeatedly drawn to his right hand as he works, a pattern of glancing and then averting his gaze; without the glove to conceal it, the exposed metal and hint of wires form an echo of the same thing inside the suit that he carefully puts back together. When he finishes, the hand hovers above the suit uncertainly for a moment, before he rests his blackened fingers on the shoulder.
“It’s alright,” Luke says. It’s really not, but he’s tired. Tired of anger and hurt and the lingering feeling of failure and shame, tired of wincing every time he remembers it and everything else along with it. So he’ll make it alright. He’s already started that, and he remembers the rage in him that had removed his father’s prosthetic hand, remembers the way Anakin’s sunken eyes and disfigured face had softened when he’d looked at Luke without the mask, remembers being ten years old and dreaming wistfully of being just like his father - who had, at the time, only been a distant figure who'd flown away from Tatooine on a freighter. “I’ll get used to it eventually.”
It takes him a while to build the pyre, a combination of manual work and the Force. The tremors have subsided somewhat, but Luke still hurts all over, and exhaustion sits heavy on his shoulders. He lets himself move slowly and doesn’t worry about taking his time. Here, on the moon, he is even closer to Leia, and he is still certain that she knows he’s alive. The future and the rest of the galaxy can wait a little longer.
Dusk has fallen by the time he finishes, soft orange light gradually receding and giving way to even softer darkness. Luke doesn’t bother trying to physically lift the armor onto the pyre himself. He uses the Force for that – still a strain, but better than putting that strain on his right arm. Finally, it’s done, and Luke falls back against the hull of the shuttle, trying to catch his breath as he stares at the pyre with his father’s suit resting on top.
A funeral pyre for the man who’d terrorized the galaxy, who’d terrorized Luke and cut off his hand. Not even that - for his empty armor. It’s a good thing that Luke is alone right now. He wouldn’t know how to explain this to anyone else, not in a way they’d understand. But he needs this.
It’s impossible to tell that the suit is empty, from this angle. Impossible to tell that it’s just a lifeless husk, devoid of anything human – the only remnant of Anakin a thing that had physically manifested him as a monster in the eyes of others.
Luke glances down at his hand and shakes his head. No – that’s wrong. It had enabled life. What his father had chosen to do with that life had been his choice alone, and in the end, he’d chosen something good and come back to himself, to the light. He'd chosen Luke, family, even though he must have known that the Emperor's lightning would destroy what kept him alive. He'd chosen Luke knowing that his mechanical body couldn't handle that choice.
Luke had chosen a similar thing, grounded by the mechanical part of him now exposed.
He lifts his prosthetic hand and curls it into a fist; the small movement sends a jolt of pain spiking up his arm. It’s almost too dark to see clearly, but the tears in the exoskin are wide enough and the damage is extensive enough that Luke can still glimpse insulator through the thin cracks in the durasteel. He doesn’t immediately want to look away.
He’s more machine now than man, twisted and evil.
“You were wrong, Ben,” Luke murmurs.
He drops his hand and tries, as he has tried for a while now, to believe that. It's easier, effortless, this time.
Luke lights the pyre with his right hand. The metal catches the firelight, gleaming softly.
(The glove is back on by the time he finds the celebration. He isn’t ready for stares and questions, not when he can barely manage his own.
But perhaps, in time, he will be.)