*gasp* IT'S NOT A KPOP FIC!
Title: The Cursed Line
Fandom(s): Star Wars
Pairing(s): none, Luke-centric
Rating: PG13
Word count: 5,264
Summary: History repeats itself. Luke watches the same mistakes play out through ghosts and memories, again and again and again. (Set around the events of The Force Awakens)
Also on AO3
Moledro:
(n) A feeling of resonant connection with an author or artist you’ll never meet, who may have lived centuries ago and thousands of miles away but can still get inside your head and leave behind morsels of their experience, like the little piles of stones left by hikers that mark a hidden path through unfamiliar territory
The open ocean hangs heavy on the horizon, rushes around the foot of the rocks, crashes and clamours through the night. It always looked so peaceful in the pictures, but like so many rose tinted views of the wilderness, a painting can only capture so much.
Wind howls through the stones, Luke wraps himself tighter in his cloak and turns his eyes skywards to the gulls. They have such trouble in the storms, but they have nowhere to go but down so have to hang in the air like the broken pieces of a mobile hanging over his cot. Easy prey, mind, he barely has to think to swipe of them out of the air and into the fire, feathers curling in the heat. He’s long since learned the effort of plucking the beast isn’t worth the time it takes to eat it.
Vader sits beside him, ghostly and pale. Luke pretends the storm is too loud to hear him breathing.
“You can use the Force to kill a bird, but not a human?”
Luke breaks a leg off the gull and rips the skin, crisped and golden, with his teeth, “yes.”
“Even a terrible human? Even a monster?” Vader reaches out to brush a gloved hand against the roasting bird, but he isn’t corporeal. He passes straight through it, then sits with the never changing façade of his mask aimed at the fire like he might be staring into it.
“Especially the monsters. Anyone can spare the life of an ordinary person, it takes a whole lot more moral stamina to spare someone terrible.”
Luke watches his father, unmoving and pensive. He supposes Vader spent and inordinate amount of his life killing people who didn’t deserve it, the idea that a Jedi would spare someone who did must seem absurd to him.
Obi Wan has told him of the legal systems of the Old Republic, there were trials and death sentences, prisons deep in the belly of Coruscant. But it was never up to a Jedi to make those decisions, the order did little more than keep the peace.
So Luke doesn’t tell Vader about the endless weeks he’s spent pondering the same question while Obi Wan looks on, torn and steady. “And what if he hadn’t had a change of heart? What if the Emperor had won?”
“Then he would have won,” Obi Wan shrugged, “the Dark Side rises just as surely as the Light, Luke. Everyone gets their moments of glory.”
That had been back on Naboo, when Ben Solo was still a blossoming ball of light. The great plains, the lakes, the skies so blue and brilliant that they could have gone on forever. Luke will never forget his first sight of storm clouds hanging heavy over the mountains in the distance.
Ben had wrinkled his nose, “it’s just rain.”
“It never rained when I was your age,” Luke replied.
Even out here, beyond the edges of the known universe, Luke still feels Leia from time to time. Moving through the ever more complex maze of Resistance hiding places. She shines like the beacon of hope she was born to be, unflinching and firm in her convictions.
Leia had a wonderful childhood, with parents who gave her enough to do something with her life but not enough to do nothing. When the time came for her to choose her path, there was no doubt in her mind that she would do what was right. The Dark Side never tempted her, but then again, neither did the Light.
“But we need more Jedi! We need to revive the order!” Luke had screamed at her when she first refused his offer of training.
Leia’s eyes had narrowed and against all her wishes, the Force swelled around her. “You know how I first experienced the Force? Aged six years old, watching an Empire ship dock at the Aldera space port and feeling this…thing, this horrible, hateful presence boiling up from inside it. I had nightmares about Vader for weeks after that, but I was a Princess and he was part of the Emperor’s inner circle, I didn’t have much choice but to curtsy and pretend he didn’t terrify me.”
In his darkest moments, Luke feels a twisted sort of jealousy brimming within him. Resentment of the relationship Leia had with their father is as palpable as it is misguided, and the night before he’d been supposed to take Ben away from his parents for good, he had sat on the roof of the building Han and Leia tentatively lived in, on Hosnian Prime, staring at the stars and brooding.
“You wouldn’t have wanted to know him like I did,” Leia whispered when she joined him. Luke didn’t need to ask how she knew what he was thinking.
“I just…I saw some good in him.”
“Well I never did.”
“He was our father, Leia,”
Leia shook her head, “he was never my father. My father taught me diplomacy and justice, his name was Bail.”
Beneath them, Ben stirred, the Force a pulsating, unexplored mass inside of him. Luke never understood how extraordinary Leia’s handle on herself was till he met her son - she is powerful, but reserved. She doesn’t need to be taught how to use the Force, she just knows.
“I can feel you peeking,” she snapped, “I don’t like it Luke, just talk to me.
The New Republic spread out before them, a new hope for the Galaxy that was as yet too weak to defend itself from the gathering storm clouds of what would later be the First Order. Light and Dark already at work.
Luke sighed, “I worry that I won’t be able to train him properly.
“If you can’t train him no one can, and he needs to be trained. I couldn’t bear it if he…”
“I’ll keep him from the Dark Side as best I can,” Luke slid his hand into hers and gripped tightly, feeling all the potential for their new galactic order between the palms of their hands.
“The Dark Side?” Leia scoffed, “The Dark and the Light are as good as each other Luke. You said Yoda spoke of balance in the Force? Well you can’t have balance with only one side now, can you? It’s Vader that worries me, we don’t need that kind of hate in this family.”
Luke squeezed her hand and smiled somewhat sadly, “Yoda would have loved you.”
Obi Wan joins him out on the cliffs, spectral and pale. He always says that Luke is far too young to learn how to project his spirit through the Force and Luke has given up asking.
“You seem disturbed.” Obi Wan says. Then he waits, because he never asks questions, though he always gets the answers he’s looking for.
Luke scuffs his feet on the ground and feels like a child, “I was thinking about something Leia once said to me.”
Obi Wan hums, and says nothing.
“She said Vader wasn’t her father.”
“Ah!” Obi Wan mutters, “No, I don’t suppose he was.”
“But I mean…what if he’s not my father?” Luke turns to Obi Wan and pretends he doesn’t feel the pleading guilt resting behind his eyes. He wants to renounce the Dark Side however it manifests, he wants that absolution.
But Obi Wan is not here to give it to him, “Only you can say if he’s your father, Luke. But even if he’s not, you can’t escape his blood.”
Luke spends many nights thinking on that problem. Sometimes he looks at this galaxy of theirs and thinks that every important decision within it was made on the back of fathers and sons making good and bad choices with or without each other. He knows that on the day Vader told him they were blood he had denied it outright, but there’s more to this than that.
“Search your feelings, you know it to be true,” Vader hisses in his ear. He makes for a pallid ghost, not as scary nor as wise as he would like to think he is. But he taught Luke a lot, even if every lesson was instruction in how not to live a life.
“You are my father,” Luke tells Vader. He says the same thing to Obi Wan. If Uncle Ben could project a Force ghost to the edge of space he would tell him too. Because all of them made him who he is and all of them deserve that recognition.
He takes a gulp of stinging sea air and fondly thinks of Leia, many years ago, telling him she had two mothers. He didn’t understand then, sometimes understanding takes time.
Ben didn’t like the Gungans. Not because he found them irritating and slow witted, but because he was thirteen years old and those lolloping lizards were the best outlet for all those razor sharp emotions that his training was supposed to be squashing out of him. Luke was twenty one by the time he started training in earnest, it was hard enough for him to learn to balance himself. He couldn’t imagine how hard it would be for a child.
All the same, he had to stop it before it grew, “hate leads to the Dark Side,” he chided. Then set Ben to the task of chopping wood, because physical exertion is as good a form of stress release as anything.
“This planet feels strange,” Ben said between falls of the rudimentary axe he’d carved for this very purpose, “do you feel it Uncle?”
Luke felt it alright, felt something warm and familiar in the soil from the moment they landed. Naboo wrapped them in its hills and valleys, thrumming with an energy that he could swear he’d felt before, though he couldn’t place it in his memory.
“I feel it,” he replied, “or I feel something. It’s nice, like coming home.”
Ben sniffed, “it’s uneasy. You know when you’re happy but you know you won’t be for long? That’s what this feels like.”
Try as he might, no matter how deep he looked into the Force surrounding Naboo, Luke never felt what Ben was feeling. Years later, Leia would explain everything, and he would look back on this moment and hate himself for not noticing the signs sooner.
At sunset, Ben stopped chopping and brought an armful of logs over to the fire. He fixed Luke with a stare confident beyond his years and tucked his long, dark hair behind his ears.
Ben was always firm and sure of his ideals. Just like his mother. “Tell me about Vader,” he demanded.
He was thirteen, it seemed like he should have been old enough. Luke told Ben Solo a tale of a man who had been so Dark that he was the only person in the galaxy with enough hate in his heart to topple the emperor. He tells it the way he thinks Leia would tell the story from his perspective, to show that the Light needs the Dark even as they oppose each other.
So distracted by the never ending summer warmth of Naboo, if there was any change in Ben that night, Luke didn’t notice it.
Yoda comes to him infrequently but without fail, usually waiting for Luke’s arrival at the highest point of the island. He doesn’t smile so much in death but he looks healthier, larger.
“You have left them all behind,” he says, without judgement, the first time they meet in Luke’s exile.
“You did the same,” Luke replies in kind.
“Out here, the next Jedi will find you. The war, they will bring back to your feet,”
Luke tips back his head and laughs till he cries. Laughs because Yoda, so small and old and weary, can still see so much good in the world, “Ben’s gone, there are no more Jedi.”
“Not Ben,” Yoda shakes his head, “nor Kylo Ren. There is another.”
Luke stops laughing then. He swallows his fears and sets off back down the island. He thinks he knows who Yoda’s talking about, and he desperately wishes he were wrong.
The last time Luke saw Han, Leia was shouting at the both of them like her words could turn back time. Her tirade had ceased to have meaning in Luke’s ears but he felt her, for the first time in his life, truly raging, the Force within her terrible and massive.
He imagined that Han could feel it too. Leia is like a storm all on her own, all the more fearsome for how rarely she lets herself fall out of check.
“He made his choice,” Han growled, when Leia was gone and Luke was determined to blame himself for letting Ben slip away, “now we have to choose how we handle it.”
“He’s gone Han…he’s not…”
Han had taken him by the shoulders and shaken him, as if he could shake out all that misplaced guilt, “Kylo Ren is just an act. My son is still in there, you hear me? No force in the universe can kill that boy.”
Luke thinks that Han probably should be right, Ben was such a steady, sure little boy. No son of Leia Organa should have fallen like that.
“I’m just…I can’t believe he turned out to be a Skywalker after all,” Leia spat through her tears. This was later, when Han was long gone and people liked to pretend that Ben Solo had died rather than changed.
Luke had taken her to Naboo, and let her feel the planet all around them, soothing and unobtrusive. Leia’s eyes had gone wide as the sun rose and lit the great oceans up in pink and gold.
“He was never a Skywalker,” Luke said softly, “he was your son Leia, he still is. He has all the best bits of you.”
“Just none of the Light.”
Luke shrugged, “Light and Dark - what’s the difference? It’s all how you use it.”
“You don’t believe that,” Leia replied. But she didn’t press the issue. She wanted to head inland and see the forests and the mountains. She wanted to breathe Naboo in and feel like she had come home. It was almost like Alderaan, or so she said.
That night, the stars had burned bright across the sky. Luke looked up, and thought of all the skirmishes and wars that he was not part of, because he was sitting here.
“I’m going to leave,” he told Leia, “I have to, my heart is too heavy. I’m not strong enough to resist the Dark in this fight.”
“You think I would have been strong enough?”
“Absolutely,” Luke smiled sadly, “but the universe is bigger than the Force, maybe this fight should be won by the people who will inherit the galaxy.”
Inherent in his statement was the implication that by the time this war would be done there would be no more Force users left. No more Luke Skywalker, no more future Jedi.
No more Kylo Ren. No more Leia Organa. Or the girl.
They bade each other goodbye at the hollowed out remains of the space port on the edge of the city where they had landed. Luke hugged Leia as tight as he ever would and wished her luck in the upcoming fight.
“Our mother was born here, you know?” She whispered into his ear. Luke was surprised to find that he did know, and more surprised to find he’d not worked it out earlier.
“I’ll miss you, sister!” he shouted after her. She smiled like sunlight on the ocean, with so much light in her eyes and her heavy heart.
His day to day life is monotonous and dull. Luke finds comfort in meditation, sometimes vanishing into the recesses of his mind for days at a time. Yoda whispers gentle encouragements into his ear as he goes, reminding him to think deep but never lose himself.
When he opens his eyes, Vader is usually waiting for him. Sat in a mirror image of his position on the cold hard ground, looking somewhat ridiculous in his cape and mask. The dusky blue outline of his figure seems blurred when Luke emerges from his waking slumber, like he too has drifted into a space between ‘here’ and ‘there’.
Luke supposes that Vader’s very apparition is proof that he can’t exist in the present or the beyond entirely. Wherever he comes from, and wherever he goes, he always solidifies by the time Luke’s mind is back in the waking world.
“I saved you, you should be grateful,” Vader hisses as Luke picks through the stones on the beach in search of shellfish.
“I am grateful, but I wouldn’t have needed saving if it weren’t for you.”
Something approaching a laugh, wheezing and coughing, comes from behind Vader’s mask, “you waste your talents in exile, boy.”
Like Obi Wan and Yoda before him then. When the Dark grows too powerful, the Light hides and waits for the next generation to take over. Light glows hard and fast, and then it burns out.
Once Darkness sets in, only the Light can put it out.
First, he feels Leia, trembling, shaking, overwhelmed. Luke doesn’t often feel her first, though he stretches out to touch her across the stars almost every night. There had been hope in her heart the last time he felt her, the same hope that they had all felt the night they took to the stars and advanced on the Death Star.
Something lurches in Luke’s stomach, and it takes him a moment to realise that Leia’s turned the Force against him and thrown him off. This woman who rejected what should have been her destiny still knows how to use the tools of fate.
He freefalls, slips, scrambles for something to hold on to. Whenever Leia will not have him there’s always Han, so he hunts for his friend's presence. Not as refined as his sister, not a bold and fiery blip of the Force in the black of space, but something familiar nonetheless. That precious old dog that never needed any new tricks.
There’s nothing there. He checks, and checks again, stretching so far that for a moment he sees the thermal oscillator burning behind his eyes and hears Chewie howling in rage. But Han is lost to him, and to the rest of the galaxy, and where he’s gone the Force can’t follow.
For the briefest second, Luke loses himself. His last memory of Han, as a gruff father unable to comprehend the magnitude of his loss, is the first thing his mind latches onto and in the instant before he can remind himself that Han Solo was so much more than a failed parent, he’s reaching out to touch the boy who was once Ben Solo.
If Kylo Ren notices Luke’s presence, he doesn’t show it. He pulls the saber back from the belly of his father, takes a deep breath, and feels nothing.
"Your father's dead, Ben!" Luke Shrieks. Kylo Ren doesn't go by that name any more.
Only it's strange, Luke will realise in the coming days. As he mourns Han and wishes he had the strength to fly back into the fight where Leia soldiers on. The Dark Side was always about emotions, rash decision making and personal gain. The Light practiced emotional repression, in the interests of protecting the galaxy with reason free from passion.
Obi Wan joins him by the fire, tells him Han was a good man.
“He was my best friend,” Luke says. It feels like a hollow statement, what kind of best friend was he to Han that Luke hadn’t seen him in years prior to his death? What kind of friend that would look him in the eye and tell him his son had been lost?
“I lost a friend once,” Obi Wan commiserates, “he came back, but not for me.”
The hardest part of training Ben, was that Luke missed the moment he was no longer the boy he was supposed to be. Perhaps the fall was gradual, but he knows that he realised all in a rush.
“It will have to be red,” he had told Ben, somewhat sadly, “I don’t know where to find the crystals for the other colours.”
“What’s wrong with red?” Ben had hummed, taking the crystal Luke had found for him and plugging it neatly into the base of the lightsaber he’d been working on.
How strange, that this child, born in the wake of so much war shouldn’t know a thing like that, “Vader’s saber was red,” Luke told him, “from what Obi Wan tells me, in the Old Republic all the Sith’s sabers were red. It’s always been a colour of the Dark Side.”
The hope had been that Ben Solo would take his red saber, and never have cause to use it. But what we hope for and what we get are often so wildly different as to make us wonder what the point in hoping is in the first place.
Ben shrugged like this was inconsequential information, “you always call him Vader.”
“That was his name.”
“He was your father.”
Luke started, “yes.”
“He was my grandfather.” Ben turned his eyes sharply towards Luke. This was not a mild curiosity of the boy’s, this was an accusation, this was an axe to grind.
Stepping forward, and holding his hand out for the half-made saber, Luke held his breath, “your mother wouldn’t like you talking like that.”
“But he was! He was so powerful and he accomplished so much and none of you will talk about it because you’re so scared of…of…of red lightsabers!”
Ben’s eyes were alight with rarely seen passion. He was an increasingly sullen boy and little seemed to arouse his interest outside the parameters of his training. The Force flared around him and despite himself, Luke flinched.
He could feel it, something wrong in the Light that had shone around Ben Solo for so long. It wasn’t gone, but it was diminished, corrupted. The fading mass of a dying star.
There is always an instigator in this game, or so Obi Wan says. No one turns from the Light without help. Luke cannot think where the adverse influence could have come from. He had been so careful with the boy - the last Force user in the galaxy, the son of his best friend and his sister, his nephew.
And yet…
“Ben’s gone.” Luke whispered, and dropped his hand. Whoever this was, would not hand over their saber.
The boy stood, at fifteen years old already inches taller than Luke, and dusted himself off. “He is.”
If Luke had had some Dark in him, he might have attacked at that moment. But he was a Jedi, and Jedi don’t kill terrible people or monsters. They don’t even kill those who have fallen to the Dark.
“My mother learned everything she knew of the Force from Darth Vader,” Kylo Ren smiled, “and just look at how powerful she is, without ever being trained. Imagine what I could do if I refined my skills the way she never did.”
When he said it, Luke couldn’t believe he hadn't thought of it before. That little girl who was terrified of a man in a mask because she could feel him, but he could never feel her. She had hidden in Vader’s sight for years, quaking in her boots but learning nonetheless. All that power, cooped up in her little body.
Luke didn’t have the heart to tell Kylo Ren that his mother had a stronger grasp of the Force in one hand than he did in all his body, so he let him go off into the night, to whatever bad influence he had fallen into the orbit of.
“Blood will out,” Vader muttered at his shoulder.
“Tell his family, you must,” Yoda chided from his feet.
“Oh Luke!” Obi Wan cried, tears streaking his translucent skin, “Luke, I’m so sorry.”
A stolid blue light settles over the island in the early morning, when the sun is peaking above the horizon but the clouds are too thick to see it. Luke wakes in the chill of the dew most mornings and strides across the island with as much gusto as he can manage, trying to move his blood and warm his bones.
He can feel something moving in the half dark, new and old all at once. A face he saw many years ago and can no longer put a name to.
“I know you’re there!” he shouts over his shoulder on the way to the shore. He refuses to be made a fool of.
A young man flickers into life in front of him. The same shade of pale blue as Yoda and Obi Wan and Vader, with a face Luke thinks he's only ever seen in the mirror. The man wears the robes of a Jedi and an expression of deep longing, hair falling to his shoulders. His presence feels conflicted and tenuous, he is unsure of what he should be doing here.
Luke is not sure of who he is. For a moment, he wonders if Kylo Ren didn’t die and come back to haunt him on this desolate outpost of rock and water, but this is not a face that could have grown out of the face of Ben Solo. Then he thinks it could be himself, reflected in the early dawn as a desperate reminder of the man he used to be.
He looks like Luke…it’s not so far-fetched…
“I am your father,” the young man says.
“Ha!” Luke shakes his head and pushes past the ghost, “you’re not.”
The young man follows him, flickering in and out of existence, first at Luke’s side, then in front of him, then shouting down from further up the rock. “You are the son of Padmé Amidala and Anakin Skywalker. I am Anakin Skywalker, you are my son.”
“I know who you are,” Luke calls back to him, “but I am the son of Owen Lars and Beru Lars and Obi Wan Konobi and Darth Vader. You are none of those people.”
“But I am! I am Vader!”
Luke stops and fixes Anakin with the most measured stare he can manage these days. He’s just a boy, the hair on his chin barely growing through. Still, he’s older than Ben was when he fell.
“Vader was a Sith Lord. You are a Jedi. When a Jedi falls to the Dark Side they are no longer the Jedi, they are lost. And we can bring them back, but mostly we don’t."
“You brought me back though,” Anakin says, stepping forward till Luke can look him in the eye. Anakin is the taller of the two of them, his hair is darker, his frame slimmer. But for all that, Luke knows what he looked like at that age, and when he paints the image next to this tortured young man in front of him, thinks they could be brothers.
Yes, he brought Anakin back, but it wasn’t enough. Vader endured, in memory and in name and in spirit. If Vader had truly been vanquished the night he destroyed the Empire, there would have been no Dark for Ben to turn to.
Luke reaches the shore and heads to the rock pools to start picking through the seaweed for something he might eat in place of real vegetables. Anakin bends down beside him and reaches out a hand like he wants to help, but his fingers pass through the greens before he can grasp them.
“Who was your father, Anakin?” Luke asks.
Anakin looks surprised by the question, “I didn’t have one. My mother, she just-“
“I’ve heard the stories, I’m asking you who your father was.”
For a long time, Anakin is quiet. Luke thinks he will not answer, starts to hope he will vanish. He pulls handfuls of kelp out of the salt water and shoves them directly into his mouth, tastes the ocean and all that salt seeping into his body, knows he will have to pray for rain later to rehydrate.
“Obi Wan Konobi,” Anakin answers at last, “he was my friend first and foremost, but he was more a father to me than anyone else was.”
“Good,” Luke says, settling himself on the rocky beach to eat the rest of his seaweed, “he was my father too. That makes us brothers.”
“It doesn’t work like that,” Anakin sniffs.
He’s right, it definitely doesn’t work like that. But this spectral being is so close and so far from him all at once, Luke thinks that has to make them something. He thinks back on all the stories Obi Wan ever told him of the man who would grow up to be his father, his seriousness and his inability to stay settled.
Luke thinks about the nights when Obi Wan seems small, rattling off a story about a volcano in which he was sure his sins would burn. Even then, when he had been sure Darth Vader was a monster, he had not killed him, because Jedi don’t kill monsters.
“The Dark Side tempted you,” Luke starts, “the Emperor singled you out and played upon your weaknesses. He did the same thing to me.”
Anakin looks at him, uncomprehending. Luke wonders at the ignorance of youth.
“You were tempted, Anakin. You gave in. You made your mistakes, you were offered a way out, and you took it. I lived with my mistakes.”
“If you can call this living.”
“I take your point.”
The clouds begin to break in the distance, and the first specks of sun, gleaming and bright, break through to dance upon the ocean. Luke watches the world go on by without him, Anakin’s mouth opens in wonder.
“I don’t hate you, for what you did,” Luke murmurs.
Anakin’s eyes narrow, “don’t lie.”
Obi Wan told tales of a boy with a bright future that turned Dark. The Anakin sitting before Luke doesn’t seem to have much Light in him, even if the Dark is as yet, not all encompassing. There is a shade of grey in the Skywalker family that neither the Jedi doctrine nor the Sith manifesto ever took into account. And Luke can sit here preening all day that when the time came, his grey was more Light than Dark, but when he looks at the evidence that history has given him, it seems like little more than a twist of fate that he did so well.
Anakin went Dark, Luke went Light, Ben went Dark. Leia refused to pick a side.
“Light’s up next then,” Anakin says, the beginnings of a smile playing across his lips.
Luke stands up in a rush, just as the sunlight makes it to the shore. He’s dimly aware of Anakin vanishing altogether, but bigger things are happening in the universe than the ghosts of mistakes past. Out there, among the stars, something is moving. Something bright, and good, and so very very Light.
Yoda was right.
Dropping the last of the seaweed, Luke dashes back up the slope, feet darting quick over these rocks that he has become so very familiar with. He doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry, to run or to hide or to scream till Obi Wan appears out of the ether and tells him what to do, what mistakes not to make.
“She’s coming!” he hisses under his breath, then louder and louder till the gulls are shrieking along in kind, “she’s coming! Again! She’s nearly here!”
A/N: I am a movies fan predominantly, all my knowledge of the extended universe comes from wiki entries and word of mouth so if any details from it used for this fic are off, I apologise. Also like.....I feel I kinda got off track from the prompt lmao my adherence to it is definitely less profound than I had originally intended
Originally written for the 2015 23 Emotions challenge
Fandom(s): Star Wars
Pairing(s): none, Luke-centric
Rating: PG13
Word count: 5,264
Summary: History repeats itself. Luke watches the same mistakes play out through ghosts and memories, again and again and again. (Set around the events of The Force Awakens)
Also on AO3
Moledro:
(n) A feeling of resonant connection with an author or artist you’ll never meet, who may have lived centuries ago and thousands of miles away but can still get inside your head and leave behind morsels of their experience, like the little piles of stones left by hikers that mark a hidden path through unfamiliar territory
The open ocean hangs heavy on the horizon, rushes around the foot of the rocks, crashes and clamours through the night. It always looked so peaceful in the pictures, but like so many rose tinted views of the wilderness, a painting can only capture so much.
Wind howls through the stones, Luke wraps himself tighter in his cloak and turns his eyes skywards to the gulls. They have such trouble in the storms, but they have nowhere to go but down so have to hang in the air like the broken pieces of a mobile hanging over his cot. Easy prey, mind, he barely has to think to swipe of them out of the air and into the fire, feathers curling in the heat. He’s long since learned the effort of plucking the beast isn’t worth the time it takes to eat it.
Vader sits beside him, ghostly and pale. Luke pretends the storm is too loud to hear him breathing.
“You can use the Force to kill a bird, but not a human?”
Luke breaks a leg off the gull and rips the skin, crisped and golden, with his teeth, “yes.”
“Even a terrible human? Even a monster?” Vader reaches out to brush a gloved hand against the roasting bird, but he isn’t corporeal. He passes straight through it, then sits with the never changing façade of his mask aimed at the fire like he might be staring into it.
“Especially the monsters. Anyone can spare the life of an ordinary person, it takes a whole lot more moral stamina to spare someone terrible.”
Luke watches his father, unmoving and pensive. He supposes Vader spent and inordinate amount of his life killing people who didn’t deserve it, the idea that a Jedi would spare someone who did must seem absurd to him.
Obi Wan has told him of the legal systems of the Old Republic, there were trials and death sentences, prisons deep in the belly of Coruscant. But it was never up to a Jedi to make those decisions, the order did little more than keep the peace.
So Luke doesn’t tell Vader about the endless weeks he’s spent pondering the same question while Obi Wan looks on, torn and steady. “And what if he hadn’t had a change of heart? What if the Emperor had won?”
“Then he would have won,” Obi Wan shrugged, “the Dark Side rises just as surely as the Light, Luke. Everyone gets their moments of glory.”
That had been back on Naboo, when Ben Solo was still a blossoming ball of light. The great plains, the lakes, the skies so blue and brilliant that they could have gone on forever. Luke will never forget his first sight of storm clouds hanging heavy over the mountains in the distance.
Ben had wrinkled his nose, “it’s just rain.”
“It never rained when I was your age,” Luke replied.
Even out here, beyond the edges of the known universe, Luke still feels Leia from time to time. Moving through the ever more complex maze of Resistance hiding places. She shines like the beacon of hope she was born to be, unflinching and firm in her convictions.
Leia had a wonderful childhood, with parents who gave her enough to do something with her life but not enough to do nothing. When the time came for her to choose her path, there was no doubt in her mind that she would do what was right. The Dark Side never tempted her, but then again, neither did the Light.
“But we need more Jedi! We need to revive the order!” Luke had screamed at her when she first refused his offer of training.
Leia’s eyes had narrowed and against all her wishes, the Force swelled around her. “You know how I first experienced the Force? Aged six years old, watching an Empire ship dock at the Aldera space port and feeling this…thing, this horrible, hateful presence boiling up from inside it. I had nightmares about Vader for weeks after that, but I was a Princess and he was part of the Emperor’s inner circle, I didn’t have much choice but to curtsy and pretend he didn’t terrify me.”
In his darkest moments, Luke feels a twisted sort of jealousy brimming within him. Resentment of the relationship Leia had with their father is as palpable as it is misguided, and the night before he’d been supposed to take Ben away from his parents for good, he had sat on the roof of the building Han and Leia tentatively lived in, on Hosnian Prime, staring at the stars and brooding.
“You wouldn’t have wanted to know him like I did,” Leia whispered when she joined him. Luke didn’t need to ask how she knew what he was thinking.
“I just…I saw some good in him.”
“Well I never did.”
“He was our father, Leia,”
Leia shook her head, “he was never my father. My father taught me diplomacy and justice, his name was Bail.”
Beneath them, Ben stirred, the Force a pulsating, unexplored mass inside of him. Luke never understood how extraordinary Leia’s handle on herself was till he met her son - she is powerful, but reserved. She doesn’t need to be taught how to use the Force, she just knows.
“I can feel you peeking,” she snapped, “I don’t like it Luke, just talk to me.
The New Republic spread out before them, a new hope for the Galaxy that was as yet too weak to defend itself from the gathering storm clouds of what would later be the First Order. Light and Dark already at work.
Luke sighed, “I worry that I won’t be able to train him properly.
“If you can’t train him no one can, and he needs to be trained. I couldn’t bear it if he…”
“I’ll keep him from the Dark Side as best I can,” Luke slid his hand into hers and gripped tightly, feeling all the potential for their new galactic order between the palms of their hands.
“The Dark Side?” Leia scoffed, “The Dark and the Light are as good as each other Luke. You said Yoda spoke of balance in the Force? Well you can’t have balance with only one side now, can you? It’s Vader that worries me, we don’t need that kind of hate in this family.”
Luke squeezed her hand and smiled somewhat sadly, “Yoda would have loved you.”
Obi Wan joins him out on the cliffs, spectral and pale. He always says that Luke is far too young to learn how to project his spirit through the Force and Luke has given up asking.
“You seem disturbed.” Obi Wan says. Then he waits, because he never asks questions, though he always gets the answers he’s looking for.
Luke scuffs his feet on the ground and feels like a child, “I was thinking about something Leia once said to me.”
Obi Wan hums, and says nothing.
“She said Vader wasn’t her father.”
“Ah!” Obi Wan mutters, “No, I don’t suppose he was.”
“But I mean…what if he’s not my father?” Luke turns to Obi Wan and pretends he doesn’t feel the pleading guilt resting behind his eyes. He wants to renounce the Dark Side however it manifests, he wants that absolution.
But Obi Wan is not here to give it to him, “Only you can say if he’s your father, Luke. But even if he’s not, you can’t escape his blood.”
Luke spends many nights thinking on that problem. Sometimes he looks at this galaxy of theirs and thinks that every important decision within it was made on the back of fathers and sons making good and bad choices with or without each other. He knows that on the day Vader told him they were blood he had denied it outright, but there’s more to this than that.
“Search your feelings, you know it to be true,” Vader hisses in his ear. He makes for a pallid ghost, not as scary nor as wise as he would like to think he is. But he taught Luke a lot, even if every lesson was instruction in how not to live a life.
“You are my father,” Luke tells Vader. He says the same thing to Obi Wan. If Uncle Ben could project a Force ghost to the edge of space he would tell him too. Because all of them made him who he is and all of them deserve that recognition.
He takes a gulp of stinging sea air and fondly thinks of Leia, many years ago, telling him she had two mothers. He didn’t understand then, sometimes understanding takes time.
Ben didn’t like the Gungans. Not because he found them irritating and slow witted, but because he was thirteen years old and those lolloping lizards were the best outlet for all those razor sharp emotions that his training was supposed to be squashing out of him. Luke was twenty one by the time he started training in earnest, it was hard enough for him to learn to balance himself. He couldn’t imagine how hard it would be for a child.
All the same, he had to stop it before it grew, “hate leads to the Dark Side,” he chided. Then set Ben to the task of chopping wood, because physical exertion is as good a form of stress release as anything.
“This planet feels strange,” Ben said between falls of the rudimentary axe he’d carved for this very purpose, “do you feel it Uncle?”
Luke felt it alright, felt something warm and familiar in the soil from the moment they landed. Naboo wrapped them in its hills and valleys, thrumming with an energy that he could swear he’d felt before, though he couldn’t place it in his memory.
“I feel it,” he replied, “or I feel something. It’s nice, like coming home.”
Ben sniffed, “it’s uneasy. You know when you’re happy but you know you won’t be for long? That’s what this feels like.”
Try as he might, no matter how deep he looked into the Force surrounding Naboo, Luke never felt what Ben was feeling. Years later, Leia would explain everything, and he would look back on this moment and hate himself for not noticing the signs sooner.
At sunset, Ben stopped chopping and brought an armful of logs over to the fire. He fixed Luke with a stare confident beyond his years and tucked his long, dark hair behind his ears.
Ben was always firm and sure of his ideals. Just like his mother. “Tell me about Vader,” he demanded.
He was thirteen, it seemed like he should have been old enough. Luke told Ben Solo a tale of a man who had been so Dark that he was the only person in the galaxy with enough hate in his heart to topple the emperor. He tells it the way he thinks Leia would tell the story from his perspective, to show that the Light needs the Dark even as they oppose each other.
So distracted by the never ending summer warmth of Naboo, if there was any change in Ben that night, Luke didn’t notice it.
Yoda comes to him infrequently but without fail, usually waiting for Luke’s arrival at the highest point of the island. He doesn’t smile so much in death but he looks healthier, larger.
“You have left them all behind,” he says, without judgement, the first time they meet in Luke’s exile.
“You did the same,” Luke replies in kind.
“Out here, the next Jedi will find you. The war, they will bring back to your feet,”
Luke tips back his head and laughs till he cries. Laughs because Yoda, so small and old and weary, can still see so much good in the world, “Ben’s gone, there are no more Jedi.”
“Not Ben,” Yoda shakes his head, “nor Kylo Ren. There is another.”
Luke stops laughing then. He swallows his fears and sets off back down the island. He thinks he knows who Yoda’s talking about, and he desperately wishes he were wrong.
The last time Luke saw Han, Leia was shouting at the both of them like her words could turn back time. Her tirade had ceased to have meaning in Luke’s ears but he felt her, for the first time in his life, truly raging, the Force within her terrible and massive.
He imagined that Han could feel it too. Leia is like a storm all on her own, all the more fearsome for how rarely she lets herself fall out of check.
“He made his choice,” Han growled, when Leia was gone and Luke was determined to blame himself for letting Ben slip away, “now we have to choose how we handle it.”
“He’s gone Han…he’s not…”
Han had taken him by the shoulders and shaken him, as if he could shake out all that misplaced guilt, “Kylo Ren is just an act. My son is still in there, you hear me? No force in the universe can kill that boy.”
Luke thinks that Han probably should be right, Ben was such a steady, sure little boy. No son of Leia Organa should have fallen like that.
“I’m just…I can’t believe he turned out to be a Skywalker after all,” Leia spat through her tears. This was later, when Han was long gone and people liked to pretend that Ben Solo had died rather than changed.
Luke had taken her to Naboo, and let her feel the planet all around them, soothing and unobtrusive. Leia’s eyes had gone wide as the sun rose and lit the great oceans up in pink and gold.
“He was never a Skywalker,” Luke said softly, “he was your son Leia, he still is. He has all the best bits of you.”
“Just none of the Light.”
Luke shrugged, “Light and Dark - what’s the difference? It’s all how you use it.”
“You don’t believe that,” Leia replied. But she didn’t press the issue. She wanted to head inland and see the forests and the mountains. She wanted to breathe Naboo in and feel like she had come home. It was almost like Alderaan, or so she said.
That night, the stars had burned bright across the sky. Luke looked up, and thought of all the skirmishes and wars that he was not part of, because he was sitting here.
“I’m going to leave,” he told Leia, “I have to, my heart is too heavy. I’m not strong enough to resist the Dark in this fight.”
“You think I would have been strong enough?”
“Absolutely,” Luke smiled sadly, “but the universe is bigger than the Force, maybe this fight should be won by the people who will inherit the galaxy.”
Inherent in his statement was the implication that by the time this war would be done there would be no more Force users left. No more Luke Skywalker, no more future Jedi.
No more Kylo Ren. No more Leia Organa. Or the girl.
They bade each other goodbye at the hollowed out remains of the space port on the edge of the city where they had landed. Luke hugged Leia as tight as he ever would and wished her luck in the upcoming fight.
“Our mother was born here, you know?” She whispered into his ear. Luke was surprised to find that he did know, and more surprised to find he’d not worked it out earlier.
“I’ll miss you, sister!” he shouted after her. She smiled like sunlight on the ocean, with so much light in her eyes and her heavy heart.
His day to day life is monotonous and dull. Luke finds comfort in meditation, sometimes vanishing into the recesses of his mind for days at a time. Yoda whispers gentle encouragements into his ear as he goes, reminding him to think deep but never lose himself.
When he opens his eyes, Vader is usually waiting for him. Sat in a mirror image of his position on the cold hard ground, looking somewhat ridiculous in his cape and mask. The dusky blue outline of his figure seems blurred when Luke emerges from his waking slumber, like he too has drifted into a space between ‘here’ and ‘there’.
Luke supposes that Vader’s very apparition is proof that he can’t exist in the present or the beyond entirely. Wherever he comes from, and wherever he goes, he always solidifies by the time Luke’s mind is back in the waking world.
“I saved you, you should be grateful,” Vader hisses as Luke picks through the stones on the beach in search of shellfish.
“I am grateful, but I wouldn’t have needed saving if it weren’t for you.”
Something approaching a laugh, wheezing and coughing, comes from behind Vader’s mask, “you waste your talents in exile, boy.”
Like Obi Wan and Yoda before him then. When the Dark grows too powerful, the Light hides and waits for the next generation to take over. Light glows hard and fast, and then it burns out.
Once Darkness sets in, only the Light can put it out.
First, he feels Leia, trembling, shaking, overwhelmed. Luke doesn’t often feel her first, though he stretches out to touch her across the stars almost every night. There had been hope in her heart the last time he felt her, the same hope that they had all felt the night they took to the stars and advanced on the Death Star.
Something lurches in Luke’s stomach, and it takes him a moment to realise that Leia’s turned the Force against him and thrown him off. This woman who rejected what should have been her destiny still knows how to use the tools of fate.
He freefalls, slips, scrambles for something to hold on to. Whenever Leia will not have him there’s always Han, so he hunts for his friend's presence. Not as refined as his sister, not a bold and fiery blip of the Force in the black of space, but something familiar nonetheless. That precious old dog that never needed any new tricks.
There’s nothing there. He checks, and checks again, stretching so far that for a moment he sees the thermal oscillator burning behind his eyes and hears Chewie howling in rage. But Han is lost to him, and to the rest of the galaxy, and where he’s gone the Force can’t follow.
For the briefest second, Luke loses himself. His last memory of Han, as a gruff father unable to comprehend the magnitude of his loss, is the first thing his mind latches onto and in the instant before he can remind himself that Han Solo was so much more than a failed parent, he’s reaching out to touch the boy who was once Ben Solo.
If Kylo Ren notices Luke’s presence, he doesn’t show it. He pulls the saber back from the belly of his father, takes a deep breath, and feels nothing.
"Your father's dead, Ben!" Luke Shrieks. Kylo Ren doesn't go by that name any more.
Only it's strange, Luke will realise in the coming days. As he mourns Han and wishes he had the strength to fly back into the fight where Leia soldiers on. The Dark Side was always about emotions, rash decision making and personal gain. The Light practiced emotional repression, in the interests of protecting the galaxy with reason free from passion.
Obi Wan joins him by the fire, tells him Han was a good man.
“He was my best friend,” Luke says. It feels like a hollow statement, what kind of best friend was he to Han that Luke hadn’t seen him in years prior to his death? What kind of friend that would look him in the eye and tell him his son had been lost?
“I lost a friend once,” Obi Wan commiserates, “he came back, but not for me.”
The hardest part of training Ben, was that Luke missed the moment he was no longer the boy he was supposed to be. Perhaps the fall was gradual, but he knows that he realised all in a rush.
“It will have to be red,” he had told Ben, somewhat sadly, “I don’t know where to find the crystals for the other colours.”
“What’s wrong with red?” Ben had hummed, taking the crystal Luke had found for him and plugging it neatly into the base of the lightsaber he’d been working on.
How strange, that this child, born in the wake of so much war shouldn’t know a thing like that, “Vader’s saber was red,” Luke told him, “from what Obi Wan tells me, in the Old Republic all the Sith’s sabers were red. It’s always been a colour of the Dark Side.”
The hope had been that Ben Solo would take his red saber, and never have cause to use it. But what we hope for and what we get are often so wildly different as to make us wonder what the point in hoping is in the first place.
Ben shrugged like this was inconsequential information, “you always call him Vader.”
“That was his name.”
“He was your father.”
Luke started, “yes.”
“He was my grandfather.” Ben turned his eyes sharply towards Luke. This was not a mild curiosity of the boy’s, this was an accusation, this was an axe to grind.
Stepping forward, and holding his hand out for the half-made saber, Luke held his breath, “your mother wouldn’t like you talking like that.”
“But he was! He was so powerful and he accomplished so much and none of you will talk about it because you’re so scared of…of…of red lightsabers!”
Ben’s eyes were alight with rarely seen passion. He was an increasingly sullen boy and little seemed to arouse his interest outside the parameters of his training. The Force flared around him and despite himself, Luke flinched.
He could feel it, something wrong in the Light that had shone around Ben Solo for so long. It wasn’t gone, but it was diminished, corrupted. The fading mass of a dying star.
There is always an instigator in this game, or so Obi Wan says. No one turns from the Light without help. Luke cannot think where the adverse influence could have come from. He had been so careful with the boy - the last Force user in the galaxy, the son of his best friend and his sister, his nephew.
And yet…
“Ben’s gone.” Luke whispered, and dropped his hand. Whoever this was, would not hand over their saber.
The boy stood, at fifteen years old already inches taller than Luke, and dusted himself off. “He is.”
If Luke had had some Dark in him, he might have attacked at that moment. But he was a Jedi, and Jedi don’t kill terrible people or monsters. They don’t even kill those who have fallen to the Dark.
“My mother learned everything she knew of the Force from Darth Vader,” Kylo Ren smiled, “and just look at how powerful she is, without ever being trained. Imagine what I could do if I refined my skills the way she never did.”
When he said it, Luke couldn’t believe he hadn't thought of it before. That little girl who was terrified of a man in a mask because she could feel him, but he could never feel her. She had hidden in Vader’s sight for years, quaking in her boots but learning nonetheless. All that power, cooped up in her little body.
Luke didn’t have the heart to tell Kylo Ren that his mother had a stronger grasp of the Force in one hand than he did in all his body, so he let him go off into the night, to whatever bad influence he had fallen into the orbit of.
“Blood will out,” Vader muttered at his shoulder.
“Tell his family, you must,” Yoda chided from his feet.
“Oh Luke!” Obi Wan cried, tears streaking his translucent skin, “Luke, I’m so sorry.”
A stolid blue light settles over the island in the early morning, when the sun is peaking above the horizon but the clouds are too thick to see it. Luke wakes in the chill of the dew most mornings and strides across the island with as much gusto as he can manage, trying to move his blood and warm his bones.
He can feel something moving in the half dark, new and old all at once. A face he saw many years ago and can no longer put a name to.
“I know you’re there!” he shouts over his shoulder on the way to the shore. He refuses to be made a fool of.
A young man flickers into life in front of him. The same shade of pale blue as Yoda and Obi Wan and Vader, with a face Luke thinks he's only ever seen in the mirror. The man wears the robes of a Jedi and an expression of deep longing, hair falling to his shoulders. His presence feels conflicted and tenuous, he is unsure of what he should be doing here.
Luke is not sure of who he is. For a moment, he wonders if Kylo Ren didn’t die and come back to haunt him on this desolate outpost of rock and water, but this is not a face that could have grown out of the face of Ben Solo. Then he thinks it could be himself, reflected in the early dawn as a desperate reminder of the man he used to be.
He looks like Luke…it’s not so far-fetched…
“I am your father,” the young man says.
“Ha!” Luke shakes his head and pushes past the ghost, “you’re not.”
The young man follows him, flickering in and out of existence, first at Luke’s side, then in front of him, then shouting down from further up the rock. “You are the son of Padmé Amidala and Anakin Skywalker. I am Anakin Skywalker, you are my son.”
“I know who you are,” Luke calls back to him, “but I am the son of Owen Lars and Beru Lars and Obi Wan Konobi and Darth Vader. You are none of those people.”
“But I am! I am Vader!”
Luke stops and fixes Anakin with the most measured stare he can manage these days. He’s just a boy, the hair on his chin barely growing through. Still, he’s older than Ben was when he fell.
“Vader was a Sith Lord. You are a Jedi. When a Jedi falls to the Dark Side they are no longer the Jedi, they are lost. And we can bring them back, but mostly we don’t."
“You brought me back though,” Anakin says, stepping forward till Luke can look him in the eye. Anakin is the taller of the two of them, his hair is darker, his frame slimmer. But for all that, Luke knows what he looked like at that age, and when he paints the image next to this tortured young man in front of him, thinks they could be brothers.
Yes, he brought Anakin back, but it wasn’t enough. Vader endured, in memory and in name and in spirit. If Vader had truly been vanquished the night he destroyed the Empire, there would have been no Dark for Ben to turn to.
Luke reaches the shore and heads to the rock pools to start picking through the seaweed for something he might eat in place of real vegetables. Anakin bends down beside him and reaches out a hand like he wants to help, but his fingers pass through the greens before he can grasp them.
“Who was your father, Anakin?” Luke asks.
Anakin looks surprised by the question, “I didn’t have one. My mother, she just-“
“I’ve heard the stories, I’m asking you who your father was.”
For a long time, Anakin is quiet. Luke thinks he will not answer, starts to hope he will vanish. He pulls handfuls of kelp out of the salt water and shoves them directly into his mouth, tastes the ocean and all that salt seeping into his body, knows he will have to pray for rain later to rehydrate.
“Obi Wan Konobi,” Anakin answers at last, “he was my friend first and foremost, but he was more a father to me than anyone else was.”
“Good,” Luke says, settling himself on the rocky beach to eat the rest of his seaweed, “he was my father too. That makes us brothers.”
“It doesn’t work like that,” Anakin sniffs.
He’s right, it definitely doesn’t work like that. But this spectral being is so close and so far from him all at once, Luke thinks that has to make them something. He thinks back on all the stories Obi Wan ever told him of the man who would grow up to be his father, his seriousness and his inability to stay settled.
Luke thinks about the nights when Obi Wan seems small, rattling off a story about a volcano in which he was sure his sins would burn. Even then, when he had been sure Darth Vader was a monster, he had not killed him, because Jedi don’t kill monsters.
“The Dark Side tempted you,” Luke starts, “the Emperor singled you out and played upon your weaknesses. He did the same thing to me.”
Anakin looks at him, uncomprehending. Luke wonders at the ignorance of youth.
“You were tempted, Anakin. You gave in. You made your mistakes, you were offered a way out, and you took it. I lived with my mistakes.”
“If you can call this living.”
“I take your point.”
The clouds begin to break in the distance, and the first specks of sun, gleaming and bright, break through to dance upon the ocean. Luke watches the world go on by without him, Anakin’s mouth opens in wonder.
“I don’t hate you, for what you did,” Luke murmurs.
Anakin’s eyes narrow, “don’t lie.”
Obi Wan told tales of a boy with a bright future that turned Dark. The Anakin sitting before Luke doesn’t seem to have much Light in him, even if the Dark is as yet, not all encompassing. There is a shade of grey in the Skywalker family that neither the Jedi doctrine nor the Sith manifesto ever took into account. And Luke can sit here preening all day that when the time came, his grey was more Light than Dark, but when he looks at the evidence that history has given him, it seems like little more than a twist of fate that he did so well.
Anakin went Dark, Luke went Light, Ben went Dark. Leia refused to pick a side.
“Light’s up next then,” Anakin says, the beginnings of a smile playing across his lips.
Luke stands up in a rush, just as the sunlight makes it to the shore. He’s dimly aware of Anakin vanishing altogether, but bigger things are happening in the universe than the ghosts of mistakes past. Out there, among the stars, something is moving. Something bright, and good, and so very very Light.
Yoda was right.
Dropping the last of the seaweed, Luke dashes back up the slope, feet darting quick over these rocks that he has become so very familiar with. He doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry, to run or to hide or to scream till Obi Wan appears out of the ether and tells him what to do, what mistakes not to make.
“She’s coming!” he hisses under his breath, then louder and louder till the gulls are shrieking along in kind, “she’s coming! Again! She’s nearly here!”
A/N: I am a movies fan predominantly, all my knowledge of the extended universe comes from wiki entries and word of mouth so if any details from it used for this fic are off, I apologise. Also like.....I feel I kinda got off track from the prompt lmao my adherence to it is definitely less profound than I had originally intended
Originally written for the 2015 23 Emotions challenge