STAR WARS EPISODE VII: Forces of Retrograde

SERIES PROLOGUE

The Death Star, above the Forest Moon of Endor.

Darth Vader was dying. He'd been prone to melancholy and melodrama in his youth, but back then – even on Mustafar – he'd always had to convince himself and his perceived strength of the severity of his injuries. This time, there was no make-believe required. He could feel his organs shutting down one by one as his suit shorted out, system by system.

Vader wheezed out a breath, and his diaphragm jumped sickeningly. Yes, his lungs would be the next to go: in time, the fits and flutters he could only just manage without the suit to aid him would slowly ebb away into complete stillness. Then, he would asphyxiate.

A klaxon began to blare, jarringly loud. A panicked voice over the station-wide intercom announced that the fires from the impact site of the Executor were spreading, and to avoid sectors N-45 and N-47 at all costs. The speaker repeated the order a further three times before whispering a prayer to a deity Vader didn't know and closing the channel.

The bedraggled boy who clutched Vader's wrists paused a moment to listen, then tightened his hold and started dragging him across the floor with renewed energy. Vader had to smile. He recognized that stubbornness in a heartbeat.

As the boy wrestled him out of the corridor they'd been travelling and into a high-ceilinged space Vader assumed was a hangar bay, the lip of the retracted blast doors struck an old wound on his back that had healed badly. Vader gasped. His limbs were dead to him, the circuitry shorted out beyond repair, but that, he could feel.

Perhaps there was a little life left in him after all. Just enough to feel pain.

The boy – Luke, his name was Luke, just Padmé had always told him she wanted to name a son – stopped moving, glancing down to where Vader lay slumped against his boots. There was pity in his eyes, and somehow Vader found energy to bristle at that. He needed no one's pity. He'd just killed his Master, making Vader the undisputable Dark Lord of the Sith. He'd won countless battles, slain countless enemies, and he...

Vader looked closer through the empty red lenses of his mask. His vision was far gone to nearsightedness without his HUD to magnify distant objects with accuracy far exceeding any Human's, and he had to squint a little to see it, but... No, that wasn't pity on Luke's face, it was empathy. Love.

This young creature, who was everything that was good and kind and powerful in this galaxy, loved him of all people as a child did their parent. Vader's chest tightened with something he didn't care to probe, but it definitely wasn't related to his lungs.

"Just a little more, Father. We're almost to the hangar, now," Luke said, his voice high and clear. He was clever not to let his exhaustion creep into his voice, but it was easy to read him with the Force. Perhaps he had simply never felt the need to hide. Or, most probably, he'd never learned how to conceal his feelings without conscious thought.

And whose fault is that, if he never learned? a cruel voice asked him.

A pang of sorrow blossomed up from beneath all of Vader's other agonies. The Jedi Purge was a mistake, he tried to tell it. One of so many, but a mistake nonetheless. The actions of a boy too young for war, addled by post-traumatic stress and the demands of his own pride. I couldn't fathom what I was setting into motion.

The voice didn't deign to reply.

Luke slowed to a halt, breathing heavily. He dropped Vader's right wrist to point at something in the distance, and the metal prosthetic, now lacking a hand and a lightsaber to clasp in it, clanged heavily against the deck plate. "Look, Father. I told you it would still be here. Not even the desperate would dare to take Darth Vader's ship."