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Vader.
Vader.
Vader. It’s a… name. A name. His name. He knows that, he was given it by him, he’s been given names before and they’ve stuck. Why won’t Vader. Why does it still feel foreign and wrong, like a body rejecting an organ transplant. Is his name an organ?
Vader.
Anakin always grounded him, made it easier to feel the pressure on his feet as he walked, easier to feel the give of the sand and the way it compresses rather than feel every grain an atom and how they moved individually. But he’s Vader now. Why’s he Vader again? Right, he remembers.
He tries to focus less on the way his skin begs and itches to shift and on the men who walk behind him, trying hard to not use the force, just to listen to their footsteps, their conversation in musical mando’a.
A child walks with them, hesitant but slowly joining the conversation.
He is of the force like I am. I can taste the stars in his blood, feel the teeth in his grin, see the shine of his force signature. He is a star.
Technically he’s a rebel, he destroyed the death star (we are stars, we burn bright and explosive and devastating) but he is young, younger than I was when I joined the empire.
He wears a bright orange flight suit and holds his helmet in his arm and has shaggy blond hair and bright blue eyes (so blue) and when he smiles the world seems brighter and it makes me happy too.
It’s hard to remember why I shouldn’t like the child, because my master says so? Something deep in me screams when I use the word master, the child twitches like a bug landed on him.
Timeskip I guess.
“I’m sorry.” he whispers it through far too little mouths, but it’s still so loud they flinch. A set of his arms, wrapped around him, dig deep into the flesh of his shoulders.
He barely registers the pain, more like tastes the electricity that runs up his nerves. But he tries to, because it is a type of pain that is distinctly human.
His men stare at him (at what they can comprehend) with wide eyes, listen to him (not to the force, not to the galaxy, not to reality, not to the singing, screaming, shrieking-) with bleeding ears, smell him with noses that drip blood.
He cringes in guilt and tries to make himself smaller, to curl in on himself. The two arm-claw-limbs that grip the ground like it’s the only thing keeping him down dig deeper into the dirt and he feels worms scurry away, feels the shifting of all the rocks and movement of the dirt.
He presses the hands gripping his head tighter, trying to make his hair (didn’t it burn off?) stop drifting in nonexistent wind, stop making shadows bend in ways they shouldn’t, stop making eyes appear where they shouldn’t be.
Luke stares at him with wide eyes, but his ears don’t bleed and his eyes aren’t unseeing. Vader knows he hears the force as well.
“I didn’t lie to you.” he wants to say it loud, to empathize it, but his men’s ears are already bleeding and they’ve already been exposed to too much they can’t quite see. So he whispers it as quietly as he can. “I’m human. My mother birthed me blood and bone, and named me of the sky. I am a half god, I am as human as I am cosmos.”
“Named?” he asked, whispering it in a horse voice
“Gods don’t have names. Just the Light and the Dark. Just Ashla and Bogan. Just the Winged Goddess and the Fanged God.” I whispered them names a bit louder than I meant to say them “I am many things but before any of them I am a human woman’s son, I am Anakin Skywalker. I am Anaakini Ninaākim.”
“Luke Skywalker. Lukka Skywalker. Lunikkā Ninaākim.” he repeats, and oh how I recognise those names.
“Luke.” I repeat, a bit too much fondness in it, I coo in a way that makes some of my men flinch “Luke Naberrie-Amidala.” I tell him