Forbidden

Beyond the Burning.

Vader slipped effortlessly into Luke’s memories. He was placed in the position of observer: voiceless and invisible to those persons in the memory, but not totally bodiless as he could feel Tatooine’s twin suns broiling the air around him and taste sand, hard, dry and gritty. It brought back memories that were both harsh and warm. He almost thought for a moment that he was late leaving Watto’s shop and his mother would be waiting for him expectantly with cool ruikan juice and nan sweets. But Vader was snapped back to himself when he saw a slightly younger version of Luke than the one he now knew run over a sand dune and enter the courtyard of a homestead.

After a moment, he recognized the place as the Lars homestead. It was where he had visited with Padme when he went searching for his mother. ‘Obi-Wan was bold to bring the boy to people I knew … to a place I had been. He didn’t even change Luke’s last name … or perhaps the Lars wouldn’t allow him to take on theirs. My old master must have been very certain I thought Luke dead to have been so arrogant. Pity he was right this time. If only there had been a whisper of Luke’s existence, I would have gotten him immediately.’

He followed the boy’s footsteps in the sand down into the courtyard. Luke was dressed all in white, had shaggier hair and more coltish movements than the boy’s now Jedi-honed grace. His son threaded his fingers through those wild locks and gave a guilty glance around, looking for someone, or perhaps rather hoping not to see someone. Vader then realized that he knew all of Luke’s thoughts, both coherent and not, at the time this memory took place.

The Dark Lord knew, for instance, that Luke was worried because he was late for chores. Luke had stayed after school to use the library’s holovid and interspace research net. Uncle Owen loathed letting him attend school at all and would hit the roof if he knew Luke was using precious daylight hours to scan the net after classes ended, even for purely educational purposes. Educational, however, would not describe the tenor of his current searches.

The boy chewed his inner cheek. He had been using those school resources to find a certain planet, one with a spectacular beach. A planet the boy had no way of knowing whether it really existed or not. Luke thought, ‘And even if it does, what will that prove? My father’s dead. And he wouldn’t be so young even in the off chance he didn’t die in that frigate explosion.’ But something told him to keep looking, keep seeking, even as Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru discouraged him from even asking simple questions about his father. Didn’t they understand that only whetted his need to know more? Their reticence to speak of Anakin Skywalker meant there was something to speak about.

Besides, his time wasn’t truly being wasted, because while searching for the planet, Luke also watched videos of Lord Vader espousing the benefits of becoming an Imperial trooper, pilot or officer; videos his uncle had forbidden him to watch. And wasn’t Lord Vader amazing? So strong and sleek and charismatic and what would it feel like to have the attention of someone like that on him? Luke was going to apply to the Imperial Flight Academy as soon as he was of legal age. Maybe if he was a good enough pilot, as good as his father, he’d get to meet the Dark Lord one day, maybe Vader would see the potential in Luke. The boy could almost feel the weight of one of Vader’s great hands on his shoulders, sliding down the front of his chest to just above his groin … there was a flash of heat and hardness and Luke shivered as his imagination seemed unable to take him further. ‘Am I sex crazed or what? Like Vader would ever want anything like that with me! Got to keep it under control.’

Vader chuckled at Luke’s chastisement. There was something about the boy so inherently sensual yet innocent that even if Luke had been a nameless pilot in the Imperial fleet, without Force powers, if Vader had caught sight of him, the boy would have been in his bed post haste.

Vader lost himself in Luke’s actions and thoughts again. He watched as Luke crept over to one of the domed shelters in the courtyard. The boy opened the door and reached inside for the tools to fix the vaporators. The ones in the North field were acting up again. ‘I swear sometimes I think Uncle Owen goes out there and messes with them just so he can keep me occupied doing chores and not hanging out with Biggs or flying in Beggar’s Canyon. Shesh, no one else’s vaporators fail like ours do.’ But Luke immediately felt bad for such thoughts. He knew that the vaporators the Lars’ owned were old and prone to break down as all things did in the harshness of Tatooine’s climate.