Light in Glass (Star Wars)

Am I for this? Luke asks the darkness.

Yes, it answers.

Chapter warnings: Stressors of all kinds. Grief. Physical injuries. Mental health challenges. Pain. Trauma. Violence. Panic. 

Text iteration: Witching hour.

Additional notes: I’ve had this one in the queue for a while now. Pardon the random dip into Star Wars, kids...I’ll catch up with myself one day. This is an experiment. I'm in an experimenting mood.

Light in Glass

This can be the end.

Death draws Luke into mist and cloud and nothingness. It’s only chance that’s stopped him before the final plunge. A metal spar digs into the backs of his knees. Blood pounds in his head. His throat aches. His face hurts. He tastes the salt of his blood. His tears. He tries not to think about the ache of that used to be his right hand, bright in the force.

Lost now.

Vader comes for him.

Vader calls for him.

The force braids and sings and doesn’t lie about the tie that binds him to his father.

The light, red and gold, gleams off vast and structured clouds. The planet is nothing but sky and sunset. He sees the shine of ships coming. Ships going.

This is what Yoda had tried to do for him on Dagobah: the endless runs through swamp and forest canopy, the drills meant to break his ego, the cave meant to break his resolve. At the brink of his exhaustion: the X-wing. What he’d seen and not understood in a force-given vision of a broken helmet.

“Ben.” There’s no hope in the word.

He’d chosen death on that platform, endless levels above, endless seconds ago.

And yet, he lives.

Despairing, he feels his father drawing closer. The force is laced with dark. It closes on his still bright energy.

Am I for this? Luke asks the darkness.

Yes, it answers.

And, for this brief, scraped away moment, hanging between death and the dark braid of Imperial servitude— 

His ego is gone. 

There are no barriers between him and the living force.

Destiny strides through Cloud City, seeking a ship. But there’s a third path. Slender and bright. Receding. Somewhere in the clouds, beyond his sight. Beyond his strength.

The wind blows cold and strong.

“Leia,” he understands, broken to nothing.

She’s getting away. Brave and bright and hard, a diamond in the flow of his thoughts.

He wishes her well with the scraped-clean part of himself.

Useless, all of his efforts. Useless, his desert frustration. Useless, his youthful charm. Useless, his passion. Useless, his training on Dagobah. He’s nothing but a small thread in a sea of light and dark. A thread blended, for too short a time, with Obi-Wan Kenobi. A thread that had tugged on the weave of a Death Star and unraveled it, not by power, not by skill, but by chance and position and the will of the living force.

He is dangerously close to his father, to the dark momentum of choice that reaches for him even now. The web Yoda had understood. The web Yoda had no hope that he might clear.

The darkness is taking him.

He understands how little he’s done, how small-minded he’s been, how hopelessly naïve, how blind—

Leia makes her claim.

Eyes closed, sweat cooling, tears drying, he feels her. Everywhere at once. The keen edge of her hope, the hard edge of her demand, the prism of her focus. He doesn’t reach for her, but somehow she’s there, the sky in her eyes, the controls of the Falcon under her fingers, grief in her heart, clarity in her mind.

“Luke,” she whispers.

He can’t leave her.

He has nothing left of himself, nothing left of the person he though he was, there was nothing of value in him at all, walking the assembled ranks of the Alliance in a temple older than memory, a spring in his step and hope in his heart.

“Leia,” he breathes. “Hear me, Leia.”

Whether it is because he’s so near death, so near rejoining the river of light rising to meet him through depthless atmosphere, through the long fall that seems his only light-side option—the force itself vibrates with his call.

Beyond his sight, a carbon-scored wafer of a ship reverses course.

The morning after his confrontation with Vader, Luke lies in a private room just down the hall from the Rebel Cruiser’s medical bay. The air is thin and cold and sterile. 

His whole body aches. There’s no strength in him to get up.

I’m nothing. He tries the thought on, like the Alliance uniform of a dead man. Sees if it will fit. I’m no one.

Is it true?

No.

I’m Darth Vader’s son. It’s the dark mirror of the glorious future Yoda had rightly disparaged.

I’m a failure. Again, this is too eyes-on-the horizon.

I’m in bed, he thinks, and that’s all.

The view of his past from the cracked-to-bedrock present is too much to bear. He should get up. Drag himself to a ship. Return to Dagobah.

But he can’t.

He can’t face Yoda.

Not like this.

“Not ready?”

He understands now that he wasn’t. How he wasn’t.

The air is cold and sterile. It smells of space. Of antiseptic. Of Bacta.

Perhaps he can make himself ready.

His face aches from weeping. His artificial hand feels strange and foreign. The rough white fabric of an Alliance-issued convalescent tunic scrapes over his skin.

He can’t stand. Not in the dark of the early morning. Not in this cold. Not with the broken open injury where the idea of his father—the greatest star pilot in the galaxy—had been.

He sits. He pulls the rough woven blanket he’d slept in around his shoulders.

He closes his eyes.

He tries to control his breathing.

It doesn’t happen.

There’s no control to be had. It’s so different from what he remembers on Dagobah, fighting the boredom, fighting the impatience. There’s no boredom here. There’s the fall. The saber cut. His hand, but even more importantly, his father’s lightsaber, arcing away.

The object and the idea of the object. Stripped by Vader.

Ben, tell him I’m ready.

But worst of all, worst of all of it—

Luke, Vader had said, casting his presence through the force and—

Father, Luke had said in return.

His breathing won’t settle.

And who is he to dictate the flow of life he can still feel? It siphons itself away from the world, weaves into his pattern, goes again.

There’s grief here. There’s nothingness where Dagobian swamps had been, holding him, swallowing him, corroding metal and light.

He sits in a bubble, a little captured air in an endless vacuum.

His X-wing is lost, but not to a swamp. It’s still on Bespin.

Into his mind comes the image of Vader, running a gloved hand over its plating, his helmeted head bowed, a maelstrom of passion, of rage, of longing.

You are beaten, he’d said.

Beaten.

Not ended. Not over. Not dead.

Like the true Jedi before him.

He wraps the rough-spun blanket around himself. If tears come, who is he to stop them?

Ben, he thinks, why didn’t you tell me?

But he knows why.

He’d imagined himself desert-carved. Like the rock of Beggar’s Canyon. Shaped by wind, by blowing sand, carrying soft stone away.

But stone is brittle. Stone cracks under pressure.

Anakin Skywalker, too, had been desert-carved.

And so his teachers had kept their silence and hoped.

Maybe they hope still.

His eyes burn and run in the sandstorm in his thoughts. There’s darkness in him. There has, maybe, always been darkness in him. Yoda had known. He’d sent Luke into the cave, hoping for a miracle. Hoping Luke would see.

His breath comes loud and hard and fast. He presses his hands into the floor, gasping for air. No clarity comes, no calm. He could have let go, beneath Bespin. Completed the fall he’d started.

He can’t go back to Yoda.

Can’t go back to his training.

The shame and grief alone may yet kill him.

If he faces Vader again, he’ll be swept into that dark and waiting web that still has him. He feels it. There’s no peace in him. No harmony, no serenity.

He can barely survive sitting with himself.

Who he is. What he is.

The metal beneath him sucks body heat into a sink that’ll never fill.

He’d looked down on Uncle Owen—his small-mindedness, his lack of vision—but all he sees through this backward lens is wisdom. Wisdom he’d overlooked. Respect for the desert. Stoic caution. Even, maybe, fear.

Uncle Owen had known his secret.

Luke’s whole body goes cold.

Owen had known exactly who Luke’s father was. Had tried to raise the danger out of him, had reined him in, had kept his circle small, his horizons limited.

Luke presses his lips together, imagining the grinding fear Owen must have lived with when his nephew talked of leaving Tatooine, of piloting more than skimmers, skiffs, podracers, freighters.

He sees it now for what it was.

In a featureless, impersonal room, his whole body trembles.

Aunt Beru, she too, must have known. Known and loved him anyway, tying gentle fetters around the scope of what must have been terrifying ambition.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers, sends the words toward the scattered stars of the Outer Rim.

Had they lived, he could’ve told them he understood, thanked them, apologized, healed some small part of the open wound of his life.

Had they lived, he might not be here at all.

Luke reaches for them across space and time, his eyes hot. In the end, they, too, had faced Vader: burning on desert sands on a clear, two-sun day, hot and bright.

The thought is unbearable.

His face aches, his body aches, his soul aches. He works for his breath. Insight, like an energy blade, spears his heart.

The door chimes quietly.

He can’t get up. Knows he’s crouched like a wounded animal in parody of meditation. Still can’t move.

The door slides open.

Leia stands in the frame, dressed in white, her hair in a simple, artful bun.

She, too, has been weeping. She’s done her best to conceal it, but it isn’t buried far beneath her composure. When she sees him, it starts again. Her eyes fill. Small muscles in her face tremble, trying to hold the line. She’s brave. And wonderful. He’d give everything he is, everything he’s ever had or will have to see her safe and free and happy.

She steps inside. Hits the door controls.

The panel closes.

“Sorry,” Luke rasps, because he is.

Leia comes to her knees, a waterfall of flowing white. Her arms wrap around him, fierce and hard. “Tell me,” she breathes, her sharp chin hooked over his shoulder.

But there are no words, only the heat in his eyes and the air hunger in lungs that can’t expand.

He can’t tell her. Not what happened, not who he is, his shame and his horror, his grief and his terror. Not about the dark weave that runs beneath the living force, not about the way that thinking of Vader—

I’m not who you think I am, he wants to say. But the words are too alive in his heart. They have a will of their own. They won’t come.

She weeps into his shoulder, quiet, contained, shaking with small sobs she tries to smother.

The magnitude of his own grief feels like a conceit, the last dying, drowning gasps of the boy who’d wanted to rescue a princess, to carry the confidence, the skill, the forbidden weapon and the arcane knowledge of a dead and beautiful culture.

But that identity is gone.

His lightsaber is gone.

Part of his body is gone, and he feels the lack in the weave and structure he makes in the fabric of the living force.

His princess rescued him, and she’s never been his princess in the first place.

He wraps his arms around Leia Organa, stripped of her home, stripped of the wise and jaded smuggler he’s certain she’s come to love.

She feels the shift in his body language; maybe she feels the shift in his energy. For as bright as she shines in the living force, she must have some sensitivity to it.

She pulls back, her face streaked with tears. “Luke,” she says, somehow able to offer him compassion from the depthless well of her own grief. “What happened?” A tear runs over the curve of her cheek. “Tell me, please.” 

“I will.” His voice rasps like blown sand over soft stone. He tries to smile. Can’t.

She looks at him searchingly, her small hands on his shoulders. The force oscillates, bright and strong between them.

Luke swallows. “Later,” he promises. He feels the echo of the boy he was struggling to rise, struggling to draw her up, to say something bracing, something strident and brash about carrying on, about recovering what they’d lost: a gravity-gone saber belonging to a lost hero; a smuggler with a talent for arrivals but not departures; a would-be fighter’s dominant hand; the scattered people of a planetless princess.

That boy is gone.

The idea of his mother pierces his mind. All through his childhood she’d been nameless, dead, someone Owen and Beru knew nothing about. He wonders about her now. Who she was. How she’d died. Whether she’d broken like a wave against Vader’s darkness in the living force, the way he, himself, had nearly crested into nothing.

He pulls away from Leia, settles himself. Sits.

“Would you like to meditate with me?” he asks.

Uncertain, she studies his face, like she’s scanning for hope, for a boyish energy that won’t come again. “It won’t distract you?”

“There’s no distraction,” he whispers, scraped so clean the words are true.

She sits, arranging herself to mirror him. As she crosses her legs, the pool of her skirt splits to reveal simple white pants. She looks at him solemnly. He can feel how deeply the force holds her: the bright, blind backstop to a galaxy of change.

He takes a breath. Then another. “I’ll help you find Han,” he offers.

“I’ll help you build a lightsaber,” she promises, grave and startling.

A dead part of him interprets her words as solidarity, as sentiment, as an empty promise, as a romantic victory. The living part of him, certain he deserves no such effort, open to the currents of a life he’d almost fallen away from, says, “Build?”

“My father,” she replies, a tear sliding from one eye, “told me stories of Jedi trainees hunting Kyber crystals. Each Jedi built their own weapon. It was part of their training.”

“I didn’t know,” he breathes.

He’s never talked to her about it.

“There must be books. Records. Even if the Empire destroyed them all, there must be people still alive who remember where the crystals are.”

He hesitates, on the verge of explaining that he’s nothing, he’s no one, he’s worse than no one, that even now he can feel darkness, like a shadow tether, reaching into his mind from a Star Destroyer lightyears away.

But idealizing himself and vilifying himself are the same error, made in opposing directions.

Like she can sense his inner conflict, Leia lets the idea go. “Let’s meditate,” she says. “Tell me how it’s done.”

He tries to sit straight and calm. Finds he can’t, with his body and mind and spirit wracked by pain and shame. Wraps the rough-spun blanket tighter around him. “We sit,” he says. “We breathe. We allow the living force to live in us.”

“We allow,” Leia says, and shuts her eyes.