Star Wars: Into The Dark || A Luke and Anakin Skywalker Story

Seven || Training

His vision is clouded with dust and his mouth tastes of lingering ash; his lungs burn with the pain the man on the table must be feeling - but he isn't screaming, unlike the man on the table.

His eyes are blank but his mind can think as he watches the man, the dismembered and torn man with the burnt tunic and the scarred head, scorched face and a will to scream as loud as he might.

But Luke isn't screaming.

Luke watches; he wonders why this scene repeatedly visits him in his dreams, a vision that he has no desire to take part in, standing beside the table under bright lights, standing beside a hooded figure whom he knows can only be -

Palpatine.

The hooded figure says nothing, does nothing but watch as dozens of droids pick and poke their way to connecting artificial limbs to the ruined monster of a man, pulling robotics together to form a life-support system.

A black life-support system.

The man keeps screaming. Luke's eyes are driven, focused upon this monster but they look over every now and then and they see that the hooded figure - Palpatine - is smiling.

In horror he turns back now. He doesn't scream, he doesn't have a want to, a need to like the man on the table that came in without legs or an arm, and is now fully supported.

The life-support suit is too recognizable. It is too familiar, it is still there with Luke, always with him -

The breathing. All he hears is the breathing. The monotone, the same structure of breath that has always been with Luke the moment he faced the masked terror on Bespin, a time that seemed like forever ago.

Luke watches. He watches the mask slowly glide towards the scarred man's face, the scarred man that Luke knew as Anakin Skywalker.

The man on the table is in awe. Red-tinted glass is falling towards him, slowly, slowly - but he has lost the will to scream. He has no strength within him any longer to keep screaming. He is put to ease in the black life-support suit, an eerie control panel locked onto the front above the belt, everything about it being so haunting to Luke -

The mask is fitted. Luke's heart sinks until his chest feels empty and his head is light, he cannot think, there isn't anything to think about -

Then the helmet slides on from the top of his head, a swoosh of air and a few beeps ring out from the droids as it locks in place, clicking and resulting in a mysterious cloud of fog and air, swirling around him...

Luke is still watching. He watches from the shadows beside Palpatine, looking at him and having so many thoughts, so many emotions -

WHAT HAVE YOU DONE? Luke thinks now, directed towards the hooded figure, the hooded Sith Lord that had caused his family he never knew so much pain, so much demise -

WHAT HAVE YOU DONE - ?!

His eyes move back to the medical table. He has lost the will to think. He has lost the will to scream out in his mind at the wretched, smiling figure beside him who takes so much pleasure in the rising of his apprentice, so much pleasure in ruining things for Luke Skywalker - but Luke still watches.

He watches the table rise. He watches it lift from a horizontal angle to a vertical angle, rising slowly, slowly enough for Luke to sink everything in...

The rise of Darth Vader.

The breathing. He hears it now. Loud and clear, as clear as he heard him on Bespin, as clearly as he heard him in his dreams. As clearly as he was when he confessed to being his father... as clearly as he could be seen or heard on the second Death Star.