Saga - Legends Out of Fire, Out of Ice or The Birth of a Sith (Darth Vader, Shira Brie/Lumiya)

Title: Out of Fire, Out of Ice or The Birth of a Sith
Characters: Darth Vader, Shira Brie/Lumiya
Summary: After her horrendous injuries suffered at the hands of Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader supervises the recovery of his Shadow Hand, Shira Brie.
Brief Note: It's amazing what kind of ideas you can get while reading the original Marvel comic series late at night. Sorry for the short length.

***

A dark figure stood inside of his private medical bay of the Super Star Destroyer Executor. He was tall and clad in black armor, a blinking life support system upon his chest. His breaths sounded loud and haggard, the artificial gasps and exhales echoing through the room.

"She will live?" he said. His voice was deep and resonate as he gestured towards the circular bacta tank in the center of the room. A red haired woman was suspended by tethers in the tank. Her features that his son had found beautiful had been marred and deformed. Her limbs were gone, terminating below the hips for her legs and above the elbows on her arms. Her once slender jaw below high cheekbones was ravaged to the bone on her left side with the right disappearing under a white bandage that caved in towards her throat. Two life support ports in her chest and left side carried the oxygen that she required directly to her lungs.

The humanoid medical droid turned his attention away from the agent in the tank and to the Sith lord. Vader stared at him, masked eyes unblinking. "It appears so," it said. Somehow, despite the emotionless programming it sounded confused. The half-sphere head with diagonal eye slits turned back to the tank.

Darth Vader studied his pupil as she floated in silent recovery. The Force had often performed such "miracles" as the non-sensitives would call them. In her destroyed TIE fighter in the middle of deep space she had floated until he had found her. The deep cold of space had frozen the blood from pouring out of her mangled and missing limbs and her limited supply of oxygen had lasted in part due to a Force trance that she had entered.

The trance had seemed so easily to enter in another life. It was nothing to call upon it to heal wounds, conserve oxygen or just to pass the time on long hyperspace jumps in the cockpit of a starfighter. For all of the power that the dark side offered, this was one that was difficult to control. One would have to take all of one's hate, anger, fear and other negative emotions and channel it into pure will to survive.

"She will require major cybernetic reconstruction."

Vader paused. He could feel the burning brand of his treasonous master and friend slicing through his limbs again. His back burned with the heat of volcanic fire. Through nostrils that hadn't drawn non-filtered air for nearly 25 years he could smell his own skin broiling once more.

She had proven useful in him in the past: stopping the rebel strike team that she had infiltrated on the new Death Star and helping him kill two of its remaining three members, and now unwillingly sacrificing so much to discredit Luke Skywalker. He knew when he gave her the mission that she would never be able to kill Skywalker like he had ordered. His son was simply too powerful in the Force to be stopped in that manner. The other objective to discredit him would now be in force. Skywalker had fired upon her ship while all communications were jammed, trusting in the Force while Shira had moved to kill him in the fog of war. "I have told you to treat her, do not make me clarify my order."

The other rebels would question Skywalker, berate him, court-martial him, perhaps. He would lose the support of friends and others, all while berating himself for killing his lover accidentally. It would drive Skywalker away from the Rebellion. Drive him straight to Vader.

The Dark Lord of the Sith felt the pressure of his forearms upon his fingers and uncrossed his arms. "Give her synthskinned prosthetics," he said.

"Putting the order in now, Lord Vader," the medical droid said. It spun away and made itself useful elsewhere.

She had been useful in the past and she would be useful in the future. She would never be as powerful as she could have been and that feeling would sting and fester inside of her. She would make do, though. She would strive to complement her weaknesses and make them her strengths instead.

"Lumiya," he said out loud.

"Lord Vader?" the medical droid asked.

"You will cease calling her Shira Brie," Darth Vader said. "She will be known as 'Lumiya' to you from now on." He would continue her training in the Force and even present her to Palpatine as a potential Emperor's Hand. Unlike his last attempt at an apprentice, she would be hidden under the Emperor's nose. And if his son would come around to joining him... One apprentice could easily replace another. It was the Sith way.

 

Superb missing scene feel. Very much in-character & spot-on for motives and strategies. Oh yes, Luke does have a thing for redheads LOL Fascinating side-point that caught my attention about the dark side utility for healing trances and having to pull on the darker emotions for such things, being a disadvantage.

 

Oh, well now, this was wonderfully disturbing.

Gaaaaahhhhhhh, the feels. Excellent little passage here on how they now relate to one another.

 

It popped into my mind because we never really saw Lumiya's recovery anywhere. All we got was a quick stinger in the last page of #63, I believe, as well as a picture in a sourcebook. Both of those were after prostheses had been applied.

I had to rack my brain for a while to come up with why Vader had ordered Shira to kill Luke or discredit him if she couldn't do that, while in other sources Vader wanted Luke alive. So I thought, why would Vader reasonably assume that she would be able to kill him? And if she was able to do so, wouldn't that make her a better apprentice?

I was inspired by Vader's Sith healing technique in Shadows of the Empire and scaled it down a bit. And yes, Luke certainly does have a thing for redheaded Imperial agents tasked to kill him. I think that's why Mara and Lumiya made such natural rivals, their backstories are remarkably similar with one of them taking one path and the other another.

Thank you. I wanted to make it a kind of twisted relationship that Sith should have.

Gaaaaahhhhhhh, the feels. Excellent little passage here on how they now relate to one another.[/quote]

I wanted to make apparent the parallels between Lumiya and Vader to readers. I also wanted to show that Vader is well aware of them as well.

 

This is a great bit of introspection on Vader's thoughts about Lumiya. I like how we get the sense of the echoes in their transformation to cyborg state. This is a moment that I've wondered about too. (There's some illustration of it from one of the guide books that is very odd, in that she barely looks scratched -- I think they got carried away on the "redhead in underwear" element and didn't check Lumiya's actual post-borg character design. )

He's still willing to do whatever it takes regarding the whole Sith apprentice thing, still thinks of her in terms of usefulness -- but there is that moment of recognition and almost-empathy. Very well done!

 

Quite possible, but I think it was an homage to when Shira was first shown to be alive in the comics: she looked remarkably healthy there, too. So, taking in what cybernetics she's stated to having (and I loved the bit in Betrayal where she hid her lightwhip in her thigh), I decided to show her before those injuries.

In my opinion, he still sees her as useful despite her injuries. Part of it's fueled by how very similar their situations are, and Vader knows that. And you're right about "almost-empathy", at least in my interpretation.

 

A late reply...

Lumiya is a very interesting character and, though I wish she would have spoken here, it's interesting to see Darth Vader's own bad memories resurface upon seeing her damaged body. On one side, he is aware that she will never be the same, but at the same time, he's aware that he will never be the same, either. Love the TMI descriptions of Lumiya's injuries, too - fits the story perfectly. A great "missing scene"!


There are two little things that sound odd, btw:
- The first sentence of the second paragraph, unless that is what he said in the comic (need to re-read it).
- The medical droid being an "it".

 

Thanks for bumping this, Ewok Poet .

This is really fabulous. Love the imagery and the mood. Like everyone else, I also love LOVE this:

 

Nicely done. Anything that adds depth and good characterization to Vader is great to me.

 

When I first read that scene, years ago, and saw the full extent of Lumiya's injuries in the comics, I felt that there had to be some sort of connection between the two in such a way, bot in and out of universe. I asked myself, especially after viewing Revenge of the Sith, how Vader would feel to have his apprentice suffer similar injuries to the ones that he had?

As for the description of her injuries, I wanted to accurately portray just exactly that she had been through. She took a laser cannon blast to her unshielded TIE at point blank range and then spent at least a few hours floating in space with little protection from the vacuum. I also double checked through the LOTF series which listed some of her cybernetics. Her jaw was what was surprising to me, as she was shone with extensive scarring on the left side of her face. So, I gave her a half-Malak, if you will.

It doesn't say that, but to me it just sounded like something that Vader may have said. At the very least, it sounded good in my mental Vader voice.
The medical droid is something I don't have a very good explanation for. Probably it just came about because I simply forgot to assign the droid a gendered personality.

I loved writing that part, to be honest.

I really wanted to explore Vader's emotions in this part of the comics. I can only hope that I did the character a little bit of justice.

Thank you, everyone, for reading. I appreciate it a lot.