Beyond - Legends Inheritance [Dark Luke, Vader AU circa 9ABY]

Title: "Inheritance"
Author(s): vader_incarnate
Timeframe: 9ABY (post-RotJ AU)
Characters: Luke, Vader
Genre: angst, drama, Sith being Sithy, “and then everything sucked for everyone, but especially my favorites”

Summary: The inheritance the boy was owed, and the one he received instead. Or: in which Lord Vader gets everything he ever wanted and hates it.

Notes: Angstmongers Anonymous First/Last Lines Challenge response! My dice chose for me these lines with which to begin and end the story.

12. “Who did this?”
19. “That's no longer your decision to make.”

Spoiler: Addditional Notes

This one goes out to whoever at Fornite HQ gifted me with lightning!Luke sitting on a throne. Thanks, anonymous graphic designer - I'm just gonna go ahead and take that and construct a world in which it fits and also add some more stuff to make it terrible. Just look at this evil sunshine boy, I love him.

---

"Who did this?" Vader thundered as he swept into the room, knowing the answer even as the words crossed his lips, and knowing that it was pointless to ask. There was only one possible answer, and only one person the boy would allow to survive an attack of this magnitude - and Vader, to his vexation, sensed two distinct life forms in the room before him: one burning bright with victory and one cowed and muted and thoroughly beaten. This foolish indulgence would be the death of them all.

The throne room was in shambles, and as he stalked towards the shadowed throne, the Red Guards hurriedly stepped aside to let him by, disappearing obediently to close the door after he passed. They knew not to get involved in family affairs.

It looked as if a thermal detonator had gone off. Or several, knowing the girl's training. The floor was littered with the detritus of a hard fought battle, and if decades of war had taught Vader anything, it was how to read the forensics of a fight: here, lightsabers had clashed and scorched rough lines into expensive marble, there one of them had fallen extinguished to the ground, and near to that the epicenters of the thermal detonator explosions. And then, leading up to the throne, the scarred and ashen burns of electrical discharge. They should have known better. The both of them.

But there on the throne, crowned and confident and contemplative, sat his son and his Emperor.

The remnants of the Inquisitorius had fallen shortly after Endor, unable to adapt to their new reality, and in a moment of dramatic overindulgence, the second Emperor had commissioned a crown made from the spoils of that victory. His predecessor had never affected a crown, but even Vader could appreciate the picture it made: this new Sith Emperor crowned with bleeding kyber.

They said the crown itself screamed, even to those who were blind to the Force. That it whispered madness into the minds of all who looked upon the new Emperor. The rumors spread to the furthest corners of the Empire, and then beyond its boundaries - and hard on the heels of the rumors came the terror and despair that darkened and chilled the Force.

But the second Emperor didn't sit in his throne so much as drape himself across it, and the sight disconcertingly reminded Vader not of the boy's predecessor, of Sidious - but of Vader's master before him, and the way that Kenobi had always seemed to sit more astride his chair in the Council chambers than within it. And for a single wild moment Vader thought that there had not possibly been enough time for Kenobi to teach him to sit like that in the distance between Tatooine and Alderaan.

Nevertheless, the boy mimicked that particular posture, familiar to no one but Vader - his legs spread carelessly and casually and his right arm dangling over the armrest, but his left hand up at eye level as he gazed almost pensively at the sparks of lightning that cascaded across his fingertips.

Vader’s suit had a specific weakness to lightning built in. One day they both knew that the boy would use it. But that day had not yet come.

His left leg was casually propped up on a girl, collapsed on the floor and still spasming sporadically - the recipient of the lighting. Vader's enhanced aural sensors caught her low choked sobs, though the sound would have been inaudible to others: pained but also humiliated, her searing hatred flaring brightly in the Force. The sounds reminded him unnervingly of Bespin.

"Lord Vader," Padmé's son greeted him softly, turning away from the crackle of the electricity he held in his hand to offer Vader a small and secret smile. He did not say Father, as he once had. Nor did he say Master, because though the boy held the throne, he was still learning the teachings of the Sith and Vader held the mantle of the Sith Master. The balance of power between them was a delicate thing. "You're early."

"You toy with her," Vader seethed, "but you underestimate her hatred of us at your peril. Our peril. Her master trained her - "

"To kill when she had hardly begun to walk," the boy finished for him, waving a hand in a carelessly dismissive gesture. A sparkle of lighting lingered briefly on his fingers. "You've told me, on multiple occasions. And I'm hardly underestimating her. If she manages to kill me, I'll thoroughly deserve it."

"You are unwise to - "

"I know. But if his throne is mine by right of conquest, then surely everything else of his ought to be mine as well. Even his Hands. We were just discussing the matter, she and I." He grinned wolfishly. “Do you want to know what she tried this time? A cortosis mesh, embedded in her gloves. She disabled my lightsaber. I think I might take her hands for that. And wouldn't that be funny, a handless Hand?”

The girl’s fear bled freely into the Force at that, an eagerly hemorrhaging artery, her pain too great for her to concentrate on her shielding - but Vader fought the urge to roll his eyes. The boy was too fond of teasing his prey, but also too inexplicably fond of the girl to follow through on the threat.

Sleep, Vader ordered the girl in the Sith language of Kittȃt.

The Jedi waded in the shallows of the Force with half-hearted mind tricks, but the Sith spoke their power in the Force inflected language of Kittȃt, leaving non-sensitives hanging on their every word, bound to every whim of their superiors. And though she was stubborn and her mind should have been strong enough to resist, the girl was too weakened and in too much pain to do so, and she collapsed immediately into a deep sleep.

And the Emperor - the Emperor pouted. "Spoilsport," he accused lightly.

“Kill her and be done with it,” Vader growled. “Your foolish affection -”

“Don’t you think I know that?” the boy snapped back. “I know she’s a weakness I can’t afford, that she’ll kill me - both of us - with a smile on her face if she was capable. But she isn’t capable, so it’s not a problem.”

“You underestimate -”

“Stop. Please,” the boy interrupted suddenly, and the uncharacteristic plea stopped Vader short more effectively than the order. He leaned forward on the throne, briefly put his face in his hands, inhaling deeply with his eyes closed.

“Fathe-” he started, but he caught himself. He shook himself briefly, sat up straighter, and started again. “Lord Vader. I know you’re haunted by echoes of the past.” Vader suppressed a surge of surprise, that the boy knew, and that he had put words to the feeling, and the boy arched an eyebrow. “If we’re not honest with each other, who else can we be honest with?” he asked rhetorically, before continuing. “But - it’s like that. She feels like an echo. Within the Force. But ... not of something in the past.”

That made no sense at all, but Vader said nothing.

The boy shook himself again and pulled himself upright, resuming his languid position reclining on the throne, though this time he set both legs properly upon the floor. They would put the matter aside, as they always did, and the boy offered the first overture of peace by changing the topic. “But you didn’t come here to lecture me about my foolish affections. Do you have a report on Bilbringi?”

“The Rebellion has been pacified,” Vader rumbled.

"Pacified," the boy repeated, sneering. "Spare me the euphemism, Lord Vader. Tell me which of my former friends we've managed to put down like a rabid dog, and how many it cost us. And then tell me how many civilians were in the way, and how many of those were brutally murdered for the crime of being in the same system as the Rebellion."

"General Solo was the commanding officer aboard the Emancipator when the ship went down with all hands," Vader responded after a pause. A flare of pain and surprise lanced through the Force, but the boy mercilessly quashed them down before reinforcing his shielding. "As the ship fell out of orbit, Executor followed her with a barrage of turbolaser fire and a series of thermonuclear warheads to her docking bay as she launched escape pods. I strongly doubt - " your friend, Vader did not say, " - that General Solo was able to escape."

Solo had saved the boy above Yavin. And saved him from Vader himself. That his death came now at Vader's hand, and at the boy's order - the inversion carried with it an insistent echo of finality, a whisper of fate. The boy’s history with the Rebellion had opened with Solo’s rescue; it was only fitting to finally bookend that chapter of his life now with Solo’s death.

The boy closed his eyes, and Vader spared him a moment for his grief. Vader took the opportunity to study him; he found himself doing so often.

The second Emperor’s face was scarred, a souvenir from Endor. Not as grotesquely as his predecessor’s had been, but the scarring had been Sidious’ final gift: an aftereffect of the lightning, the marks of which the boy had chosen to keep. It contorted the right side of his face, giving new menace to his otherwise boyish aspect. The propaganda no doubt put the onus for this on the Rebellion, as Palpatine’s deformity had once been blamed on the Jedi.

The matching scars that Vader knew crisscrossed the boy's torso looked like nothing so much as the deep roots of an ancient tree, and Vader's own rebellious thoughts brought him memories of the Great Tree within the Jedi Temple. A treasonous voice tinged with something like regret whispered to him, That culture should have been his legacy, to train in the Temple like generations of Jedi before, to meditate by the Great Tree and in the Room of a Thousand Fountains.

But the inheritance of the Sith was not beauty but pain, and Vader had chosen that legacy for his son even before he knew of his existence. And despite his romantic notions it was not the roots of the Great Tree that had made their mark on the boy’s flesh and soul, but the voracious and unyielding Dark.

His son had once shone not just in the Force but physically, as if Tatooine’s suns had been melted into him: gilding his skin, heating his blood, bleeding his hair to gold. Vader’s optical scanners granted him vision only in shades of crimson, but he remembered reading the description in the boy's bounty in the aftermath of Yavin, remembered in the sanctuary of his qabbrat trying to force his brain to superimpose that description of sky blue eyes and sun kissed golden hair onto the hologram that showed him the face of Padmé's lost son.

But Yavin had been years ago, and that boy had ceased to be. And though he was still a child of Tatooine, his aspect no longer reflected the warmth of her twin suns but instead her brutal and merciless nights lit only by the cold light of uncaring, distant stars. Vader knew too that the boy's once tanned skin had paled and his sun bleached hair had darkened, and Vader's own treacherous mind whispered to him that without Anakin's coloring he must look more like Padmé's son than ever.

Vader did not know what color the boy's eyes were now, and this he could admit to himself: he did not want to know.

But even without that knowledge, Vader could read the baleful look the boy shot at him when he finally opened his eyes, hatred burning brightly in the sunken, hollow eyes of a man who had not slept in days. Vader knew the look well. He also knew the nightmares. "How many did we lose?" the new Emperor asked finally. "And what was the loss of civilian life?"

"Six Destroyers. And the Chimera. Piett is preparing the full report and will have that for you by sundown."

The Emperor's eyebrows shot up in shock. "The Chimera? Han took out Thrawn?" The implied good for him hung unspoken in the air, but the boy managed to suppress his smile.

“Not quite. It seems the Chimera had lost its commander before the ship itself went down. An assassination.”

The boy blinked in surprise, then glanced quickly at the still unconscious girl at his feet. “An assassination,” he repeated slowly. “That’s hardly the Rebellion’s style.”

“It seems your sister was able to make an alliance with the Noghri,” Vader informed him. “One of which was the Grand Admiral’s personal bodyguard.”

The Emperor barked a laugh at that, an unbecoming reaction from a monarch who had just been informed that one of the heads of his navy had been assassinated and his flagship lost in battle. “Good for her,” he said, apparently unable to keep it unspoken this time. “I take it she wasn’t aboard the Emancipator with her husband?”

The question was deceptively casual, but Vader sensed the burning desperation in it. The boy had always been overprotective of his sister, even now when they were on opposite sides.

"You know I would not have obliterated the ship so thoroughly if she was, Luke," Vader rumbled, irritated.

"Do not call me that, Lord Vader,” he snapped. “You overstep."

Padmé had chosen his name, had chosen Luke to honor Anakin’s mother’s tongue. It hurt not to be able to use it. More than it should have.

“You will not turn her,” Vader said, surprising them both.

The boy who had been Luke grinned suddenly, an unnaturally pleasant expression with real humor behind it that no longer quite fit the new contours of his face. It recalled the expression from the holo that Vader had once held in his qabbrat - the one he still kept, the one he still studied, the one that sometimes he still examined for hours on end to try to see if he could recognize something of that long gone carefree Rebel pilot in the man who now occupied the throne.

“Here I thought we had a don’t ask, don't tell policy about honoring the Rule of Two,” the new Emperor protested dryly. "How am I supposed to plot to overthrow my Sith Master when he's so inconveniently interested in my plans for succession?"

"You know she will not accede," Vader warned.

The boy's eyes, whatever color they were, gleamed lambent from the shadows of the throne. "She will. I'll have her willing or I'll have her broken - but in the end, she will." He glanced back towards his hand, where lightning had again begun to dance, before looking back at Vader, something cruel and predatory lurking in his gaze. "They say she has children now. And children are such an easily exploitable weakness - wouldn't you agree, Lord Vader?"

They could be honest only with each other, but Vader did not say, You fell to save her. You gave your soul over to the ravenous Darkness to save your sister. You don't understand the depths to which you've descended.

Nor did he say, I have been where you are, I have stood where you stand - and when I gained what I thought I wanted most, there was only horror there for me.

Vader didn't have the necessary words, and the boy would not have heard them, and the inheritance of the Sith was not beauty but pain, so he said only, "You are making a mistake."

Anakin's son smirked. "Perhaps. But that's no longer your decision to make."

---

End.

Spoiler: Additional Notes

Notes:
- Vader, go betray your son and ally yourself with your widowed daughter and infant grandchildren. I demand it. I may or may not write it out any time soon, but I demand it nonetheless.

- Tell me with a straight face that a Luke Skywalker Sith Emperor wouldn’t have a crown of corrupted kyber that drew blood every time he put it on. You can’t. He's really just that extra.

- Guys if we ever get to the redemption arc, the moment when the purified kyber turns white will be epic. And so extra.

- I don’t know why I have three different Luke-as-Emperor AUs, apparently I just really like the concept. This one I blame on Fortnite. I’m going to codename this one the Kyber Crowned, he can go sit in that corner of my brain reserved for Emperor Lukes with the Sun Lord and the Black King, and they can duke it out over a holochess table to figure out whose story I'll continue first.

- Update on the holochess game: the Black King version won, for various reasons he's the best at playing chess.

 

LOLOL I just bet they do

That's my girl :mara:

This is so creepy but I love it

lolllllll

Elli, you know I love you, but I might not be talking to you now

This is a very in-character arrogance level for a dark Luke

*SO PROUD*

This boy, I swear

Elli, I really really want her to kill both of them with a smile on her face now

Don't you toss this L/M angst at me and expect me to forgive Luke for humiliating her, because I'm not going to, I still want Mara to take him out now

get 'im, Mara

*shakes fist @ Luke*

I love this

And this (hey, it just now occurred to me that we don't have a Thrawn emoji, this feels like an oversight. But we need a Mara one first)

Aw yeah, you go, Leia and Rukh

*tags Endless Screaming Twitter bot* AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

So good, so angsty

Anakin's son, aaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh

Skywalkers are indeed very extra about this sort of thing

 

I love it. Luke turning dark and becoming the emperor with his father lord Vader at his command

 

This is -- I don't -- I can't even -- Wow. Just.....wow. This is so well written and compelling and angsty and beautiful in the most awful way and I want to read more and also I hate it. And I realize all that is jumbled and rambling and probably kind of incoherent, but it's just a really complicated emotion, okay? This story made me feel.....I don't even know, I don't know if it even has a name, but it made me feel. I'll have to leave a more coherent review later. I am not okay right now.

 

Edit: Accidental double post. Oops, my bad.

 

: "Someone must have taught him how to manspread, it sure wasn't me. Like everything else, this must be Kenobi's fault."

Initial draft of the beginning note included, "Gabri, maybe don't read this one; I'm terrible to Mara in it."

Maybe eventually, but she needs to do some other stuff first while I build out this universe a bit. And I'm a sucker for Vader and Mara reluctantly working together. They could process so much trauma together if either of them knew how to handle emotions

One of my favorite things to do is to give dark!Luke some lines that really ought to be read in his "Tosche Station to pick up power converters voice." Because he’s still essentially the same person - just awful now!

Isn't he awful, I love him.

Gabri, it is SO AMUSING to me that both Luke and Vader canonically get red lightning - Fallen Luke gets it in Force Unleashed (mostly to differentiate it from Starkiller's traditional blue lightning, I know, I headcanon it anyway) and Vader gets it in Charles Soule's comics. And I just love so much that these dramatic Skywalker boys get their lightning in this color to keep with their Sithy aesthetic.

Thank you!

Thank you!

DC Comics has this miniseries called Tales from the Dark Multiverse and that's basically what my muse does half the time - skitters off and contructs terrible and beautiful worlds where everything is broken. The other half of the time, cat Vader fluff.

---

I wrote out a terrible backstory to this terrible world over in my drabble thread but went through a few different versions. You should probably read both, but basically this the same as that one, from another perspective.

---

When he slept at all he would go to sleep with the screams of murdered children ringing through his mind and would wake to the sounds of the same and even after all these years he knew he would never grow accustomed to it: that they would always always be there to ram past his shields, tear through his ears, eat into his soul.

He knew that others thought the kyber crown to be an overindulgent affectation - but nothing else he had ever found could ever come close to drowning out the sounds of those. Murdered. Children. The rumors said the crown whispered madness into the minds of those that looked upon it, but he knew that it was not the crown at all but only his own cracked and fraying shields: slowly collapsing after years of attempting to hold the screams at bay. Easiest to encourage the rumors that blamed the crown.

He knew himself to be thoroughly broken, as he had been for years since the incident with the interrogators. "The incident" was what Vader called it, and it was that that had given rise to his hatred for his father's euphemisms - the incident that had left him screaming until his throat raw, until he couldn't actually scream anymore, until the only sounds coming from his ruined throat were piteous, mewling sobs. But he had left no one else alive to scream with him by then and he could only listen because he could do nothing to block out the sounds.

Vader found him in the wreckage, approached him when no one else could, and only then had the helmet finally been removed - but by then it was too late and the screams would not stop and had taken up permanent residence in all the corners of his mind, seeping into the cracks and crevices and corners, poisoning his memories, digging deep to uproot his sanity.

He vaguely remembered begging his father, in an urgent and desperate whisper, when will they stop when will they stop when will the children stop screaming please please make them stop.

And Vader's basso rumble of reply - never. They will never stop.

Vader had been right.

The kyber crown didn't really block or drown out the screams but sometimes they would - harmonize. Find some short note of agreement when the dueling screams of memory and kyber became momentarily tolerable. And he was noticing more and more that it happened most often when he was contemplating an atrocity.

Once in desperation he'd ordered a child brought before him in the throne room. He'd had the wild thought that a new child's screams would - wouldn't fix it, maybe, but would give him something new to listen to, for once. Just for a change of pace.

It wasn't until they brought him a boy -

A little boy, terrified and shivering and whimpering so softly as to almost be inaudible, his fear bleeding freely into the Force like an opened artery -

It wasn't until they brought him a boy and hurriedly and fearfully left the child alone with him that he realized the depths to which he had fallen.

He'd come so, so frightfully close to torturing a child to death. Just to see what would happen.

He left the child standing there and stalked away in shameful, glowering silence, sending cracks spidering through the stone floor with each step and lightning angrily crackling behind him in barely leashed impotent fury.

Leia would bend; he knew this. She had her own children now, and he knew well the depths to which someone would descend to silence the screams of children.

I know I said I'd stop; I can stop anytime I swear

 

ELLLLLLIIIIIIIIIIIIII NOOOOOOOOOOOOO

lolololol

JK I love you but whhhhhhhyyyyyyyyyyyy

 

I'm at SeaWorld with the mantas, it's where I construct angst

 

AW such terrible angst for him.
But Mantas? I have seen them as very kind and graceful animals

 

It took me a while to click the "like" button as a precursor to composing this comment, as "like" is a word insufficient to respond to this level of darkness and dysfunctional family angst. Here they are: father and son, ruling the galaxy, as Vader offered. Though not really, not quite together. I don't know about the man crowned with kyber, but even as he softens his words with euphemisms, Vader has been stripped of all illusions. Every day could be the day when that boy makes use of that weakness in his suit, and every day they both pretend that isn't so.

As for Luke himself, the boy who fell into darkness to save his sister's soul, I do not know how he is going to earn that redemption arc after pulling this stunt:

His left leg was casually propped up on a girl, collapsed on the floor and still spasming sporadically - the recipient of the lighting. Vader's enhanced aural sensors caught her low choked sobs, though the sound would have been inaudible to others: pained but also humiliated, her searing hatred flaring brightly in the Force.

(Yes: apparently demolishing your most beloved mortal enemy in combat is one thing, but using her as a bloody footstool to cement her defeat is just beyond the par for me. Also, I suspect that if she knew Vader could hear her sobbing-- and know what she's been reduced to--she would make sure to smile all the more whilst killing him.)

Then I read the addendum--a piece of writing showing the darkest recesses of the Kyber Crowned's mind--and I switched to being almost awed that he can appear so sane, so normal. Manspreading and bantering oh so casually as those dead children scream eternally in his head. On my re-read as I prepared to write this, I found myself wondering if even death would be enough to silence them, or if the eternal part will be literal.

But this is still Star Wars, and in the Force all things are possible, so I should probably reserve most if not all judgment on that. Will Vader betray his emperor and son and join (reluctant) forces with his furious and widowed daughter? Can redemption itself make one iota of impact on the neverending screams? I would not dare to predict any of this, only that I'm sure it would be a wild ride of the darkest of angst.