To Walk the Skies

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Prologue: The Phantom Presence

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The lone and level sands stretched off into infinity, glowing a pale grey-blue-silver under the arch of a dark, star-flecked sky.

A boy sat in the sand, grasping handfuls of it and watching with sky blue eyes as the silvery particles ran through the spaces between small fingers.

"Who are you?"

The harsh voice made the boy jump to his feet and spin around, eyes wide with fearful surprise.

A man was there, dressed all in black, tall and intimidating. His face, though twisted in an ugly scowl, was handsome, equal parts soft and fierce: a dimpled chin set in a rugged jaw, smooth tanned skin on angled cheekbones, and bright blue eyes, one bisected by an old thin scar, all framed by a shoulder-length mane of curling dark blonde hair.

The boy should have been frightened in the presence of the dark stranger. Yet, for some reason, deep down on some instinctual level, he felt the man could be trusted. So he smiled up at him and introduced himself the way his aunt taught him.

"I'm Luke. Nice ta meetcha, mister! What's your name?"

The man was taken aback. How could this boy—Luke—be so blithe when faced with one such as he, one cloaked so deeply in darkness?

"I'm Anakin." The hated, rejected name fell from his lips without thought, and he could not take it back. Strangely, he didn't want to.

"Hi Mister Anakin!" The boy held out his small hand.

"What do you want?" Anakin asked harshly, eyeing the boy with suspicion. A long life of danger and betrayal meant he would not trust so easily, even though the little boy appeared to be exactly as he seemed: an innocent and trusting child.

"Uncle says when you meet a man, you should shake his hand. It's polite!" Blue eyes sparkled, pale blonde hair glowed in the starlight. The little boy's outstretched hand was unwavering. Hesitantly, Anakin reached out with his black-gloved mechanical right hand and gently took the boy's hand. To his surprise, he could feel it- usually, his right hand was nerveless durasteel, sensors relaying only movement, not sensation, to his central nervous system. But now, strangely, he could feel the softness of the boy's hand, the young calluses on his palms, the firmness of his childish shake. Luke released his hand after a moment, and Anakin looked at his outstretched hand in confusion as it tingled with the loss of contact.

"Mister Anakin?"

He dropped his hand and looked down at the little blonde haired boy.

"What is it, Luke?" His face moved in a way that it hadn't in...in five years, as he looked at Luke. He...he smiled. Warmth seemed to rush from his still-tingling mechanical hand right to his heart, pushing away the shadows that he clung to, that clung to him. It was nice. It was thanks to the child.

"Mister Anakin, why are you in my dream?"

Confusion cut through the warmth like a knife, but before Anakin could protest, before he could insist that no, this was his dream, not Luke's, the stars fell from the sky in a rush of thunder.

Luke cried out in fear, and in the last moment, before the world ended, Anakin drew the boy into his embrace, protecting him from the encroaching darkness.

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Darth Vader rocketed awake, breath coming in great wheezing gasps. Sith-yellow eyes winced away from the abhorrently bright whiteness of the interior of his meditation chamber. He closed them, and forced himself to breath more slowly, to allow his damaged lungs to actually take in the pure O2 of the sealed chamber. After a moment, his wild waking fear had drained away, leaving confusion in its wake. He opened his eyes and stared down at his right hand, where it rested in his lap. Dead. Nerveless. Unfeeling.

It was...a dream?

He snorted slightly. Of course it was a dream. The question was this: was the dream a vision? He'd never had a true dream before. Even as a boy, he had dreamed flashes of future events if he dreamed at all, and the last time he had dreamed was nearly five years ago, brief frenetic flashes of death and darkness that had spilled over into his waking life and caused only sorrow. This...this was different. Cohesive, whole; surreal, yes, but not disjointed images of events yet to pass.

Vader tapped at the controls of the pod, activating the mechanism to affix his helmet to his suit, endeavoring to brush the vestiges of the dream from his mind. For that was all it was, all it could be—his imagination.

His helmet lowered completely over his head, sealing him into his night-black armor.

Khoo. Hiss. The respirator cycled, the mechanized breathing synonymous with Darth Vader. Behind black lenses, Sith-yellow eyes flashed.

There was no way a dream of Anakin Skywalker protecting a little boy from darkness was a vision of events yet to pass. It was impossible.

After all, I am the darkness.

He fisted his right hand tightly as he exited the meditation chamber, ignoring the way his palm still tingled from the phantom presence of the little boy's hand.

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"Mister Anakin! You're back!"

It was the same childish voice from the night before. Anakin opened his eyes to see little Luke standing before him again, blue eyes sparkling.

"Why am I here?" Anakin's question was harsh, but the little boy didn't seem to notice.

"It's a dream!" Luke said with a wise nod. Then he tilted his head curiously, looking Anakin up and down. "What are you, anyway, Mister Anakin? I don't think I've ever seen anyone like you ever, not even in a dream!"

"I'm a starfighter pilot," Anakin said on impulse, reluctant to reveal his true identity for some reason—perhaps the same reason he had given his former name to the child instead of his current one.

Luke's sparkling blue eyes were huge. "Whoah! Wizard!"

Anakin flinched at the exclamation. That vernacular—it was discomfortingly familiar

"Where are you from, boy?" he snapped. It was an irrational question—this was a dream. Luke's point of origin was his mind. But the boy didn't seem to know that.

"Tatooine!" said the boy cheerfully. As if it were something to be proud of. As if the mere mention of that sandpit was perfectly alright.

But the evidence was irrefutable. The sand-dweller clothes, the sun-streaked blonde hair, the tanned skin. Luke could have been a much younger Anakin's double. Anakin hissed out a curse, making Luke's eyes widen.

"I don't think you're supposta say that word, Mister Anakin sir."

"Silence, child! Spare me your inanity. Why would my subconscious decide to haunt me like this? This is pathetic, ridiculous! I have no regrets! My childhood has long since been over. I am a man! A Sith! I fear nothing! Least of all a phantom of my past!" Anakin was shouting by the end of his tirade, oblivious to Luke's mounting fright until the boy let out a choked sob. Anakin rounded on the boy, eyes flashing. "What?!"

"You're bein' s-scary Mister Anakin."

"Of course I'm scary, I'm—"

The sky shook and trembled. The stars began to fall. Darkness swept across the silver sands. And in a moment of shared fear, Anakin knelt down and swept the little boy into his arms as all of the light was extinguished.

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Vader woke with an audible shout of frustration. Bending over in his sleep chair, he rested his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands. It took him a moment to regain a steady breathing pattern, and when he did, he swore violently.

Kriff, what is this? Why would I dream of the same child again?

For a heart-stopping moment, he considered that it was the Force's way of punishing him for inadvertently killing his child in the womb. Then his scarred features hardened. No, he had been punished enough in losing his wife and child, in being betrayed by his love, in being left to burn. All at the whim of the jedi.

And Palpatine.

It was a traitorous thought, but a true one. Palpatine had been just as complicit in the events leading to his wife and unborn child's deaths, even persuading Vader that he had the power to prevent said deaths, when in reality he had none. Palpatine constantly held the promise of more power over Vader's head, forcing him to dance like a Kowakian monkey-lizard for it and rewarding him only with pain and a bare sliver of sithly knowledge. It was torturous.

For the first time in his five years of apprenticeship, Vader realized that he wanted to be free.

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After frightening Luke, it had taken several nights of silent staring contests before the boy spoke to him again. Still, each dream ended the same way: with the boy ensconced safely in Anakin's arms. Now, nearly a year later, that pattern had repeated several times, with Anakin slowly learning to be patient with the young child. Anakin's bouts of frightening anger and frustration diminished over time, and now every night Anakin would sit calmly in the sand, listening to Luke describe his day.

"And they call me Wormie! I don' wanna be called Wormie! It makes me so mad!" The boy picked up a fistful of sand and flung it in frustration. Together they watched it fall in the windless dreamscape, starlight glinting off of the grains and turning into a cloud of silver.

"When I was young, no one took me seriously either. I had one good friend, though, Kitster, and even though he teased me sometimes, I knew he believed in me. Maybe you need to find someone like that?"

Luke brightened. "Biggs! Biggs is like that. He's a bit older'n me, but he still plays with me, and shares his models with me, and tells cool stories!"

"Well, then why would you need the others then? Biggs sounds like a good friend to me."

Luke made a face. "Biggs is friends with them too. He tries to make them stop calling me Wormie, but they don't. And-and even though they tease me they can be fun to play Imps and Smugglers with."

Anakin patted the boy's head consolingly. "Maybe you just need to be patient with them Luke. Sometimes people will be mean, but you just have to keep your head held high and not let them kick you down. If you keep it up, they'll see that you're too wizard a person to pick on."

"Does that mean that I can punch 'em like the men in town do to each other when they get mad?"

Anakin snorted. "That's probably not the best idea. First of all, you're younger and smaller and they outnumber you, so you'll just get beaten up and then they'll never respect you. Second, they're looking just for that sort of reaction. But if you stay calm, nothing will frustrate them more, and when they are frustrated, they make mistakes, and that's how you beat them. And when you are patient and reasonable and set a good example, sometimes you not only beat the bullies, you make them into your friends."

Luke looked pensive, tracing absent, weaving patterns in the sand with his forefinger. "I guess that makes sense, Mister Anakin. I guess I hafta put up with it if I wanna be friends?"

Anakin shook his head. "Not quite, Luke. Don't put up with it—if you bow your head, that's just as good as picking a pointless fight. Instead, brush it off. Make sure that you are neither impressed, nor intimidated by their taunting. Do you understand, Luke?"

Luke nodded slowly. "They can be mean to me, but I won't let what they say hurt me. I gotta ignore it all the way, like I never even heard 'em call me mean names, 'cause when I do that it'll get boring, and they'll treat me nice like Biggs."

"And then they'll see just how wizard you are."

Anakin favored the boy with a soft smile, and Luke beamed back. Anakin drew him into an embrace even before the stars began to tremble and fall that night.

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Vader awoke feeling...strange. He had given Luke advice that he would have benefitted from back in the days when he was picked on by other Tatooinian children, and later by the younglings of the Temple. He had always rushed into fights that he had no chance of winning, and won the respect of no one. Vader had merely saved the imaginary boy time and pain...but the advice he had given so freely in his dreams rested poorly with him now.

He had advocated calm, patience. Jedi virtues. The jedi were wrong, they were always wrong, yet in Luke's (hypothetical) situation, Sith values would be utterly fruitless. Perhaps...the jedi were wrong in many ways, but in a certain few, they were correct?

The thought upset him, to say the least, and his officers gave him a wide berth for several days thereafter. Vader continued to find himself giving jedi-like advice to Luke though, and finally ceased his post-dream fits of temper, simply to spare the lives of his subordinates. After all, not all of them were incompetent, and as he had advised Luke, being patient and reasonable could get you far.

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"Are you my father?"

Luke was older now, nine to the five he had been when they first met, and his desert-sky blue eyes were infinitely older than that. Anakin had learned much about the boy in their semi-regular midnight congresses that had started with that first dream. Including the fact that the boy lived with his aunt and uncle, as his parents were both dead. A curious, unimportant tidbit, he had believed until this very moment, for (what he was pretty sure was) a figment of his imagination to possess.

Now, it made his heart ache.

"I don't think it's possible," he said gently. He could not answer in the definite negative without feeling like a liar, for some reason. Perhaps, he—who would have been a father—felt as though he was a sort of father to the boy. They had certainly spent enough time in each other's company. Nearly every night since that first time four years ago, Anakin dreamed of the young imaginary boy who told him stories of growing up on a moisture farm, stories of boyish trials and troubles not too unlike what Anakin had faced as a child—though at least Luke was not a slave. Anakin gave him advice, and offered him comfort, laughed with him, and occasionally scolded him. It was what Anakin would have wanted from a father-figure, what Qui-Gon Jinn might have been, what Obi-Wan Kenobi had never quite managed to be.

And all for an imaginary boy.

A boy without a father.

"I don't care." Luke had a bold, familiar look on his face: a look of defiance that Anakin had often seen in the mirror when he was Luke's age.

"Don't care about what?" Anakin gave the boy a fond, humoring look. Above him the sky trembled, as it always did before the dream ended. He knelt and opened his arms, and the boy threw himself into the man's embrace.

"I don't care that you don't know. Anything is possible. So you are my father. Because I say so."

The boy's arms tightened around Anakin.

"I'd like that." Anakin's whisper was nearly lost to the rush and thunder of the falling sky, but Luke smiled in the last moments of light before the darkness, and Anakin knew that his words had been heard.

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Darth Vader woke feeling oddly light. Not physical lightness—he was still weighted down by durasteel limbs and black armor—but a particular lightness of being. A feeling he had been missing for nearly a decade. For once in a long while, the ever-present anger and pain and darkness faded, replaced with a feeling like happiness.

If he was smiling under his mask all day, none of his subordinates had to know.

In his dreams, he had a son.

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…. End Prologue

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A/N: Okay, so I've been working on this story for a while now (usually when I was supposed to be doing college stuff) but I'm nowhere close to being done. I do, however, have approximately 80 pages of it written, and tomorrow is release day, and I need motivation, so what the hell, here's the prologue. Chapter 1 (weirdly) is still the chapter that needs the most editing, so I'm not posting it until I have both it and the current chapter finished—so don't expect any sort of regular update. Maybe this isn't my magnum opus of fanfiction or maybe it is, but I already have the ending written and I'm determined that I'll get all of you there. Until next time…may the force be with you! (Also if any of yall are in the commenting mode plz plz be critical I need all the help I can get. Criticism is inspiring.)