Luke had selected items with innocent memories—a droid's old restraining bolt, a young pilot's childhood toy. Ben had chosen a half-melted datacard—worthless for whatever it had once contained, but still marked by the traces of the Force.

"Open yourself to it. What do you see?"

Ben wrapped his hand around the scrap of metal and closed his eyes.

"A room," he said. "Dark. Metal."

Luke nodded. "Good. Try to focus. Can you pick up on anything more?"

Lines folded between Ben's eyes. He frowned. "A hand? Somebody putting this in... a slot. A computer?"

"Okay. Anything else?"

"No," Ben said, but then his expression darkened, his frown deepening to what was almost a grimace.

Something dark passed across his face, over his presence. It was impossible. Luke had tested every one of these artifacts himself, made sure that there was nothing Dark in their signatures.

There was nothing of the Dark Side. But there was something.

Luke steeled himself, expecting Ben to fly into a rage, to channel the dark energy, as Leia had warned him he would.

But instead he fell back, letting out an empty cry, and he pushed. Luke felt it, as surely as if Ben had intentionally thrown him back. He pushed all the darkness away.

"No!"

"Ben?" Luke rushed to his nephew's side. He was unhurt, that much was obvious, but his panicked cries went on.

"Ben." Luke tried to hold him, tried to comfort him, but he didn't know what to do or say. When it came to the Force, he knew what he was doing, but not when it came to preteen boys.

"Get it away from me!" Ben cried. "Get him away. He's not my father," he spat through gritted teeth. "He's not."

Hesitantly, Luke picked up the half-melted chip and held it, trying to sense what Ben had seen.

There. It was a whisper, really, the faintest of a trace. Luke would never have noticed it if Ben's hadn't reacted the way he did.

It was nothing. Maybe Han had held this, once. Maybe he'd just been in the same room.

"Ben." Luke set the chip aside, put his arm around his nephew's shoulder, the way he had with Han and Leia so many times. But their son drew back, the look on his face one of sorrow, his light in the Force dim and cold. "Ben, I know this is tough. But Han won't be gone forever. He—"

Ben shook Luke's hand away and leapt to his feet. "I hope he is!"

"You don't mean that." Luke stepped toward his nephew, but the boy shook his head and slammed his fists against the walls.

"I hate him!" he screamed. "I hate him! I hate him!" He punctuated each outburst with a blow.

Luke waited. He waited for the hatred to subside, and when Ben's punches grew softer, lighter, more frustrated and exhausted—ripples in the Force instead of waves—he stepped closer again, took Ben's hands in his own, and turned the boy to look him in the eye.

There were tears on Ben's cheeks. "I don't want to be like him."

"You're not. Han is... a good man. But he's scared, I think, of things like this. He's scared of what you could become."

"He's scared I'll be stronger than him!" Ben spat out.

Luke shook his head, waited again for Ben's breathing to calm. "He's scared that you, and I, and your mother... that we have something he can't share."

"He doesn't understand me!"

"That doesn't mean he doesn't love you." The words were filled with grief. "I felt the same way about my uncle, Ben. He didn't want me to be a pilot. Or a Jedi."

"Then he was wrong!"

"No." Luke shook his head. "He was right. I did have the potential for darkness in me. I would have been safer, if I'd stayed on the farm."

"You would have been miserable."

"Maybe that too." Luke smiled, but it was a sad smile, a wistful one. A smile for Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru.

"I could be great," Ben pleaded, almost like it was a question. "It's our heritage. It's his!"

"Ben." Luke's voice was breaking, along with his heart. "Vader... wasn't great." He looked away.

"He was stronger than you."

"No, he wasn't."/

To say any more would be to go directly against Leia's wishes. But Ben needed to know the truth—that he did have a great heritage. And that it came from Anakin Skywalker, not Darth Vader.

"How much do you know about Endor, Ben?"

Ben's eyes grew distant; he drew back. "I know he died."

"He died to save me. The Emperor..." Luke closed his eyes and turned away.

He could feel it, still, like it had been yesterday—the power of the Dark Side, ripping through his veins, into his bones. The smell of his own flesh, singeing and burning. The floor of the Death Star, cool against his face. And he could see his father, the mask of Darth Vader, through vision that wavered and flared. He could hear his own voice: "Father, please."

He didn't know if he could tell it to Ben.

He tried. He tried, and when he was done, Ben looked up at him with large, empty eyes.

"Do you understand?" Luke asked, once again. "He was Anakin, my father, at the end."

Ben was silent, his presence a storm of warring thoughts.

"He came back to the Light, Ben," Luke urged. "It saved him. He saved me."

"He died because of you," Ben muttered.

"He died for me. For us. To rid the galaxy of the Emperor."

"The Dark Side... killed my grandfather." He sank to the floor, put his head in his hands.

"He had been injured," Luke explained, "so many years before..."

"You took off his mask."

And after all this time, that was still a blow.

"He was dying already."

If that was true.

"Because the Dark Side was stronger."

"No."

Ben hid his face, for what seemed like an eternity. Luke couldn't touch him. Couldn't even move.

And then he looked up, and his face was like a child.

His voice was empty.

"Vader was weak, too."

Author's Note: Thank you so much for reading! I can't swear that I won't write more in this timeline or with these characters, but I do think that I've taken this as far as I can without getting into my own headcanon about Rey's past and parentage... so in the interest of at the very least not contradicting canon, I'll be stopping here for awhile.

This was my first foray into fic in four and a half years... and has managed to be more popular than most of my other stories put together! Thank you so much for the ego boost! This was fun and cathartic to write, and I hope it touched some of you too. :)