Fic: Faded Lives
Dec. 12th, 2003 09:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
valarltdUsual header and disclaimer. Spell-checked, unbeta'd comments welcome.
I go to see him every day. He never knows I'm there. The drugs make him sleep a great deal. As he is now. Asleep and dreaming. And I'm on my way to work. No dreams for Lady Chancellor, just unending paperwork and diplomacy.
Outwardly, Luke looks little different from the young man who burst into my cell all those years ago announcing that he was there to rescue me.
As I look now, into his cell, and back on the past, I can see his madness beginning even then . His utter conviction that the Force was real, that Ben Kenobi was instructing him even after we saw the general die, should have been our first clue. Maybe we could have gotten him the help he needed before it got so bad.
He stirs in his sleep, and I watch through the window in his door. His face is unlined, smiling faintly. I wonder what he dreams. I can see his eyes move under their closed lids.
The ysalimari in the cage near him is sleeping too. Luke still believes in the Force and that the creature blocks the use of it. It's there mostly to keep him from hurting himself.
The doctors say tending the ysalimari is the first step in his recovery. He killed the first three, believing their deaths would free him to use the Force and escape. He finally seems to accept this one. He feeds and waters it, cleans its cage and even talks to it, telling it stories. He isn't allowed much company. When the stories begin to bear some resemblance to reality, therapy will begin. I still hope that he can return to us from the grip of his psychosis.
I watch a little longer, check his chart and then go to my offices. So very much to do, even twelve years after Palpatine’s fall.
But Luke stays with me today, as he does most days. I wish he could sit in my office and advise me, as he did during the war. Force inspired or not, his advice was always sound. My morning is consumed in work and memories. I ignore the cold hollow in the pit of my stomach as I dictate treaties, agreements and execution orders.
Han calls, as he always does, and we meet for lunch. We eat at our favorite café in the upper levels, an outdoor place that serves real organic food, not nutrimix or synthemeal. We speak of nothings, all the nothings that make up our life together.
Luke sits between us, unseen, unacknowledged, a ghost. Even after ten years, we never speak of him. A kiss, brief, dry, passionless, another nothing, and my mate has left.
Luke haunts me all afternoon. Somehow, I know when he wakes and when he sleeps. When he sleeps, the images of his dreams come to me most sharply. His waking hours are dulled by a haze of drugs. He would call it the Force. Han would say something about my imagination. Perhaps it is the secret we share, the blood between us, that causes it. I have heard of such things between twins.
One more of the many things I cannot share with the man I share my meals, my bed and my life with. He does not know of my relationship. These things eat at us, piling the nothings between us like stones, a wall of them.
Luke’s asleep and dreaming. His dreams are always the same, and usually bad. He dreams of fighting Vader, killing him in a cave and being killed by him on Bespin, where it is not his hand but his head sent tumbling down the airshaft. He dreams of dying under the electrical assault of the Emperor. I’ve shared that one often enough to know that his heart stops after the twentieth scream of "Father!" The pleasant ones are few and fleeting. They touch him lightly enough that I know he is asleep and dreaming, but I never know the content.
Today, he dreams of his trial, the competency hearing that sent him to the room he now inhabits.
I saw it coming. Luke became a liability when he survived Endor. A dead hero, we could have lauded and invoked and used. But he lived, and came back with his wild claims of supernatural abilities made even more convincing by a few parlor tricks. Those, coupled with bizarre idea that Vader was his father damned him. There was no way the New Republic could allow him to remain free.
The Jedi were a mystic sect, rightly eradicated long ago. Luke, with his lightsaber and his delusions, had the charisma that would draw followers to him. Millions would flock to him from thousands of impoverished, devastated worlds, looking for miracles instead of the hard work their planets needed. His claims of being Vader’s son would draw loyalists out and give them a rallying point.
The last thing we needed when trying to create a republic was an aristocratic messiah.
But he was alive, and we could discredit him. Execution for deserting on Hoth and then on Endor was not an option. A martyr would garner even more followers than a live leader. His legend would grow of its own accord, until not even his followers would remember Luke himself, but only the Jedi.
I close my eyes and put my head on the desk that is as large as Luke's cot. I see through his eyes as he dreams the trial. Mothma, stern and hard-faced. The Rogues looking scared and stricken as he was remanded to the custody of the Center for Mental Health until such time as he was no longer a danger to himself or others.
I felt him sag under the weight we laid on him that day. Every death, even those he caused for the Rebellion, was held against him. When the number of dead from the Death Star was laid at his feet, he caught my eyes with a look of pure betrayal.
And the sight of Han, seething, his hand clutching mine until his knuckles turned white and I was afraid he’d break it, sent a stab through Luke that I can feel even in the dream. I’d suspected it for a long time. And I knew the affections were not unrequited. I see myself standing there, cold and sad, doing the right thing for all the wrong reasons.
The Rebellion betrayed her greatest hero right there, making him the target for all the hatred and resentment simmering among the recently-liberated peoples. I betrayed him. I'd be dead on Tarkin's orders if he hadn't saved me. The Rebellion would be so much debris orbiting Yavin if he hadn't made the shot they were saying was the beginning of a career in mass murder. The fleet would have been destroyed at Endor if he hadn't distracted the Emperor.
Because he heard the voices of the dead, we called him psychopathic.
Because he was other-directed, and took his beliefs seriously, we locked him away so he could not lead others to his beliefs.
Because he believed Vader’s lies, he is drugged into insensibility.
Because of the Force.
The Force. Vader’s damnable Force that has robbed me of everything I held dear: my world, my father, my sleep. My brother and friend, who should be nothing but honored in his middle age and is instead considered mad.
Some days, like today, when Luke's dreams are bad, I think I need the room next to his. The things I cannot tell anyone weigh on me. More stones, walling me in as effectively as the hospital and drugs contain Luke.
Vader wielded a very real weapon: his voice. That voice made my knees weak the first time I heard it, frightening me, arousing me and confusing me. If Vader claimed black was white, one could believe it as long as he listened to that voice. Most days, I believe he used hypnosis, truth drugs and that voice on me. Today I don't. Today I know the Force is real, and was what lent his voice its power. The Force Vader used on me, burning me alive and never harming one hair of me. The Force Luke believes in.
The one that is real, and can harm or heal, lift objects or raise the dead or all the other things I've seen Luke do. All those things I didn't bring up in front of the hearing. If I said I'd seen him move a droid with only his mind, I'd have that room next to his. Even evidence from Artoo's recorder wouldn't have helped. I think Luke knew. He went quietly into his oblivion. Maybe he'd seen too much.
He's awake now. I wonder if he senses me as I sense him. If my distress was what reached out and woke him. When he’s awake, he’s harder to sense. The drugs leave his mind sluggish. I let him fade out and start working again.
I manage for a few hours. The galaxy spins well enough without me. I switch on my computer to the hospital monitor. Han is there, as he always is. In the afternoon lull, when the morning meds have worn off, Luke has eaten and is his most alert. Han always comes then, before the evening medication.
My beloved has little to fill his days. Since his eyes, never properly healed in the haste of war, ceased functioning two years ago, he has been at loose ends. He goes to Luke every day, a talking gameboard under his arm. The staff allows Han in, knowing Luke would never hurt him.
I watch as Han activates the board. The game is a simple one, a child's game really, not the complex one he and Chewbacca used to play. Luke is slow for his first move. As they play, Luke’s mind clears and he can focus. His moves come at a more normal rate.
The tears that land on the screen are as routine as the game. My two handsome heroes: one blind and useless, one mad and useless, reduced to playing children's games in the afternoon. There is no room for heroes in peace time, only for bureaucrats. But we could do so much better by them!
I watch as Luke wins. Han threw the game four moves earlier. He beams and Luke looks almost normal. It doesn’t last. It never lasts.
Luke says something about the Force, and I watch Han's face close down. They tend the ysalimari. I do wish he'd quit calling it Ben.
The nurse comes in, on schedule. Luke takes his injection placidly enough. Han sets up the board again for an even simpler game, one of sowing stones in cups.
Luke fades a third of the way through. By the time his last move comes, he is dozing sitting up. Han cancels the game and folds the board up. I know what comes next and I switch the monitor off.
Han will put him on his bunk, cover him and kiss him, the barest brush across his temple, before he leaves. It's a gesture that looks brotherly to anyone but me. Luke won't know about it, and I shouldn't know.
I leave the office after a few more hours. Hours that blur under work and the ache that nothing soothes. I stop briefly at the hospital, and look through the window. I know this nightmare. It's the electrical one. I don't want to watch him writhe under electricity that exists only in his mind.
Han gets around our apartment well enough. He has dinner waiting for me. Again we talk of nothing.
I ask what he did. He says "nothing."
He asks what was exciting at work. I say "nothing."
No news from Chewbacca.
Nothing of import in the news.
I clear up. A concert on the holonet kills part of the evening. I shower and Han brushes my hair as he loves to do.
In the last days before his sight went altogether, I wore my hair down. His last sight of me was that. He says brushing me helps him remember what I looked like. He showers and joins me in bed.
More nothings as we discuss our plans for tomorrow.
His lovemaking is careful, but needy. He requires this reassurance that there is one thing left he can do. He sleeps afterward, sated on my body. The soft snores beside me are comforting and familiar after ten years. I will not trouble his sleep with the things I carry. Nor with the knowledge that since he would not choose between us, I chose for him.
I lie awake, and listen to the silence, to the nothings that are my life.
I go to see him every day. He never knows I'm there. The drugs make him sleep a great deal. As he is now. Asleep and dreaming. And I'm on my way to work. No dreams for Lady Chancellor, just unending paperwork and diplomacy.
Outwardly, Luke looks little different from the young man who burst into my cell all those years ago announcing that he was there to rescue me.
As I look now, into his cell, and back on the past, I can see his madness beginning even then . His utter conviction that the Force was real, that Ben Kenobi was instructing him even after we saw the general die, should have been our first clue. Maybe we could have gotten him the help he needed before it got so bad.
He stirs in his sleep, and I watch through the window in his door. His face is unlined, smiling faintly. I wonder what he dreams. I can see his eyes move under their closed lids.
The ysalimari in the cage near him is sleeping too. Luke still believes in the Force and that the creature blocks the use of it. It's there mostly to keep him from hurting himself.
The doctors say tending the ysalimari is the first step in his recovery. He killed the first three, believing their deaths would free him to use the Force and escape. He finally seems to accept this one. He feeds and waters it, cleans its cage and even talks to it, telling it stories. He isn't allowed much company. When the stories begin to bear some resemblance to reality, therapy will begin. I still hope that he can return to us from the grip of his psychosis.
I watch a little longer, check his chart and then go to my offices. So very much to do, even twelve years after Palpatine’s fall.
But Luke stays with me today, as he does most days. I wish he could sit in my office and advise me, as he did during the war. Force inspired or not, his advice was always sound. My morning is consumed in work and memories. I ignore the cold hollow in the pit of my stomach as I dictate treaties, agreements and execution orders.
Han calls, as he always does, and we meet for lunch. We eat at our favorite café in the upper levels, an outdoor place that serves real organic food, not nutrimix or synthemeal. We speak of nothings, all the nothings that make up our life together.
Luke sits between us, unseen, unacknowledged, a ghost. Even after ten years, we never speak of him. A kiss, brief, dry, passionless, another nothing, and my mate has left.
Luke haunts me all afternoon. Somehow, I know when he wakes and when he sleeps. When he sleeps, the images of his dreams come to me most sharply. His waking hours are dulled by a haze of drugs. He would call it the Force. Han would say something about my imagination. Perhaps it is the secret we share, the blood between us, that causes it. I have heard of such things between twins.
One more of the many things I cannot share with the man I share my meals, my bed and my life with. He does not know of my relationship. These things eat at us, piling the nothings between us like stones, a wall of them.
Luke’s asleep and dreaming. His dreams are always the same, and usually bad. He dreams of fighting Vader, killing him in a cave and being killed by him on Bespin, where it is not his hand but his head sent tumbling down the airshaft. He dreams of dying under the electrical assault of the Emperor. I’ve shared that one often enough to know that his heart stops after the twentieth scream of "Father!" The pleasant ones are few and fleeting. They touch him lightly enough that I know he is asleep and dreaming, but I never know the content.
Today, he dreams of his trial, the competency hearing that sent him to the room he now inhabits.
I saw it coming. Luke became a liability when he survived Endor. A dead hero, we could have lauded and invoked and used. But he lived, and came back with his wild claims of supernatural abilities made even more convincing by a few parlor tricks. Those, coupled with bizarre idea that Vader was his father damned him. There was no way the New Republic could allow him to remain free.
The Jedi were a mystic sect, rightly eradicated long ago. Luke, with his lightsaber and his delusions, had the charisma that would draw followers to him. Millions would flock to him from thousands of impoverished, devastated worlds, looking for miracles instead of the hard work their planets needed. His claims of being Vader’s son would draw loyalists out and give them a rallying point.
The last thing we needed when trying to create a republic was an aristocratic messiah.
But he was alive, and we could discredit him. Execution for deserting on Hoth and then on Endor was not an option. A martyr would garner even more followers than a live leader. His legend would grow of its own accord, until not even his followers would remember Luke himself, but only the Jedi.
I close my eyes and put my head on the desk that is as large as Luke's cot. I see through his eyes as he dreams the trial. Mothma, stern and hard-faced. The Rogues looking scared and stricken as he was remanded to the custody of the Center for Mental Health until such time as he was no longer a danger to himself or others.
I felt him sag under the weight we laid on him that day. Every death, even those he caused for the Rebellion, was held against him. When the number of dead from the Death Star was laid at his feet, he caught my eyes with a look of pure betrayal.
And the sight of Han, seething, his hand clutching mine until his knuckles turned white and I was afraid he’d break it, sent a stab through Luke that I can feel even in the dream. I’d suspected it for a long time. And I knew the affections were not unrequited. I see myself standing there, cold and sad, doing the right thing for all the wrong reasons.
The Rebellion betrayed her greatest hero right there, making him the target for all the hatred and resentment simmering among the recently-liberated peoples. I betrayed him. I'd be dead on Tarkin's orders if he hadn't saved me. The Rebellion would be so much debris orbiting Yavin if he hadn't made the shot they were saying was the beginning of a career in mass murder. The fleet would have been destroyed at Endor if he hadn't distracted the Emperor.
Because he heard the voices of the dead, we called him psychopathic.
Because he was other-directed, and took his beliefs seriously, we locked him away so he could not lead others to his beliefs.
Because he believed Vader’s lies, he is drugged into insensibility.
Because of the Force.
The Force. Vader’s damnable Force that has robbed me of everything I held dear: my world, my father, my sleep. My brother and friend, who should be nothing but honored in his middle age and is instead considered mad.
Some days, like today, when Luke's dreams are bad, I think I need the room next to his. The things I cannot tell anyone weigh on me. More stones, walling me in as effectively as the hospital and drugs contain Luke.
Vader wielded a very real weapon: his voice. That voice made my knees weak the first time I heard it, frightening me, arousing me and confusing me. If Vader claimed black was white, one could believe it as long as he listened to that voice. Most days, I believe he used hypnosis, truth drugs and that voice on me. Today I don't. Today I know the Force is real, and was what lent his voice its power. The Force Vader used on me, burning me alive and never harming one hair of me. The Force Luke believes in.
The one that is real, and can harm or heal, lift objects or raise the dead or all the other things I've seen Luke do. All those things I didn't bring up in front of the hearing. If I said I'd seen him move a droid with only his mind, I'd have that room next to his. Even evidence from Artoo's recorder wouldn't have helped. I think Luke knew. He went quietly into his oblivion. Maybe he'd seen too much.
He's awake now. I wonder if he senses me as I sense him. If my distress was what reached out and woke him. When he’s awake, he’s harder to sense. The drugs leave his mind sluggish. I let him fade out and start working again.
I manage for a few hours. The galaxy spins well enough without me. I switch on my computer to the hospital monitor. Han is there, as he always is. In the afternoon lull, when the morning meds have worn off, Luke has eaten and is his most alert. Han always comes then, before the evening medication.
My beloved has little to fill his days. Since his eyes, never properly healed in the haste of war, ceased functioning two years ago, he has been at loose ends. He goes to Luke every day, a talking gameboard under his arm. The staff allows Han in, knowing Luke would never hurt him.
I watch as Han activates the board. The game is a simple one, a child's game really, not the complex one he and Chewbacca used to play. Luke is slow for his first move. As they play, Luke’s mind clears and he can focus. His moves come at a more normal rate.
The tears that land on the screen are as routine as the game. My two handsome heroes: one blind and useless, one mad and useless, reduced to playing children's games in the afternoon. There is no room for heroes in peace time, only for bureaucrats. But we could do so much better by them!
I watch as Luke wins. Han threw the game four moves earlier. He beams and Luke looks almost normal. It doesn’t last. It never lasts.
Luke says something about the Force, and I watch Han's face close down. They tend the ysalimari. I do wish he'd quit calling it Ben.
The nurse comes in, on schedule. Luke takes his injection placidly enough. Han sets up the board again for an even simpler game, one of sowing stones in cups.
Luke fades a third of the way through. By the time his last move comes, he is dozing sitting up. Han cancels the game and folds the board up. I know what comes next and I switch the monitor off.
Han will put him on his bunk, cover him and kiss him, the barest brush across his temple, before he leaves. It's a gesture that looks brotherly to anyone but me. Luke won't know about it, and I shouldn't know.
I leave the office after a few more hours. Hours that blur under work and the ache that nothing soothes. I stop briefly at the hospital, and look through the window. I know this nightmare. It's the electrical one. I don't want to watch him writhe under electricity that exists only in his mind.
Han gets around our apartment well enough. He has dinner waiting for me. Again we talk of nothing.
I ask what he did. He says "nothing."
He asks what was exciting at work. I say "nothing."
No news from Chewbacca.
Nothing of import in the news.
I clear up. A concert on the holonet kills part of the evening. I shower and Han brushes my hair as he loves to do.
In the last days before his sight went altogether, I wore my hair down. His last sight of me was that. He says brushing me helps him remember what I looked like. He showers and joins me in bed.
More nothings as we discuss our plans for tomorrow.
His lovemaking is careful, but needy. He requires this reassurance that there is one thing left he can do. He sleeps afterward, sated on my body. The soft snores beside me are comforting and familiar after ten years. I will not trouble his sleep with the things I carry. Nor with the knowledge that since he would not choose between us, I chose for him.
I lie awake, and listen to the silence, to the nothings that are my life.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2003-12-14 03:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-12-14 08:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-12-18 03:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-05-16 11:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-05-16 04:20 pm (UTC)Glad you liked it.