Forbidden

DISCLAIMER: George Lucas owns Star Wars, all the characters, merchandise, etc. I am making no money from this. Doing it just for fun.

CHAPTER ONE: BURNING

Luke shifted in sleep, his feet tangling in the thin sheets, his hands fisting in the comforter as he was drawn into a dream he had not allowed himself to have since the Burning on Tatooine. It was a dream about his lover, a man whose features he had never seen with his physical eyes, but whose face and body were imprinted in him so deeply that they were a part of Luke’s very essence.

In the dream, Luke was sitting on a beach, his knees pulled up to his chest and his arms wrapped around them. It was sunset, but the dying of the sun did not hold his gaze; all his attention was fixed on his lover instead.

His lover was a youth, perhaps in his twenties, a few years older than Luke himself. He stood before Luke half-clothed and completely unashamed. His muscled golden chest was bare. He wore only a pair of light tan pants that hung low on his hips, clung to his muscled thighs and stopped just above his elegant bare feet.

The raging sea was at the older youth’s back. The rush of the water stirred his long honey-colored hair that flowed down to his shoulders in thick waves. His lover’s eyes were arresting in the deepening twilight as they glowed yellow-gold under his arched brows. They pierced Luke’s body as easily as a lightsaber could slice through cloth. As equally fascinating to Luke were his lover’s lips. They were lush, shaped like a cupid’s bow. They could easily switch between a pout and a scowl, but they were tugged into a small smile at that moment.

His lover lowered himself in a quick fluid movement to his haunches before Luke. He reached out one of his strong hands to grasp one of Luke’s forearms, to have physical contact between them and to steady himself on the soft sand. His touch burned through the light material of the shirt that covered Luke’s arm.

“Luke, what are you thinking about?” His lover’s voice was low and smoky.

“You. I’m thinking of you. As if you don’t already know,” Luke said and felt a smile curl the corners of his own mouth. “And what are you thinking about?”

His lover’s smile quirked larger, “You. After all there is nothing more important to me than you.”

Luke’s heart beat harder in his dream, heat flared in his groin and raced through his body more potent than any drug, more potent than the Force itself. His lover leaned forward then, his head slightly tilted to the side, and he brushed those full soft lips against Luke’s own. Luke moaned, the sound coming from the back of his throat. His lover’s warm pink tongue traced the line of Luke’s jaw as the younger man arched into that touch.

His lover’s voice was quiet, but filled with throaty promise as he spoke into Luke’s left ear, “So responsive, child of my heart.”

Luke’s voice was equally soft, but it seemed to block out the sound of the rushing waves, the sound of his own breath and heartbeat, as he said, “Only for you, Father.”

Luke woke as he always did from this dream sweat-drenched, his heart pounding so hard it felt like it would leap out of his chest, gasping for breath, and sticky from his own release. But this time greater horror than before overcame him than it had when he dreamt this dream as a younger teen. It flooded Luke, crashed over him like a tidal wave. What was he inside that innocent dreams of his father had turned to lustful ones? What kind of man was he to still have these dreams after he knew his father had not died as a pilot of a frigate, but still lived, making these visions perhaps possibilities, not pure fantasy? What kind of being was he to continue to yearn like this now that he knew his father was Darth Vader, Dark Lord of the Sith?

Luke was grateful, and not for the first time, that now that he was considered a full Jedi by the Rebellion he had been granted certain privileges such as his own sleeping quarters in the starship Encounter, one of the larger Rebellion ships. He ran his hand through his sleep mussed hair, thrusting the shaggy blonde locks from his eyes and ripped the sweat soaked sheets from his body. He used a corner of one to clean the semen from his bare stomach and penis. His sex ached from the touch and Luke flushed at his weakness. He flung the sheet from him so he wouldn't be tempted to touch himself to hardness again with the memory of the dream. He told himself that the scent of musk in the air from his release was disgusting, but he took deep breaths of it anyway.

He padded naked to the viewport in his room so he could stare at the black emptiness of space. He traced a path between two stars with his fingertips, wondering if there were any people in between those suns, protected from the vastness of space by durasteel and plastiglass. He snorted. 'I think this because Darth Vader could be one of those people. He is the only one I long to see.'

Luke did not know what Vader looked like under the mask andsuit he now wore or how he would look withoutthe terrible injuries that forced the Dark Lord to wear them. The lover in his dream was far too young to be his father even if Darth Vader were completely whole or so logic told Luke. But Luke thought of the man in these dreams as his father and since Bespin he thought of the dream man as Father and Vader all as one. It didn’t matter whether the face of the man in his dream and the face that Darth Vader had were the same: Luke dreamt of his father, he knew Vader to be that father and Luke wanted him. He was loath to admit, too, that the way Vader looked with his black suit, mask and flowing cloak was as seductive to him as the clean-limbed youth that haunted his dreams. 'Why do I long for him so? Many people lose their parents but they do not fantasize like me ... desire like me.'

He clenched his right hand into a fist and winced. His prosthetic hand ached even though countless checks by the droids and by himself had showed nothing wrong with it. He was assured that it was phantom pain, crossed signals in his brain that still registered his flesh and blood hand even though it was long gone, rotting or more likely incinerated on Bespin. Some part of Luke wondered if the hand had continued to clutch onto his father’s lightsaber as it fell to the gas planet below Cloud City, but another part of him found the thought too nauseous to contemplate.
He had lost more than just his hand in Lando’s city, he had lost some part of his innocence. 'But then again what kind of innocent could I have been when I had dreams of ... lust ... for my father and those started long before Bespin, they started before I ever left Tatooine.' Luke shivered and held his arms around himself thinking of the one other person who had any idea of Luke's wanton thoughts.

How well Luke remembered the tightening of his Uncle Owen’s heavily stubbled jaw and the narrowing of his uncle’s hooded eyes as he read the datapad that Luke had copied down his dreams in ... first the innocent ones of him adventuring about the galaxy with his beloved father and then ... then the others. Luke had screamed at his uncle about violated privacy when he found the older man with the datapad. But his voice had failed when his uncle’s eyes left the datapad and fixed on Luke’s face. Luke believed his uncle would kill him at that moment.

Luke had known two burnings in his life: the one that had incinerated the Lars and their homestead and the earlier one, the one he always thought of with a capital ‘B.’ Even though the second burning had killed his guardians and the life he had known, the first Burning resonated far more deeply to his shame, like an abscess in his soul. That Burning had nearly killed him so he hadn’t been wrong when he thought he saw murder in his uncle’s eyes. He had survived, but he had thought until this night that the part of him that longed for his father’s loving touch had been incinerated.

But now the dream and the longing were back greater than before and what terrified Luke was that he knew with just a call of his mind his father would come to him. Gooseflesh suddenly covered Luke’s arms. 'How desperate is my father to have me help him overthrow the Emperor and rule the galaxy? Would he offer me my most forbidden desire ... himself?'

Luke dropped to the floor into a lotus position, rested his arms palms upwards on his thighs and began counting his inhales and exhales. Hopefully meditation would allow him to let go of these evil thoughts, let go of temptation. There was goodness in Vader. Luke had sensed it. He would seek to bring his father back from the darkness. Luke’s own foul desires would hopefully be burned away in the process. He would never give into them. Never expose his father to his wrongness. Vader had enough darkness in his life.

Just as meditation began to take him to calmness. Luke recognized a familiar red warmth in his thoughts, a warmth he realized had been there as he woke up and possibly even as he slept. Luke understood thenthat his mind was open to the bond he shared with his father. 'Oh, Force, did he experience the dream, too? Does he know my wrong feelings for him?'