Archive of Our Own

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Luke’s thoughts pulse as dull, ungraspable threads, slowed by Hoth’s deep freeze. Amidst the jumble of warning signals his brain feeds him—danger, keep going, get to the marker—a vague image of Jedi robes lingers: coarse brown weave against blinding white. A message. A familiar voice he hasn’t heard in too long.

“Ben…”

Ben was here. But how could he be? Ben Kenobi is dead.

The rebels had the effects of hypothermia drummed into them by the medics when they arrived on the ice giant. Hallucinations. Slurred speech. Forgetfulness and severe confusion. Lack of motor function… The knowledge was supposed to help them help others. It’s not much comfort to identify those symptoms in himself, following the mental checklist down, down to its grisly conclusion.

Blowing snow snatches any short-lived rational thought. It whips daggers into Luke’s face, bare skin numbed and searing with invading frostbite, and it’s how he realises he’s on his back now, not face down in the snowdrift.

Something about… the Dagobah system…

Caught in the wind’s eerie howl, the low current of a voice charges through. Han. Echo Seven. Must be the comlink at Luke's wrist, though would it still function in this storm? They’d had trouble before. The limited, outdated technology they’d brought with them to Hoth seizes up in extreme cold sometimes. At least it’s harder for the Empire to intercept.

Han again. Speaking. No, yelling over the blizzard. There’s a pleading tone to words Luke can’t make out – like he wants Luke to do something.

Respond? He must respond. Luke’s teeth tremble, as though the cold is about to shatter them in his gums at any moment. He’s Echo Three, isn’t he? He can’t move his arm to respond. Can’t open his mouth. His lips are frozen solid, his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth.

There’s weight on his chest, and a vague sniff of warmth.

Ben… Danger... The Dagobah system…

“Hang on, kid.”

Slipping out of consciousness will be easy, but Luke can’t go under; he’ll fight that with every ounce of strength left in his frozen body. Because he doesn’t want to die out here, alone, entombed by the bitter, indifferent white of Hoth, a stone’s throw from Echo Base.

Though, his desire to endure dwindles with each painful passing second. Should he let go? It would be easier to let the cold take him. No more running and hiding. No more surviving, rather than living. But the sparkling trace of the Force hangs on, willing him to listen. Luke Skywalker doesn’t think like that.

A ghostly hand reaches out in Luke’s mind. Is it Ben’s? Leia’s? A psychological embodiment of the Force? Or, more likely, just another hallucination.

What happens if he tries to take it?

Putrid stench yanks him back to awareness. It saturates Luke’s senses, thick in his nostrils, damp and cloying at the back of his throat. He chokes, and the action of coughing shoots pain through him in a glowing, bone-deep ache. Heat seeps through his uniform. It presses. Melts. Soaks. Hurts.

Luke’s rigid limbs are being bent into a dark space that’s too small, pressure pushing in from all around. Something cracks to accommodate his presence, then settles heavily. The roaring wind dulls, but it’s not quiet here. The slick squelch of something tangles through his coat’s fur and sticks it to his cheeks in wet strings.

The hand reaches out again. Before, it was sensed more than seen, almost carved from the snow and cold in a pocket of muddled thought. Now, black-clad fingers bleed through the white burnt behind Luke’s eyelids.

In a flash of clarity, Luke realises the unthinkable truth. He’s crushed inside a tauntaun. The beast’s heart beats no longer, but blood still moves through its viscera, the twisting, sluggish sound of death squeezed against Luke’s ears, gripping him tight.

The part in the animal’s guts offers a narrow window into the frozen landscape. Han is out there, shielding his eyes from battering snow as he hunches over his pack, picking out parts of a shelter.

Unless this is an hallucination too. He’d seen Ben out there, hadn’t he?

The hand extends to him again, unrelenting in its temptation. It’s pale and shrivelled. Then pink flesh. Then polished, mechanical joints. It isn’t real.

Luke’s losing. He’s going to die here, stuffed inside Han Solo’s tauntaun, and Han will die too, on a subzero world chosen because it was unliveable.

Then, Luke does die.

At least, he leaves the flesh and blood confines of a body shivering within another and finds himself floating in an unfriendly void.

This place is everything Hoth isn’t. Silent. Dark. Neither warm nor cold – Luke has no body here to know for sure. He’s struck by how lonely it is, how the emptiness pulls and sucks at any curiosity or relief he might feel. Until voices begin to swarm in, hundreds layered overtop each other so that he can barely make them out. A hissing cacophony of words clamber to be heard, and Luke wants to yell at them to stop, but he’s no mouth to scream.

One voice remains as the others fade away. Darth Vader's. The man who killed Luke’s father.

Vader materialises, a somehow darker silhouette in the void. He observes Luke. His cape flaps at his ankles, breaths echoing in the dark with a steady rhythm.

“Embrace it, Skywalker,” he says, slowly. “It will save you.”

Embrace what, Luke can’t ask. Embrace death? A little late for that. Luke’s dead already, a corpse inside a corpse on a planet that’s nearly dead too.

Embrace the Dark Side? Never.

Vader extends a hand, and Luke knows it has dipped into his chest on that icy rock, passing through his ribs to wrap fingers around his heart. Then, Vader squeezes, hard, and Luke gasps a mouthful of tepid blood and splutters it out onto Hoth's snow, bright red peppering white.

Luke’s shaking, but his tremors aren’t from exposure. Power surges through him like nothing he’s felt before. It’s the Force, though it’s more than Luke can contain. It’s propels him to crawl out through the tauntaun’s lacerated guts and onto the snow, to rise and stand on fortified legs.

“Embrace it.”

Han’s still building the tent as Luke approaches, his back to him. Luke’s dimly aware of withdrawing his lightsabre, the movement like muscle memory, and notices the flash of brilliant blue light before it registers as coming from him.

What is he doing?

Luke’s driven to action, to run towards Han, cleave his lightsaber through the white, and—

Han ducks, just in time. “Whoa! What the—?”

The saber slips from Luke’s frozen grip, hitting the snow with a hiss as it retracts.

Luke loses consciousness.

*

Later, Luke comes round beneath piled furs, a warm body at his back. The blizzard rages still, the flimsy shelter whipping about in the wind, but holding. Wasn’t he someplace else not that long ago? Wasn’t he…

Han!

“Hey. It’s okay, kid,” Han says, wrapping his arm around Luke’s waist when he stiffens in fear.

“I-I’m s-sorry,” scrapes from his throat. He’d cry if his tears wouldn’t turn to ice. Sucking in a breath at the memory of what he’d done, what he’d tried to do, the tears come anyway. The guilt is suffocating.

“You weren’t in your right mind.” Han squeezes at Luke’s waist, comforting. Luke's clothes are damp with tauntaun blood, melted ice, and sweat, but he’s alive, in one piece, and Han is too. That’s all that matters. “Try to rest until morning. They’ll find us, I promise.”

Luke relaxes, and as he drifts back into sleep, his mind wanders.

“You will go to the Dagobah system.”

“Embrace it, Skywalker.”

Luke’s not sure which entices him more.