Title: Another Skywalker
Fandom: Star Wars
Rating: G
Length: ~ 1230 words
Content notes: none
Summary: Jedi training had failed the father. Now, with Luke, Yoda tries to fix those mistakes.


It was night on Dagobah, though beneath the heavy vegetation and frequent cloud cover, it could sometimes be hard to tell. Here by Yoda's hut, the swamp was humid enough that the night was scarcely much cooler than the day and it was rarely any brighter than what one might charitably call “murky”.

The dark and the rhythm of the rain could easily lull someone to sleep. Often, they had. But tonight, Yoda was awake – awake and watchful. As he regarded his new apprentice from the vantage of his tiny bunk, he felt the damp of this planet more acutely than he ever had. His bones ached and he closed his eyes once more with a sigh. Old he was and now, faced with this monumental task, he felt even older.

Not, however, as old as the Jedi, not as ancient as the traditions he had to impart to this brash boy. Four thousand years of history and training there were and he had had a mere twenty to consider how he might alter them to suit this situation.

If he'd had the choice, Yoda would not have altered them at all. He had been a Jedi for centuries now and he had nothing but respect for the ways he had learned so long ago that they were part of him. Learned and then passed on to so many younglings, just as he wished to do with this new one.

But their need was dire and time was short.

Once, someone like Luke would have been turned away. Strong with the Force, he was, yes – to Yoda's eyes, that was obvious. But his father had been too old to begin and Luke was even older. Talent would not have been enough to win him a place among the Jedi.

But had they done it anyway, accepted him as a student despite his age, he would have begun slowly. Months would have been spent on merely learning to feel the Force, to sense its ebbs and flows. Maybe even to hear it, the faintest whisper of life audible even in the vast emptiness of space.

Then they would have proceeded to history and philosophy. Much to Yoda's regret, that had been the first thing he had to cut. It did students good to learn the history of their order, where the Jedi had come from and what their predecessors had done. It helped to quell a youngling's endless chorus of “why”; in their history, there was always an answer. But they had no archives here, no holobooks or artifacts for a padawan to examine. He could have taken a different approach, of course. Once, in a time before holobooks or even their more delicate predecessors, knowledge had been passed down orally, through stories and songs. Yoda had seen much and he could still have taught in this way, but Luke lacked the patience for stories. His student's mind was too busy with the affairs of the present to be concerned with the past and so Yoda set it aside.

The philosophy was even more important and that, he tried still to teach, if only by example. It had sometimes been misunderstood even before the terrible purges, but the Jedi were not merely a warrior order. They were not just soldiers, but also healers, keepers of knowledge, and philosophers. If he could not make Luke understand that, he would fail. Luke might be a mighty warrior, but he would not truly be a Jedi.

And there lay the crux of the problem. Yoda sighed, though his eyes were still closed. He did not need them open to see the truth. All this history, all the training, and in the end, it had failed. They had failed. Now it fell to him to set it right, to correct his own mistakes and those of others.

For the entire lifetime of his new student, he had been in exile, feeling the tremors in the Force as each Jedi life was snuffed out. Decades he'd had to contemplate where they went wrong and how he might do it differently this time. Now that it was time to move from contemplation to action, he could only rely on the Force and hope he had made the right choices.

In the peace of meditation, he believed he had. He'd faced their failures and seen a path forward. But when he was teaching, struggling with all he had left in him to move Luke along that path, he wondered.

Luke was so like his father. It could not be avoided; everything he did and said reminded Yoda of the boy who'd taken so much from them.

It wasn't a physical resemblance, or not just that, nor the hints of Tatooine in his tones. It was his character: his impatience, his reckless stubbornness. The way he gave up when things were difficult, declaring them impossible rather than trying harder. The wisdom he refused to heed; the ease with which he'd been deceived by mere appearances into thinking Yoda a foolish and not terribly bright creature.

And the fear. For all Luke's boldness, the courage he had shown in leaving his friends and coming here solely on the words of what others might have dismissed as imagination, he still stank of it. Yoda could feel it: he feared for his friends and for the Rebellion.

It was not a foolish fear, not the easily dismissed fancies of a child. The dangers were real and that made the emotion harder to conquer. But conquered it must be; to Yoda, the fear was the biggest danger of all. He had sensed it in Anakin and, in the end, they had failed to soothe it, to teach him to rise above it. Instead the fear had swallowed him, drowning the Jedi and leaving only a mockery behind.

He had not taken Anakin's fears seriously enough, had not truly seen how great a threat they posed. With Luke, he must do better. And he had to do it here and now, for the most important part of a Jedi's training, the long apprenticeship where he or she learned from their master's example, was the one thing Yoda could not give. Obi-Wan had made his choice and he could not argue with it; it had been the right one. But in his absence, no one could be Luke's master. Yoda was old and even if he were not, Vader would sense him if he left Dagobah. He would be a distraction and at that, a fatal one.

Only the children could reach their father and that they would fail to do if instead he were distracted by the threat of Yoda's presence. The fear and hate would blind him, make him unable to truly see what he'd become. And that would mean failure and the end of the Jedi.

He must not fail, not this time. Two chances only they had, but Yoda did not intend to need the second.

Outside the hut, the sun was rising. From here, Yoda could not see it, but he did not need sight to know. It was time to begin again. Carefully, he got to his feet and retrieved his stick, then hobbled over to where Luke slept and poked him with it.

“Sleep the day away, do you? Time for training, it is!”