It starts after Padme tells her husband that she's pregnant, as if the revelation had sparked some heretofore unknown fuse in Anakin's brain, and slowly, inexorably, it becomes clear that their secret is not going to remain secret much longer at the rate he's going.

The jokes are eye-rolling or cringe worthy and sometimes boggling to the extreme, but he loves her reaction.

"Where did you even find these?" she asks him, once.

Anakin's grin is mischievous. "I looked in Alderaan places."

"ANAKIN!"

But that was before, when the world was still bright and not dyed in the red of filters, when Padme, Anakin and their child were alive and there was still hope.

Darth Vader did not joke.

And then, then there was the boy.

"I have a son," Vader says, testing the words. They feel strange and weighty, awkward on his tongue. The vocoder, however, registers them with a deep, unerring confidence, grounding them in reality.

Something stirs. Hope? Delight? Vader has long forgotten what those feel like. Anticipation, yes, that's it. That must be it.

He chases the boy across the stars, herding him into the cage he's prepared at Bespin. They trade blows, lightsabers arcing, and then the boy, half-trained as he is, slips. His lightsaber slips through his son's arm - the same side as the one that he'd lost so long ago - and he's at last able to reveal who he is.

Vader pauses, looking at the cauterized stump, and the shaking boy, still reeling from the revelation.

"Need a hand?"

Something in the Force, a distant half-familiar presence, lets out a long-suffering groan. Luke stares, horrified and stunned, and then pitches himself off the tower to escape.

"Too soon?" Vader wonders aloud.