Chapter Text
It was when Luke snapped out of the haze — just a split-second, just a moment — that he realized that he had straight-up impaled Ben with his own green lightsaber. An ignition of a lightsaber, and Ben had been stabbed through the heart, and even using the Force to heal him…
It was too late. It was far too late. It was something where Luke didn’t think that it was possible to have done this — this wasn’t him. This couldn’t be him. He wouldn’t do this. After all, he wasn’t someone who was just…selective with mercy, was he?
He’d saved that student who was temporarily driven to madness by Sith holocrons, didn’t he? Why couldn’t he do the same thing with Ben? Why was Ben different from that student? From Vader, for that matter?
After Leia’s parentage had been revealed to the galaxy, Luke had been accused of caring more about Vader than about anyone else in the galaxy. “All he ever cared about was his father. Everyone else he couldn’t care less about”, that was one accusation. “Daddy’s boy” was another accusation. Things of that nature.
Even standing over his nephew’s dead body…given that he’d killed Ben just for having intrusive thoughts, Luke knew that they were right. If Ben had mattered to him, he thought, would he have drawn his saber at all?
***
The Jedi funeral that he held for his nephew was a private affair. Even as Luke sat there, watching the flames rise into the sky along with the smoke, he thought back to Vader’s funeral, where it seemed like Vader’s armor was burning on that pyre. This wasn’t armor here, though. Just flesh and bone. Just one of many differences, but it said it all for Luke, the depths of his failure.
That was just a young man, not a monster. Luke wished he’d been able to tell the difference.