#||verse: six months as a trooper; luke skywalker||

[mayxthexforce]

I've Spent Half My Life Out There || Luke & Vader

Plotted starter for @corruptedforce

He'd been doing so good. For two months, Luke managed to keep a low profile, stay out of trouble, all while also excelling in his classes and training sessions. What should have been the simple, mandatory six months as a trooper on Tatooine right after he turned sixteen, just to keep the Empire off his family's back about none of them having ever gone through Imperial school, turned into him being sent to spend those six months working maintenance in a star destroyer. It was more than Luke ever thought he'd achieve this young. Owen and Beru were far from thrilled– they weren't happy at all about him being sent away. But Luke was beyond himself. Nobody back home could believe that little Wormie Skywalker could make it into an imperial vessel of such importance

And the Executor sure was an important, if not the most important, vessel.

But he'd screwed up. It'd been a well intentioned mistake. Luke has been tasked with running maintenance on none other than Supreme Commander Vader's starfighter, a TIE Advanced x1, while his supervisor was busy talking to other higher officers. As they usually did with low ranking members of the army, they acted like Luke wasn't right there with two completely functional ears that, oh surprise, worked even as he busied himself with fixing the damage on the hull. So, he hears when one of them pointed out that they'd had to fish Vader out of an asteroid field after he flew too far away from the Executor and couldn't make it back on his own before the starfighter ran out of fuel, and ended up pulled by the gravitational field of the asteroids.

That wouldn't happen if starfighters could reach hyperspace. That was the thought that doomed Luke Skywalker.

To the boy that built a winner Skyhopper and multiple landspeeders out of parts that were all either bought from scrapyards, provided by Jawas, or procured from Beggar's Canyon and the dune sea, finding a way to install a hyperdrive on a Skyhopper wasn't a matter of skill, it was simply a matter of time. Fortunately —or unfortunately— for him, Vader's starfighter had needed more repairs than anticipated before it could be presented to the Supreme Commander once again. So, he had time to spare on his little project– project that, maybe, he should have asked permission for.

In all honesty, he'd never meant for Vader to be the first to test it out. After all, Luke had been tasked with testing that everything worked right once he was done with the repairs, and that's exactly what he had intended to do. But the galaxy didn't wait on anyone, and it didn't wait for him to be done before requiring Vader to take the starfighter. No 'buts' could convince his supervisor to listen to Luke, not until it was too late.

From what he'd heard, at least the starfighter didn't blow up. That was good, no casualties. Just a hyperdrive that had been tested by someone who didn't even know that it'd been installed in the first place, someone who was the head of the imperial army, someone who could court martial him.

He kept his head down and did all he was told while he waited. That was all he could do: wait for the inevitable. It was a matter of time before everyone knew that he was responsible. After all, his name was right there on the list of people who'd been put to work on the Supreme Commander's starfighter: Skywalker Luke, right there at the very top of the list with time stamps and everything, showing every single day —over a week— he'd been working on it.

Uncle Owen would be so, SO mad if Luke ended up in prison.