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I know exactly what fic you’re talking about lmao you’re right and you should say it.
luke and vader spend the original trilogy, but especially ROTJ, more or less reading each other’s minds every other second, which really fascinates me because the level of psychic ability demonstrated between the two of them is not something we see with any of the other characters. obi-wan and anakin certainly don’t speak into each other’s minds at all throughout the PT, but within minutes of luke knowing the truth, we get the beautiful, son, come with me, and father? scene. when arriving at endor, luke and vader sense each other the length of several ships away, and both of them immediately know that the other is there, and then the entire gestalt of their duel before the emperor is that luke refuses to kill vader because he has magically sensed the good in his father, the “good” being that luke knows, through literal mind-reading, that vader absolutely will not kill him, and wouldn’t have killed him on bespin either. the “don’t make me destroy you” was a bluff.
luke uses vader’s hilariously un-buried feelings about him (smash cut to palpatine saying to vader, “are you sure your feelings on this matter are clear?”) to manipulate him in much the same way vader uses luke’s hilariously un-buried feelings about his friends in ESB, and then leia again in ROTJ, and can i just say, for as much shit as we give vader for being kind of a terrible manipulator, he knows exactly what he’s doing by the duel in ROTJ. he pushes luke closer to the dark side than the emperor manages - by threatening leia, vader unlocks luke’s batshit temper, and luke literally beats him into submission and slices off his hand before luke realizes what he’s almost done. but vader reads luke’s affection for leia, and the truth that leia is his biological daughter, directly out of luke’s brain. no one could read the direct truth out of someone else’s brain like this in the prequels, or else the plot would be literally impossible - the closest we get is maybe yoda sensing anakin’s grief for his mother in AOTC, but that’s nonspecific. this is vader and luke plucking pertinent feelings literally out of each other’s heads. they’re so weird <3