Summary: Tomorrow never comes, since it's always a day away, just out of reach.
Pairings
: Vader x Padmé
Author's Note
: I leave it up to you to determine whether Vader's hallucinating or not.
Disclaimer
: I don't own Star Wars.


The Force still rings with the echo of her presence when he's alone and with others. The siren song threatens to drown him in his own burnt, half-dead blood but still, Vader listens helplessly, and tries to sing back but can't find the words to say.

There is nothing he can say to her.

This is the only way she (She who is divine, She who is at once beautiful and terrible, She who must never be named again for her name may make Vader fall apart all over again) is real to him anymore, hovering just behind wherever he walks and keeping to the shadows when he is left to himself.

His master, wise and sage and darkness incarnate, would tell him that he must exorcise her insistent presence from his perception of the Force. She is just a relic of the time long past when he was still Anakin Skywalker, a sign that the naïve, all-too-flawed young Jedi is perhaps not as gone as he should be. But that will do no good. It is Vader who sees her now, not the echo of Anakin, for both Anakin and Vader loved her, love her still.

And this is her revenge on him.

This is her revenge, forceful, implacable creature that she is, for arbitrarily choking the life from her and their child; he has always guessed at the vengeance that lied beneath her regal veneer. Her vengeance is cruel and apt, that she will never allow him to see her face again even when she lingers on.

No matter how Vader strains and struggles with mutilated eyes, her face is obscured. If he hears her walking behind, when he turns round there is naught but a formless shadow escaping up a silvery bulkhead. If she hovers in the shadows just beyond his vision when he's alone, she is all dark, swishing cloth and blurred outlines. Veils of shadow shroud her visage.

And her laugh echoing off the walls, the laugh that only Vader can hear or has ever heard, is hollow and mocking, the bitter knife that cuts through his suit straight to his charred, twisted skin.

She wants Vader to know that she'll never leave him now.

She wants him to know that she'll never forget.

She wants him to know that she'll never forgive him.