A/N: Recently re-watched Episode III (yay for carepackages from home!), and couldn't get this out of my head for hours until I finally scribbled it out on the back of an MRE napkin. Had a friend type it up and post it. Strange and sad.
Dead Beautiful
She was dead and she was beautiful.
He is not dead and he is warped beyond human recognition.
He ought to be dead –
he has seen the medical reports, seen the gritty footage of the
procedures he cannot personally recall. And he knows that he should
by all rights have died in the black rocky banks of that fiery ocean.
He did not die, not then and not on the slab of metal where they lay
his twitching almost-corpse to reconstruct the man's body with the
limbs of a monster.
His body survived,
fueled by the hate and rage that flared up inside when he found
himself once again helpless, once again denied the one power for
which he had given up everything else. All he had ever wanted, fought
for, suffered for, was that power – to control his own little
world. He didn't need an empire, didn't need armies of soldiers
to march at his word. It might help, sometimes, but all he really
wanted was the power to change his world the way he wanted it, the
way it should have been. A world where the Council gave him the
respect he deserved. A world where his friend acknowledged his power,
where political schemes and power struggles didn't matter at all
because he could wave his hand and make them vanish without effort. A
world where his love alone was enough to protect her from any harm.
But she was dead. And the world he wanted to make vanished with her.
It was hard to accept that, at first. Hard to give up the schemes and dreams, the vision of the way his life was supposed to be. Power. Respect. Friendship. Peace. Children. Wife. It all vanished with a single step backwards, a wide-eyed stare and a tear on smooth skin. It faded with the breath of a choking woman. It burned in the flames on charred flesh. So he accepted the loss, and worked for another's dream, another's schemes. He did his master's bidding because he only tried to do things his own way once, and look how that turned out. So he destroyed other people's worlds, because he could not create them, and when he slept he dreamed of a woman pulled by solemn beasts to her pyre, all white and bleached except for the flowers woven into her long brown hair.
Even death could not taint that beauty. He knows without knowing that her features were peaceful in their finale repose, that the sweet lines of her body flowed smoothly under the glimmering funeral gown. He knows that those who looked upon her funeral wept at the tragedy of her early loss, at the heartbreak of such beauty, such purity cut short.
He had thought once that he could not survive without her. But survive he did, and the universe spun on regardless. Time flowed as it always would, heedless of any one living creature no matter how knowledgeable and powerful. Whole solar systems would bend to the whim of his will, but time paid no mind to the most fervent wish of his burned and blackened heart. He could not undo what he had done. There would be no redemption, no last minute heroism that would bring him back to the man he had once been. Everything he was, everything he had become, was as permanent as his eventual grave.
She was dead, and she was beautiful.
He is not dead, and he will never be beautiful again.
And he wonders, sometimes deep in his dreams, which is the greater tragedy.
