Pain. You are in terrible pain. The kind of pain that makes you wish for death because it's cold comfort will offer the yearned for release. But you are not going to die. No, your Master has seen to that. He rescued you from the place where you had fallen. The burning sands peeled away and melted your flesh. They turned your hair to ash. The mechanical prosthetic that replaced your right hand and forearm is twisted and useless. The Count had cut off your hand in that fateful duel years ago. You returned the favor by removing the Count's head. The Traitor removed your remaining limbs, your other arm and your legs below the knees. Where they were remain only stumps and a dull pain that is overshadowed by the pain of your other wounds.
The air in that place had been like drinking fire. Your breath comes in feeble gasps and your voice, which once commanded hundreds of troops in battle, has been reduced to a weak rasp. You can't remember how long you lay in that Hell as you waited for the darkness to claim you once and for all. You're only regret is that you didn't get the chance to apologize to her, your wife. You know the truth now. He must have snuck aboard her ship without her knowledge. In your arrogance you let your famous temper run away from you. But you know she is alive. You felt it.
Your Master rescued and took you away from that Hell. Images of him and his servants faded in and out before your eyes. You felt detached from yourself as if what you were seeing was real. Was this all a nightmare that you couldn't wake up from? But the pain comes back as they lift you onto the table, greater and more terrible than ever before. And though it causes your throat to throb in stabbing agony to do so, you scream.
Machines fill the darkened room, some inert, others moving with mechanical preciseness. You have been given nothing to take the terrible pain away. You're sure that is your Master's doing. Though you cannot see him or hear him, you can feel his presence like an oily shadow in the back of your mind. The only other thing you can feel is pain as the machines do things to your body. The broken right forearm and hand is gently but forcefully removed and a new one is fixed in its place. Other mechanical limbs are fixed in place of your other arm and legs. The pain is beginning to fade now and a blood-chilling coldness replaces it. This is a good thing, because you're slowly freed from the pain which blinded and deafened you, but also bad because if you are to die now, you will never see your Angel again, and be able to apologize to her. You will take her away; far away to somewhere where she and the child she bore will be safe.
The machines begin to operate on you, but you are so numb by now that you can't feel the pain much less try to stop them as they remove damaged lungs and replace them with even more machines. You think to yourself, ruefully, that it is as if you are literally losing your humanity one small, barbecued piece at a time.
The darkness begins to close in on you, attempting to smother you in its numb embrace. You can barely feel the machines clothing your body in a new garment, apparently to protect your damaged flesh forever more. Now they fit a collar-like device over your neck, connecting it to the machines that now are part of your flesh and blood. This offends you. What right do they have to collar you like some animal? Like a slave? But were you not already a slave before this happened? Before the Traitor left you to die in that nightmarish Hell? Did you not pledge loyalty to your Master's teachings? Isn't loyalty and obedience just another type of slavery? In a way, you think, you have been a slave all your life.
Now, a shape descending towards your immobile head blocks the one remaining light in the place where you cling to existence. If you were still capable of it, your breathing would increase as it comes closer to you. It covers your face and latches firmly onto the collar. The second part of this… coffin slides into place beneath the rest of your scarred, hairless skull and attaches with a loud click and a whining hiss, like the wail of a dying bird. You are alone in the coffin. You cannot see, you cannot hear, but you can see. However the eyes of the coffin only see in crude red and black facsimiles of the world.
A sound.
You are breathing. But it is not you that is breathing. It is the machines that are now a part of your very soul that breathe for you. You cannot even make them stop. They draw a deep cold, metallic breath into and out of your ruined lungs with a sound that will be remembered through the ages. A cold, hollow death sound.
You hear voices. One is buzzing, mechanical. The other is as the voice of a serpent.
"My Lord, the reconstruction is complete. He lives."
"Good. Good."
You feel the table beneath you pitch upwards. You feel rather than see your Master stand beside you. He speaks your name, not the name that you have been known by your whole life, the name your former friends and your beloved wife called you, but your new name. Your new, terrible name that will be remembered through all histories.
"Lord Vader? Can you hear me?"
You try to speak, but it is not your voice that answers but the coffin's. A deep, mechanical bass.
"Yes Master."
You are alive. Your Master has saved you but the only thing you want now is to find her, your wife. You know that she and only she can relieve you of the terrible burden of this new existence. Only she will be able to see your face, the one that exists beneath the coffin-like mask that is now your face.
"Where is Padme? Is she all right? Is she safe?"
"It seems in your anger… you killed her," says your Master.
You cannot accept it. You know what you did, how much power you used. You could not have killed her simply by choking her. Unless the loss of oxygen caused something to happen to the baby…
You try to get off the table but you are restrained. Your new limbs are quite adept at ripping off the restraints and freeing you from their embrace. You stumble, almost falling. You are walking on what are little more than stumps attached to crude imitations of legs. It doesn't matter. Your Master is lying, your wife is alive, you know it to be true. You cast your senses out… and the horrible truth is manifested to you from the darkness. Your wife is dead. Gone, forever. Despite all your efforts, your pledge to your Master, all those you killed in his name, even the children you slaughtered, mattered not in the end. Your dread vision came to pass. You are the one killed your wife. You're responsible. You have destroyed everything you have ever known, including her, for your pact with the Darkness.
You scream. The coffin/mask screams for you.
"NO!"
The droids and machines are crumpled by invisible hands. Glass vials and containers explode. The very room is being torn apart around you. The building itself, 300 stories high shakes to its ancient foundations. You would have the whole planet destroy itself with your rage and sorrow but you are now so much less than what you were, this is all you are capable of.
The lights are crushed and you are plunged into the darkness that is now your soul.
Your Master smiles a twisted smile.
The Darkness is all that is left now and you welcome it.
Welcome to the rest of your life… Darth Vader.