Disclaimer: Don't own Star Wars, too poor to do so.

The following passages are taken from, and inspired by the writing style of Matthew Stover's 'Revenge of the Sith' novelization. I highly recommend you check it out at some point.

The Revenge of the Sith

Obi-Wan flipped in the air and let the Force bring him to a catfooted landing. An adder-quick stab of his lightsaber disabled the platform's guidance system, and Obi-Wan was able to direct it back toward the shore with a simple shift of his weight.

He turned to watch as the collection plant shrieked like the damned in a Corellian hell, crumbling over the brink of the falls until it vanished into invisible destruction.

Obi-Wan lowered his head. "Good-bye, old friend."

But the Force whispered a warning, and Obi-Wan lifted his head in time to see Anakin come hurtling toward him out from the boil of smoke above the falls, perched on a tiny repulsorlift droid. The little droid was vastly swifter than Obi-Wan's logy old cargo platform, and Anakin was easily able to swing around Obi-Wan and cut him off from the shore. Obi-Wan shifted weight one way, then another, but Anakin's droid was nimble as a sand panther; there was no way around, and this close to the lava, the heat was intense enough to crisp Obi-Wan's hair.

"This is the end for you, Master," he said. "I wish it were otherwise."

"Yes, Anakin, so do I," Obi-Wan said as he sprinted into a leaping dive, making a spear of his blade.

Anakin leaned aside and deflected the thrust almost contemptuously; he missed a cut at Obi-Wan's legs as the Jedi Master flew past him.

Obi-Wan turned his dive into a forward roll that left him barely teetering on the rim of a low cliff, just above the soft black sand of the riverbank. Anakin snarled a curse as he realized he'd been suckered, and leapt off his droid at Obi-Wan's back-

-Just at the right moment.

Obi-Wan's whirl to parry met Anakin's blade. Then the hand clutching his lightsaber suddenly fell away, leaving behind an amputated stump of burnt flesh.

And as Obi-Wan stumbled back, eyes wide and mouth agape as a scream of excruciating, unimaginable pain tore through normally smooth vocal cords, Anakin landed on the rim and brought his lightsaber up to his shoulder and slashed through the air, burning through air particles first before reaching skin, then flesh, and then bone.

Obi-Wan's head was ripped from its spot on his body, sent flying into the air from the sheer force of the blow that Anakin had delivered to the Jedi Master. It flew over the rim, and bounced its way down the cliffside, catching aflame before it hit the lava river and burned into ashes before those ashes were burnt to nothing as well. Anakin had watched the whole thing unfold with a manic grin that didn't suit right on his handsome face.

That, Anakin mused to himself, was all too easy.

Behind him, the headless corpse sank to its knees and folded to the ground like an akk dog cub. The ruined body of one of the brightest hopes of the Jedi Order was a sight one would find to be pitiful.

Anakin found it humorous.

He picked up Obi-Wan's lightsaber, still gripped precariously in the flesh-and-blood hand of Obi-Wan before he ripped it out of the hand. He lifted his own as well, weighing them in his hands. He had based his design upon Obi-Wan's. So similar they were.

So differently they had been used.

He tossed the lightsaber over his shoulder, not bothering to watch it land in the river where its owner's head had rolled into.

He closed his eyes. For a brief moment, he savored the feeling of the darkness rush through his body, cooling his alarmingly-warm body with its icy cold tendrils that sent a shiver of delight up the young Sith Lord's spine. The feeling was intoxicating, similar to a junkie's taboo love to a deathstick.

But he wasn't just some drug junkie. He was Darth Vader, Lord of the Sith, Destroyer of the Jedi, and the murderer of criminals like Obi-Wan Kenobi, Count Dooku, Nute Gunray, and so many other vile creatures

He tilts his head back, and let loose a cackling laugh that echoed for miles. Finally, he had done it! With the death of Kenobi, the traitorous Jedi were no more but a footnote in galactic history. With the death of the Separatist Confederacy's leadership, he had brought peace, freedom, justice and security to the Empire.

A flash of metal through the sky, and Vader felt the familiar presence closing in around him. He knew that ship: the Chancellor's shuttle. Now, he supposed, the Emperor's shuttle.

He felt a thought not of his own echo in his mind.

You have done well, Lord Vader. My young apprentice.

Vader grit his teeth, despising that term. It reminded him so much of the Jedi Masters at the Temple, how they looked down upon him from their tower in fear at the potential that a slave possessed that dwarfed their own menial powers.

"Indeed I have, my 'Master'." Vader sneered at the descending shuttle. "But I am not so 'young' as you think I am."

Darth Vader stalked away, not bothering to dispose of Kenobi's body himself.

The planet would do that for him.

At the landing deck, C-3PO stood on the skiff's landing ramp, squawking when he saw Vader approach. "Artoo! Close the ramp!"

A spark of fury took hold of Vader's burning heart.

Kenobi had even managed to re-program his droids - one that he'd built himself in a desert junkshop, and the other he'd received from Padme as a gift of love - to turn against him, to deny him access to his wife and unborn child. Had the Jedi's treachery know no bounds?

Reaching out with the Force, he looked deep into C-3PO's mechanical hard-frame and, as if one were flicking a light-switch, turned him off with his will.

The protocol droid slumped to the ground, the light in his photoreceptors gone.

After a moment, the loyal Artoo-Detoo met a similar fate to his counterpart, leaving Vader as the only conscious being onboard the Naboo skiff.

He found his wife laying in one of the skiff's rooms, her skin unnaturally pale and unmoving. A spike of fear raced through Vader - Even stars burn out - before he calmed at the faint presence of life still inside her.

Outside on the landing deck, he could hear the bootfalls of clone troopers and his new Master approach the Naboo skiff.

He reached a hand over to stroke his wife's cheek, "Don't worry, my love, everything is going to be alright.

"The Emperor is here."

Obi-Wan once told him that everything must die, for it is the will of the Force. But Vader had denied that lesson to be true, and now, with his Master standing beside him and clone troopers carefully placing his wife into a medical pod, Vader felt something he didn't think a Sith could feel.

Hope.

A Naboo skiff was left behind below the red thunder of a volcano on Mustafar, the only indication of its previous owners being the two deactivated droids left inside.

Tantive IV reverted to realspace and flashed toward an alien medical installation in the asteroid belt on Polis Massa.

And on Coruscant, a Sith Lord watched in awe and fear as his Master imbued his will into the still body of his wife, watched as color returned to her skin and her breathing return to normal, and watched as the medical droids cleaned off the two newborn children whose presence in the Force were like beacons of light from the moment they were born from their mother's womb.

The Sith Lord held his children in his arms, trembling slightly but stowed it away when his Master arrived to peer at the children. A wretched grin broke out on the Master's face, who reached out a gnarled hand to each of the children's foreheads and passed his will onto them without the Sith Lord even realizing.

Everything is proceeding as I have foreseen.

Happy Empire Day, my young Sith.

Leave your suggestions of what 'What-Ifs' you would like to see in this collection. Whether they'd be Canon or Legends.