-AUTHOR'S NOTE - This is a one-shot fic I wrote a long, long time ago that I happened to come across and decided to upload. It may not be my best quality, but hey, I like it so…yeah. Here ya goes!
Disclaimer - I don't own Star Wars. No, I don't. You may think so, but I'm telling you how it is, boi.
Rated K…Suitable for pretty much everyone, yup.
Vader - One Shot
The first thing he sees in his new life is a crude mechanic duplication of the world around him. Instead of perceiving the colors of the galaxy he lived in as he once did, he is greeted with sensors flooding before his "eyes"...though he is not seeing as a human. Not really. He has become as much a machine as the operating table he is bound to, as the medical droids that surround him, as the chamber in which he has been revived. But this is not life...this is nothing. This is less than what he once was, what he dreamed to become.
This is weakness. Trapped inside his own body, unable to even breathe by himself, the suit he has been glued within does everything for him. It talks for him, walks for him, breathes for him, sees for him...Part of him wishes he had died on mustafar.
Mustafar.
The word echoes within his mind, his thoughts hidden behind the sleek dark helmet that sits atop his head. The name burns inside him, and all that happened rushes back to him in a heartbeat...
But it's not his heart that's beating. Not really.
It's not his body anymore.
It's Vader's.
Is this what the chosen one was supposed to look like? Was supposed to feel like? Anakin Skywalker had ceased to exist when his new name had been anointed upon him.
But his body had remained. Now, he was Vader, through and through. And Vader felt weak.
Suddenly, the sensors in his ears...or what's left of them...picks up sound waves, translating words spoken from outside of his shell so he could understand what was being said to him.
"Lord Vader...can you hear me?"
It was him. His master...the one whom he had pledged his alliance to. The shadow that, for so long, had pulled the threads of the galaxy, ever so slightly at first...until in the end, he had manipulated everyone to the point where they were powerless to do anything about it. And with thoughts of his allegiance came thoughts of the reason he had joined the sith in the first place...
Padme.
He spoke out to his master, but it was not his voice that talked. It was another machine.
"Yes, my master."
The voice sickened him. It was bass and clumsy, though oddly intimidating...yet when he spoke, nerves burned inside him, aflame where his vocal chords had once been. But, once again...he could do nothing to stop it.
"Rise". The shadow called out again. He felt the operating table make it's way up. He turned his head, the mask of vader, to gaze at the face of the sith.
And he asked the question that burned within his fragment of a mind.
"Where is padme? Is she safe? Is she...all right?"
The darkness that was sidious hesitated, then spoke in a voice that implied both pity and blame.
"It seems...in your anger...you killed her."
No.
It couldn't be. Burning inside himself, he yelled out with the machine-like voice of vader. Though the words burned in his throat, he spoke nonetheless.
"What! I...I couldn't have! She was alive! I felt it!"
His sorrow, his anger, all of his emotion burst aflame in the force. He reached out, looking for something, anything to take in his hands and destroy...
The room began to shake. And in all his galaxy-annihilating rage, in all his pain, he wants to take the shadow that was his master and kill him, he wants the entire galaxy to suffer, he wants to exact his revenge on everyone and everything and he wants to die and burn, he wants to finish the job that was started on mustafar, to end it all in one glorious, final blaze of fury, because life just wasn't worth living anymore.
And then he realizes...he's already dead. He's gone.
And he can't do anything about it.
And in all his rage and sorrow and grief and misery and his desire to destroy everything and anything that stands in his way, all that explodes around him is the medical droids that forever ensnared him within the shell of death, and even though he reaches out for sidious to crush him in his anger, in his incredible grief...
He can't.
Does he even want to?
He has nothing left.
Nothing.
He was useless to himself. All that he cared about...
...Gone.
There was only sidious. Only the dark side.
Only his agony, trapped forever in the flaming compounds of his own death.
And he breaks free from the operating table with his new arms...Vader's arms, Vader's Body...
And he bellows mournfully, but there's no one there to console him, no one but sidious to hear his cry. As he cries out, it burns...scraping his ravished throat even further...but he doesn't care.
Pain was all he had left.
The force shall free me.
-The End-