Author: Delilah Draken
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: Star Wars (ANH, ESP, ROTJ)
Pairing(s): n/a (at the moment)
Status: Work In Progress
Started: August 05, 2005 – 08.21 hrs
Disclaimer: The stories are mine. All the rest - characters and locations you've heard of in TV shows, movies, books etc - belong to their respective owners. I am just borrowing them.
Summary: Sometimes, when you play with fire, it doesn't burn you. It freezes your soul and paralyses your heart.
Inversion Challenge Luke and Vader trade bodies. This can be at any time in the trilogy or before and can be because of an alien artifact/weird occurrence/the Force, whatever. The two characters have to learn to live each others lives plausibly until they can switch back. Requirements
1. Must be L/V (of course)
2. Must contain the line, "Just remember, I can do just as much damage here as you can do there."
3. Must contain the line, "Give me one good reason not to kill you where you stand".
4. Must have at least one scene where Luke has to get used to walking with a cape.
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by
Delilah Draken
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- I -
Cold. So terribly cold. I don't like the cold. Why is it so cold? My angel's eyes are never cold. He repeats the words, silently, within his memories' best guarded secrets, over and over again, makes them his own, his only thought, his black beacon in a nightmare of white. Slowly, painfully he sets step after step into the freezing snow, battles the icy wind that attempts to conquer his lone, broken body, and tries to ignore the voice of an old, long dead friend, enemy, whatever telling him to visit a myth on a world of slimy mud and biting insects.
The voice is insistent, following him around, finally using the shadow of a once youthful face to make him look up, to see the apparition. He sees the ghost, smiles to himself that now he really has lost his mind and turns away, still ignoring the one-sided conversation. He doesn't see any reason to listen, to follow a phantom's orders, as the message is not for him; but for the boy, his angel's little darling heir, a dream that was never allowed to become reality.
Hours, minutes, days fly by, frozen moments eaten by the creature clad in ivory silk and breathing agony. Were he still able to produce the sound, a chuckle would be heard, amusement over bad metaphors and silly poetic justice. But only silence surrounds him, a soundless void only disturbed by the howling wind slicing at his skin. And still he walks on, always moving, never resting, to a place he does not know where, but hopes it will be warm, warm, warm, better than here.
Matter reigns over mind, letting him lose the tiny ounce of stubborn determination that made him cross this far an ocean of ice. With an exhausted sigh he sinks into the welcoming snow, cherishes the chance to rest, to sleep and be no more. Let them find his body, let them find the remains of a once proud man and wonder who he was, he who was insane enough to risk a blizzard without protection. His epitaph will read 'All honour to him, defender of shadows, warrior of darkness, child of the desert. In legends, he will survive, he who was called Darth Vader'. The traditional Tatooine form of address elegantly engraved in silver nightstone to be a memory, a tale to be remembered, to be told for generations to come, for there is no immortality without someone to sing your song, to write your story and create a fantasy of hero's death and lost love.
How ironic then, the great joke of the universe, that the stones will never learn his name. Here he is - monster, nightmare given flesh, betrayer of love freely given - and dreams of an afterlife as a cherished whisper in the eternal dunes. How pathetic to wish for what can never be. How dreadfully delusional to even dare to think of such an heresy.
It hurts to keep his eyes open, to blink away the tiny icicles that are growing on his lashes. It hurts for it is necessary. There never was a dunes' child who didn't look Death in the eye, who didn't await the goddess with open arms and a blade to fight, who wasn't ready for the dance. In Death's arms there is no light and no cold, only shadows and the warmth of a mother's womb. But is this Death he sees, is that the last lover gliding on black wings to bring him back his angel for a final kiss good bye? He is not sure, imagination and reality fighting for supremacy, what it is his eyes show him, if his beloved lady of the green fields kneels beside him, his hand touching her face with adoring devotion. In the end, it doesn't matter whose lips he kisses with his last breath, he doesn't care any more because a dying man's dream is a holy thing and to break the illusion is a crime worth a million lifetimes of pain and despair.
