this is a disclaimer.
hear the horses
He's never understood why they say that dying is easy. In his experience, dying involves a lot of blood and agony and the leaving-behind of everything and everyone you've ever loved. Dying is finishing a race by crashing your pod into a rock wall rather than crossing the finish line. It's a full stop where there should be a comma, but the thing is: it's not a short, sudden halt. It's a protracted winding down to an inevitable end -
- even though so many people have died so quickly at his hand -
In his experience, dying is the hardest thing.
Never did believe that nonsense about being One With The Force. He saw his first corpse at age - oh, three? Certainly it's one of his earliest memories: the stillness, the emptiness. The sense of nothing there that's stayed with him so long. Not all the words of all the Masters in the Temple could ever counteract that memory.
Speaking of nothingness: he can't feel his legs. Or his arms. And Mother Goddess there are knives in his chest that stab and twist with every drawn-out breath, and vaguely he wonders why he is not panting, but then the word comes to him: respirator.
"-ther? Father, can you hear me? I know this isn't easy but I need you to stand up, Father. Father, please!"
Father, please.
Barely audible above the din of the alarms and the tramping of booted feet running this way and that (someone is screaming in the distance, most likely hysteria), his son's voice tugs him back to consciousness.
The world is changed, he thinks.
(Again.)
The boy is bending over him, trembling with the aftereffects of the torture he suffered at Palpatine's hands, concern for his less-than-deserving sire writ large across his features. It occurs to him as if for the first time that his son has not inherited his own height or bulk, and that slight-seeming frame is bowed with weariness.
Speaking twists the knives in his chest even further.
"Luke."
Smile half-forced in return, and genuinely for the first time he feels a sense of loss when he realises he has never seen the colour of his son's - of Luke's - eyes. Intellectually, he knows they're blue - he's read Luke's file so many times he can recite it off by heart.
But that's not the same thing.
Pointless to pretend that standing up is not a struggle, but with Luke's help, he manages somehow.
"Place is huge," Luke says disgustedly. "Could be wandering around here for decades - no, it's all right, I know which way. Professional terrorist, remember, I make a living out of breaking into places I shouldn't... you know Leia and I jumped across a reactor shaft on the first Death Star? At least, I think it was a reactor shaft. A lot of people were shooting at us, I don't remember that well. And then we got to the hangar bay and Han was going didn't we just leave this party, like he expected the Death Star to be manned by a single battalion of stormtroopers..."
He would have snorted once, but his lungs won't let him, so he gestures instead. "And no officers?"
Luke grins. "Yeah. Hey, do you know how I got off Bespin? Leia came back for me - I reached out to her with the Force, and she heard. From what Yoda said that's not normal, I think she'll be good at this."
"Of course," he rasps. "My children, after all."
"Oh, wow. Properly humble attitude, that."
Never be ashamed of your abilities - or of who you are, his mother used to tell him.
Something racks him: a cough suppressed by the relentless function of his respirator, leaving him shaking, staggering - Luke nearly buckles under the sudden extra weight, hallf-carrying, half-dragging him a few extra steps before lowering him to the floor. The wailing of the alarms stops; so too the shouting from just a minute ago.
Elevator, Anakin realises. Doors are closed.
"Here," Luke says gently. "Try and relax - I know, I know. But we're almost there, Father. You won't mind if I commandeer your personal shuttle, will you?"
Anakin doesn't dignify that with a reply. Luke's grinning again, a smirk Anakin remembers wearing himself, practically high on adrenaline. They're not safe yet, but of course that doesn't matter. Like at Collesta when they stormed the Separatist shipyards - getting inside was the difficult part, he and Obi-Wan stole the designs and destroyed the computer banks on a fierce rush of battle-joy that carried them in and out and well out of the way of the explosions in a blur...
He can't feel it, himself.
Protracted winding down to an inevitable end.
Wants to see his daughter again, fiercely, angrily: to face her knowing she is his daughter, to watch her with her brother, to look at her and see not Leia Organa but his Leia whose name means accomplishment...
It won't happen.
It doesn't matter. The very fact that it won't happen means she is there and not here and anywhere that is not here is safe - although, she's probably in the battle on the moon with that smuggler of hers - but she'll be fine. She's an excellent shot, he remembers. And Solo loves her very much.
With an effort, he focusses on Luke once more. The noise has come back; the boy is dragging at his shoulders. Anakin helps him as best he can, clumsy, tired, near death. He's been cheated of his son's company - cheated of his family - for so long, and now this: nothingness creeping up on him, final, irreversible.
But not even the thought of Obi-Wan makes him angry now. It's too late for that, and besides: how was the man to know that Luke's mere existance would do this to the Lord Vader?
Impossible to put his finger on when, exactly, he stopped thinking of the boy beside him as his son and started thinking of him as Luke .
He thinks he lost control of the Force the moment Palpatine's lightening lashed him. It would take an effort, but he could touch it again, channel it through his wounds, restore at least some rudiments of health, long enough to reach Bast Castle and be treated properly. Luke could - would - aid him. He could stay. Make reparation. Know his children.
(What the desert wills no man may undo.
The gods of his childhood are very far away now, but their truths are - finally - with him again. Mother Goddess, forgive me.
He should have put the torch to his mother's pyre in the manner of her people, instead of allowing Lars to bury her in the sand. Selfishly, he hopes Luke knows enough of his heritage to grant him that last gift.)
He'll miss their twenty-fifth birthday. He'll miss Leia's training. He'll miss weddings and children, good days and bad; he'll miss their ultimate, final triumph over the Empire, the simple raising of a flag above the bombed-out skyscrapers of Coruscant, impossibly blue in the morning sunlight.
Anakin can't even see what colour Luke's eyes are.
"Luke," he says. "Help me take... this mask off."