Title: Remains
Author: Aeryn
Rating: PG
Characters: Darth Vader, mentions of Padmé
Timeframe: Shortly after RotS
Summary: She was everything that was ever good in him, and she is gone because of him.
Author Notes: Angst, more angst, and did I mention the angst? This was written in the months after RotS, which perhaps explains the mood somewhat. ;)
Disclaimer: Blahblah, it's all George's, blahblah...
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She always comes in his weakest moments. Death has not changed that.
Perhaps he should consider it a mercy that she and their child are not actually here to see him as he is now. She, who will never grow old, while he is nothing but. He grew old long before now, before the fire that melted away Anakin Skywalker's physical beauty ever touched his flesh. It is regret that decays a person, and in those final moments with her she had been the one thing left he did not regret, the one thing that would make right everything he had done. She, and the child who will never be old either.
The blood seems a permanent fixture on his hands. She took them in hers, made him forget it for a while - and stained herself with it.
Now, her own, and their child's, stains him, joining that of a thousand others. He doesn't wash himself of it – if there is anything Anakin Skywalker earned, it is this. He more than anyone had the ability, the duty, to save them. Instead he crushed them, like the teeth of unceasing gears that had swept her life up into them the moment she stepped into his, in an ancient junk shop.
Every night, he sees her. That day only four years before, when she left that balcony - the same one where later her face had shone as she unfolded her dreams for them and their baby - and strode across her apartment and back into his life. He wants to run before he has the chance to see those eyes again, before she sees his. He wills her to stop, to not come near him – if she becomes part of his life, she will lose everything she ever loved. He is not worth that.
She doesn't hear, for his mouth refuses to speak the words. He knows she would ignore them if she did. She glides across the room, stops before him. Her eyes meet his, they light up as she smiles and speaks the word Ani – and the cycle is locked in place, while he can do nothing but watch. Again, and again. The mask and this chamber can shut out every living thing he desires, yet somehow it is powerless against her mere shadow.
Every night, he sees her. Sees them. Crumpling before him in that moment before the fire, when the only thing he saw was his own rage.
She knew she should not have been there, especially not then, risking their child's life with her own. Trying to - what? Save him? She took him in her arms again, in her eyes, tried to make him forget. And for a moment, she nearly did.
But in the end he would not hear her. Somehow, he couldn't - he wanted her to understand, and she'd always been the one to understand when no one else would, why wouldn't she then? He was trying to give her the universe, give her her life, their child's life, but she only wanted him. The weak man he'd been, who she insisted he still was and whose name she still called him by, the one who had no means to save her.
Everything is sharper in retrospect; this memory is broken glass.
You're going down a path I cannot follow...
He could see everything that kept the awareness of what he had done in her name from burning him then and there slipping away with every step she took back from him, every word she spoke. She would not understand, would not be quiet, would not stop hurting him with her words.
I love you -
So he made her.
You LIAR!
It was the last thing she ever saw him do. It was the last he saw her living face, stricken with horror and tears blurring those luminous eyes; the last time he heard her voice, still managing to whisper his name even as he took it from her.
Damn it, she should not have been there - but he can not be angry with her anymore. She was not the one who failed that day. She never betrayed him; the truth he remembers now in her eyes before he closed them forever stings him as much as anything else. Her eyes had never been able to lie to him.
Perhaps she should have betrayed him - it might have spared her, or her child.
And even if she had, it didn't matter. All that should have mattered was her. Not him, not Obi-Wan, not the entire galaxy.
She was the only thing that would have stood if the rest of his world had fallen around him, and he cut her down.
She was everything that was ever good in him, and she is gone because of him.
And I was not allowed to die with her.
No.
He - Anakin - did die with her. Her end had finished driving in the knife that Mustafar had first pierced him with.
And yet the memories are here, in this mind. It was these lips she caressed with hers and these eyes she'd looked into when she sealed her wedding vows, this ear she'd whispered sweetly and not-so-sweetly into in the night, this flesh that had helped create the child that would forever lie within her, this hand she'd pressed against her stomach to feel that child kicking there.
This hand that stretched out and crushed the life from them both.
Anakin Skywalker is gone, which means she, who professed love solely for him, has no place here. And yet there are moments like this where he thinks he can almost feel that familiar warmth, standing just over his shoulder - but he pushes it away, finding he cannot tolerate the idea that she might still be there in some way, that she has not actually found peace. And he will not defile her memory by forgetting what was done to her, by trying to touch her again, even in this limited way. Anakin Skywalker will never touch her again.
Anakin did succeed in his most desperate desire in a way, Vader thinks. The birth of their child never claimed her. Their child will never suffer the lack of a mother. She will never have to age while her spirit watches powerlessly from a withering flesh prison. She will never know pain again, and his child will not know it at all.
They will not grow old together. He will rot, and everything she loved in this world is less than dust, because his memory is all that remains.
It is a fate she never deserved.
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[end]