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Author's Note: This chapter shifts to flashback, launching the recount of Vader and Amidala's marriage. Note that these memories are not in italics. As such a great chunk of Sightless in the Dark will be flashback, I thought it would be hard on the eyes to read lines upon lies of slanted script. I hope this switching of settings does not become confusing. If it does, please tell me in the reviews and I'll try my best to denote the differing eras better in the ensuing uploads.
Speaking of reviews, thanks to QueenMeep and Gizzi1213 for you for your kind encouragement!
Chapter Two
Personal reflection was not something Vader was fond of. It is a common misconception that this and meditation—which he did a great deal of—were one in the same. Meditation is a state of restful, relative calm and oneness with the world. By contrast, Vader found personal reflection to be a wracking dredging of old bits and scraps of settled life that had no business being disturbed from the past's sequestered sea floor. Either or was a solitary act and required Amidala's staff be sent from the property in the footsteps of the previous circus he had kicked out.
He rang the property's lower levels where the stormtroopers and communication officers held station. The line buzzed repeatedly; he paced irritably at the trills. After some time numbly he cut the call. They must already have gone.
Only Amidala had the authority to clear out the lower levels.
Sabé and the other hooded wonders of Amidala's clandestine handmaiden posse turned up shortly after, demanding access his wife. In the tradition of the Ancient Nubians, the handmaidens were to off themselves immediately upon the death of their queen, so as to ensure all sensitive secrets and hairstyle techniques went with her to the grave. They had heard the news and returned, now attempting to push their way past Vader and commit the sacred suicide in the presence of Amidala's body.
Vader's stubborn refusal was beginning to wear on Sabé's habitual air of demur, clerical apathy. Her mouth twitched under the perma-shadow cast by her cowl.
"I find your disrespect for Naboo's traditions offensive, Lord Vader".
"And I find your traditions to be bizarre and occult. Now leave!"
The tall woman stepped closer, trying futilely to sidestep him. The others hung back morosely, regarding him with the aloof disdain so typical of the Nubian gentlewomen. "If you have any respect for your wife you will allow us access. She valued our loyalty beyond all else."
"Then she was foolish to do so. It would seem her death is satisfactory proof that your loyalty wavered. We would not be having this argument had you not left her side!"
"Our lady demanded solitude. We obeyed."
"Are you bodyguards or androids? You should not have allowed her to turn off the security system!"
"Governor Amidala was ardent that her privacy was not to be invaded tonight." The first break of emotion could be heard it the woman's smooth voice. Vader mentally urged her to continue, sensing his questions were about to be answered. "We begged her not meet her guest--"
Realizing her words were now slipping out at his will, Sabé gasped. She shook her head furiously at Vader, her subordinate handmaidens crossing their arms in eerie unison. Not since the Jedi Order had there been such a creepily furtive, mentally in-synch collection.
"Not even your devilry could make us betray Amidala's secrets. Come, girls. We shall depart now and return prior to the medic's arrival in the morning. It is preferable to delay the ceremony than to aid Lord Vader's unholy investigation into her death."
Vader was too exhausted to stop them, letting them file into the lift. He would question them further upon their return. As the doors hissed shut, Sabé called to him, "The dead's secrets die with them, Vader. You'd be wise to realize this before our return."
Vader wondered vaguely if that was a threat or advice as he watched the elevator lights count downwards.
Thankfully, the droids put up less of a fight than the handmaidens when he locked them in a hall closet, powering only See-Threepio down. "Oh, not again!" he moaned helplessly while Vader reached for the "off" switch. Apparently Amidala had subdued them in much the same manner.
Finally, as alone as he could be stationed on a planets of trillions, Vader turned down the oily yellow lights of the salon until the brilliance of the Coruscant nightline was again visible. He sat, hunched over on a sofa too delicately designed for him and sighed mechanically.
Vader would not go back to the body yet. He could not calm himself enough to mediate. He had all the time in the universe to start the investigation. Right now he would reflect and rack his brains over the past twenty years of his marriage.
There was an even earlier time when they had been married, but there was no point in considering that distant epoch of their lives. That was a marriage of another man, a marriage of an entirely different sort. It was a foolish undertaking begun out ofimmature passionand brash naivety. The present was so far removed from anything remotely similar that Vader thought back only far enough to the first day of their second marriage: the last day of his surgeries.
The two weeks prior where he lay drugged, agitated, and operated on, passed as disjointed emersions from the deep, black pool of a medicated drip. He remembered only fragments. The staccato blip of a monitor. Blaring, artificial lights all the way down the hallway. Killing the nurse. Tension in the operating room. His transfer to the droids.
Vader learned after that he had arrived almost but not wholly dead, accompanied by the Emperor and his entourage of villains, each entirely unpleasant. He had been a writhing, breathless, bloodied torso and a head that moaned, and cursed, and spat horrible things onto the facility's immaculate O.R. floor. His presence had caused a great disquiet. The nurses refused to go near him, the image of one of their own strangled by his sheer ill will still fresh in their memory. She had bent her lovely head near the black, corroded flesh, offering soft words of comfort and a sharp injection of relief, only to find her next breath impossible.
The doctors were no braver than their nurses. He was a difficult patient, they told him as he drifted from this world to the next. They had never seen anything like it and they were the best. He was being moved down the hall where they were better equipped. Droids were more capable at delivering the results that Vader's benefactor desired.
All the way down the hallway he asked for his wife. They did not answer. Perhaps he could not be heard over the frantic murmuring of the healers or the erratic, electronic bleeps of the monitors. Perhaps they thought his demands to be mad ramblings; who would have wed this malevolent beast?
Only after Vader had been properly strapped down to the second operating slab and she on the other side of the threshold, did one nurse answer him. She had not the faintest clue about his wife, but offered, "I pray, for her sake, that that poor soul is far, far away from here." Her clinical smile was only visible for the one moment in the sliver space between the closing doors.
The nurse knew, as well as he, that Vader deserved to be left in the dark.
The overhead lights switched off for the rest of the operations. Droids did not require anything but ghostly headlamps to attach new legs while his others burned some thousand billion kilometers away. As metal wired into bloody flesh he could still feel the skin of those phantom limbs scorch and blister into nothing but the same pain he would endure for all eternity. He fought the agony in waves, a drowning man flailing, losing against the surge. Another anesthesia. Down, down, down, back into the deep. They threw him a line, gave him back a trachea. Motors whirred to life inside his dead organs, gears snapped sharply into place. A metonym click, click, clicked along with his heart.
He cried "Water!" and he cried "Master!" and then he cried a name he could no longer fit his swollen tongue around.
Beyond his own agony there was another pain with no claim on his body tormenting him just the same. Another surgery bathed in an ethereal glow that could have been a dying angel's gentle radiance or just another blinding set of industrial lamps. Vader looked up—Padmé looked up—and there loomed the ever genial, ever understanding Obi wan Kenobi.
Vader gnashed his teeth (he still had those), knowing Obi Wan was at his place, at her side, holding her hand, under those bright lights. They would ask Kenobi if he was the father, and he would smile with all the galaxy's contentment and say yes, thinking back to the burning form howling on the fiery banks of hell with a certain sense of self-righteousness. How difficult it had been to leave Vader in two, but in the end had it not been the only way? Obi Wan would perhaps reflect on this with a sad, pious smile many times in the future, but now the poor child who writhed on the pallet below required his attention.
She was screaming somewhere across the galaxy, but Vader could have sworn she was no further than across the room. Gasping, crying, dying, she had a tenuous hold on life she was begging have severed. Vader had a tenuous hold on her he would not sever for the world, a connection Kenobi realized with a start. "He's here," she whimpered between the contractions of her womb and the next thing Vader knew Kenobi cut the brief, fragile connection as easily as he had cut Vader's limbs.
That would be the last time he ever truly knew his wife.
Oh how the Vader wished it was a cold hatred he had for Kenobi. A frigid, passionless exercise of deferential loathing. To know that Kenobi could still get the better of him, could still evoke these painful emotions, tormented Vader to no end. His was a fierce, fervid hatred further fanned by the fervor of Mustafar, but he vowed it would be with cold tranquility that he killed Kenobi. If only to ensure the death of Kenobi, would Vader will himself to live, for Kenobi had taken everything and now all that remained for him was to take on Kenobi.
His dosage was increased again and he fell back into fitful suspension.
The droid asked him to flex his toes. He could not even focus his gaze on the robot, let alone perform its task. Something white-hot prodded at him. He felt the zap through a crude mimicry of sensation. He flexed his toe.
Upon his next awakening he found himself half-listening to a distorted conversation becoming clearer as the layers of his anesthesia wore off.
"It defies all logic, your highness," a healer was saying. "He should be very well dead."
"Ah, but Doctor what is keeping this wretched creature alive has never obeyed the rules of logic."
The Healer momentarily forgot his station. "I though the Force died out along with the Jedi last month."
"Publicly," the voice answered smoothly. The Emperor's shadow slid off the wall and along the floor as it earthly form moved away from the dimmed lamps, towards the platform. Yellow eyes peered out from the gloom and Vader met the terrible gaze with his own dead stare. "Your drugs seem to be failing. The patient is awake."
"He resists our best efforts to ease his suffering, your highness. He is stubborn, almost masochistic, in his desire to remain conscious and ride out the pain. We've administered enough sedative to tranquilize a wild Nexu and yet he still stirs now and again, cursing out my medi-droids and destroying equipment."
The Emperor's lips curled, having never been quite so pleased. "That is because he knows he deserves to suffer. That he has brought this all down upon himself. And as every Jedi knows, there are consequences to actions… and one must stand tall and grit and bear those consequences." He paused in his quiet speech, his eyes leaving Vader's to observe the half-man's injuries. His cruel smile only widened. "Now at present, our patient can't stand up. But what he will do…what he has done, is borne the totality and the profundity of the pain and the suffering and the agony he has incurred. For that is what a man does. Lord Vader in every human sense has been emasculated, but he lies here, strapped to this bed, wanting only to suffer the pain he is entitled to. For pain is the only way he shall ever feel human again. He choked your nurse and destroyed your droids, Doctor, because you were denying him that right. The right, as they say, to take it like a man."
Vader could only twitch his half-responsive limbs in rage. This was perhaps the most truthful Palpatine had ever been to him. He preferred the lies.
The Emperor bent closer, eyes narrowed. "Now understand this, Lord Vader. Every limb of your body is mere circuitry and coverings. There are more tubes hooked into you than I care to say. You will never again breathe properly by your own power. And so, you must ask yourself, is it really worth braving this anguish just to cling to what is barely left of your humanity?"
"Where's my wife?" he hissed. Black spots appeared before his eyes from the sting of his ruined throat.
Vader had intended to anger his master, but the Emperor merely smiled genially: a twisted caricature of his pleasant politician's face. "Up until yesterday I would have thought among your murdered, Vader. But it just so happens she is your second visitor on this fine evening. I believe Senator Amidala has some rather important issues to discuss with you. Doctor, shall we leave the happy couple to it?"
The Healer assented fearfully and followed the Emperor from the room. At the doorway, once again a hunched obstruction of the outside corridor's glimmering lights, his shadow turned to another, smaller silhouette. "He is all yours, my Lady."
She nodded and they left her to it.
Here was the woman who had suffered equally as Vader thrashed on the surgery slab. Here she was across the room but she could have been any where in the galaxy for all he felt her. He let his head slump to the side and watched her dazedly. Amidala was unwilling to allow herself any closer to his stab; perhaps she thought it was proximity that allowed him to crush her throat the last time. Their recent ordeal had drained all emotion from her face, betraying no sympathy for his situation and no sorrow for hers. And there was certainly no fear to be found in her features, just daggers in her eyes and a mouth that would never truly smile again.
"I've come to strike a bargain, O husband of mine."
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