A Star Wars Christmas Carol
Chapter 4
The Second of the Spirits…

Vader looked all round the room, expecting at any minute for the beauty of the Angel to rest in his vision again. When she did not appear, Anakin Skywalker sank back deep within the evil that was Vader.

The Anakin within Vader only wept.

Vader sneered.

iFool! You are weak!

She was my wife!

She is dead!/i

Somewhere inside of Vader's heart (if you can say there was such a thing) Anakin Skywalker shed bitter tears over his Angel.

Vader, however, was not weeping. He was, in fact, looking around the room with a sort of paranoid look on his face. You know--the kind on the faces of those people who've been spies or secret agents for too long, and they have to be admitted to an asylum. That was the look on the unmasked face of Darth Vader. He wondered by what way the next specter would come--and feared it greatly.

Now, I wonder at his calling Anakin Skywalker a fool. Is he not worried about a ghost peeping through his door, or a specter from underneath his bed? Anakin was mourning his wife. Vader was looking for monsters under his bed.


Had he any reason to call Skywalker a fool, when he himself was acting like a child?

The comment, however, only showed what Anakin's heart was like. For really the core of the dark side in Anakin (Vader himself) was the fact that Anakin Skywalker hated himself. He hated all he had become, all he had let his world become, so he dove deeper and deeper into the darkness, to forget. Does not an alcoholic drink to forget the trouble that the liquor causes? The drink only causes more trouble, so he drinks more, more. He never sees that to clear up the problems, he must stop the drinking. This was the case with Anakin Skywalker. He never thought that if he could right the wrongs, he could undo the damage.


And so he dove now. The blue eyes narrowed to slits of a dark, disconcerting shade, and he moved slowly to the table where sat his lightsaber. Clipping it onto his belt, he looked around with a fierce determination on his face. If the spirits were to come, let them come. He would not be caught in weakness this time.

Surprisingly, Vader did not replace the helmet. He noticed, in retrospect, that he had not needed the respirator, either, after his encounter with Padme. He did not notice now, however.
What he did notice was a soft glowing light emanating from a small room right next to his. Funny, he thought. I never noticed a door there before.

He walked slowly to the door and pressed it's button. When the panel slid open, he reached up to shield his eyes. The light increased a hundredfold in intensity, and Vader noticed now that the light was not normal white light from an overhead lightsource or a beside lamp, but a sort if glowing red light, like the glow produced by his lightsaber, only softer.

Walking in, Vader had only to glance once at the short, stubby figure to recognize it.

The little creature smiled mischievously.

"He he…welcome you, I do!"