Title: Mourning
Author(s): vader_incarnate
Timeframe: Saga (between PT and OT)
Characters: Vader/Anakin, Padmé
Genre: Angst. Dark. Have some mush ready for a chaser. Like just right now go and open it in another tab.
Summary: Vader had no one left with whom to share his grief, and knew of no other way to lighten it, so he mourned in the only way he could.
Note: Welcome to my headcanon of why Anakin talks so oddly in the movies. I am making up linguistics from whole cloth, except: to offer condolences in Vietnamese is indeed to lighten the load, more or less.
Response to the Gothic Literature quotation roulette Angstmongers Anonymous challenge from the Jedi Council Forums fanfiction forum.
TW: canon typical child murder, slavery, violence.
"Even with the utterly lost, to whom life and death are equally jests, there are matters of which no jest can be made."
- Edgar Allan Poe, "The Masque of the Red Death"
Vader's milk tongue, the language that Anakin had learned at Shmi Skywalker's knee, was Lower Huttese.
The language of the slave hovels of Tatooine was bleak and pragmatic: there were few words for beautiful things, many for unpleasant ones, and words were often recycled. Red was the same as blood, the same as labor. Water was also tears and sweat.
When at nine he arrived at the Temple and began his formal education in earnest, the concept of synonyms had captivated him. How could a person, any person, need so many words for beauty, that simple beauty wasn't enough? Why also would someone need dazzling and magnificent and gorgeous? He had vivid memories of spending hours hunched over a Basic thesaurus as a young Padawan, marveling at the nuances and complexities of this word or that, the ways he could combine them and construct new meanings. It made his conversational speech patterns florid and awkward, and as a young man he had been prone to declarations of such dramatic overstatement that he could easily see others' eyes widening with ill-concealed distaste that he had overstepped an unspoken rule, that his syntax had somehow become aberrant. Still, he could not stop himself, didn't know how to stop himself.
Lower Huttese had thirteen words for death, and of those, three were specifically used for the death of a child.
One word was encapsulated in the Basic medical term "failure to thrive," a nondescript semantic shrugging of the shoulders that described an infant who died from no discernible cause, or a cause no one wished to discuss. Possible candidates included malnutrition, heatstroke, neglect, disease, accident, injury, the Master's simple boredom or sadism; best not to interrogate too closely.
Rarely in service of the Hutts, but for human masters, the mother's milk would sometimes be demanded to nourish a more important or valuable infant, and the slave's own would wither while suckling weakly at an empty breast.
Another word was recognized as synonymous with child death; though the circumstances were different, the pragmatics were the same, and the parents would never see their son or daughter again. Simply, "sold." Perhaps that was how Shmi had described his absence.
The word for the "deliberate death of a child as specifically ordered by the Master" was the closest to describe the culling of the Temple.
For a language so concerned with describing death, Lower Huttese had no term for murder. The best match was "theft of life" but that implied the sin was committed against the owner, and not the slave; to the murdered, the language was indifferent. Lower Huttese provided no innate value to sentient life, just to the blood or labor or property. Vader had now traveled through all the stars and found them no different from the gutter: the same frantic, feeble scrabble for life and meaning and hope recreated ad infinitum, so often casually and cruelly aborted; failure to thrive. But sometimes he wondered if his disdain for life had sprung from this simple source: how could he appreciate the value of life now or ever, when the concept had never taken linguistic root in his mother's tongue?
But for bereaved parents, grief became complicated and compound. The word for mourning was roughly translated to "sharing sadness to lessen a burden." For the grief of a child's death, the term was "soul loss," to convey the loss of an essential part of one's self.
Thus, "I mourn my child's death" became something akin to "I share this hole in my soul with others, that I may lessen the burden."
The greatest cosmic joke the Force had played upon him, among many, was this: that in his rage, Vader had already murdered anyone with whom he could share the burden.
But maybe the better joke was this one: that in slaying the Temple's children, he had engineered the death of his own.
There was no time that he hated himself more than when he thought of the children: the desperate gasping from a dozen young throats strangled all at once, the last jerkings from a forest of small suspended feet. There had been a point during the siege of the Temple that the Dark Side had swirled so viciously around him that he had deactivated his lightsaber and simply used his hands and the Force, letting crimson blood spill across his fingers and along his palms and down his forearms until it seemed he was wearing red evening gloves. But that was the Dark Side: the hot wash of blood and the simultaneous urge to sob and scream and rip out a throat with his teeth. It didn't matter what life they had lived and how they had given it meaning, so long as they died, and the blood was warm.
Those plentiful dead now trailed the ends of his cape, pushing and pressing and crashing into him, the only touch he knew besides that of his Master. Little hands that worked their way into his, little voices whispering, Your daughter would have done this, had you not killed her, and Vader could do nothing, because he could not kill them twice. And as much of a monster as he had become for the sake of instilling order in the galaxy - he did not know if he could do it again. He could not so much as stand next to a child without burning with shame, and he could do nothing but seethe and hate, hate until it seemed like his blood had turned to acid, hate until it was like fire licking at his bones, hate until his hate was a living thing itself and the only thing that understood him, hate himself and hate his Master and hate the galaxy. The apparitions of murdered Jedi children watched in silence as Vader raged, and the pace of life relentlessly proceeded, unabated and ambivalent.
Padmé had been sure the child would be a boy, and Anakin sure she would be a girl. They had agreed to choose names based on their certainty: Padmé would choose a boy's name, and Anakin would choose a girl's.
He remembered the giddy happiness with which he had presented his choice, scrawled on a simple piece of flimsi in a cramped and narrow script. He had offered it, of course, with an ostentatious bow and a broad grin, only a few days before - well. Best not to interrogate too closely.
"My lady," Anakin had said with his unassisted lungs and unmelted vocal chords, and smiled at his living wife with a handsome, unburnt face. "It is my sincerest delight to present you with the name of our cherished daughter."
"Oh Ani," Padmé had laughed while unfolding the flimsi, bemused but also inured to his theatrics. His gratuitous formality had never bothered her; she had loved him and married him despite it. And as the Clone Wars progressed, she had coached him in improving his speech patterns, to more closely mimic the galactic standard. "Not that I would expect anything less, but this seems dramatic even for you."
A cheeky grin. "Wait until you see the treasure you hold in your hands, my heart."
Sure enough, her eyes had widened as she read the paper, brown eyes darting across it again to confirm. "Leia," she had said slowly, tasting the word carefully, an idle hand going to her engorged stomach. "Ani, do you know what this means? In arēm - "
"In arēm, the native language of Naboo before it was settled by the Republic - it means 'justice and death,'" Anakin had finished proudly for her. He had labored to find the dictionary for the dead language, had stolen moments aboard the Resolute during the Outer Rim sieges to bury his face in the text to find the right name, the perfect word.
"It just seems … dramatic," Padmé had said, which Anakin had known didn't necessarily mean no, and with a slowly dawning smile that had decidedly meant yes.
"I have a feeling she'll come by it honestly," Anakin had replied, still grinning, with his heart full to bursting - that one such as he, born in the hovels of Tatooine but somehow ascended almost to mastery within the Temple itself, could ever have done anything to deserve her. To be the recipient of that smile, to have felt the touch of those lips. "Perhaps the drama is hereditary."
"It makes my choice pale in comparison, for our son," Padmé had admitted. "Hopefully he doesn't get the drama gene."
Lower Huttese had few words for beautiful things, but it had a simple one for the most beautiful thing. Luke, the name she had chosen to honor his mother's tongue, meaning love.
Luke, Padmé's child who he had murdered in rage and madness.
There was no word for this. No set of syllables or phrases that could be constructed from the dead or living languages across a hundred thousand stars that could convey with anything close to adequacy the depths of his self-knowledge and self-loathing and self-inflicted pain.
Vader had no one left with whom to share his grief, and knew of no other way to lighten it, so he mourned in the only way he could: by meting out the raw pain from the chasm in his soul, the one that should have been full with a wife and a child, the one that was instead a black hole that could never be sated but that always demanded more and more and more as he ripped open the wounds in his psyche again and again and again until he hemorrhaged pain in unending perpetuity.
In his lightsaber he imbued the smell of corpses as they ballooned and decayed in dry desert heat. In his fist he held tight the memory of digging sand out of the long, bloodied grooves of fresh whip marks. The sight of his mother collapsing from overworked exhaustion under the burning suns. The scarlet spray of blood and bone and flesh when a slave's transmitter detonated. The impotent fear and rage as he huddled in the foxholes of a dozen worlds while Separatist fighters roared overhead with the certainty that his luck had run out and today he would die. The trusting young faces of those who had gone to the Council chambers to seek protection from the wisest and most powerful of their Order and the child's high, clear voice: Master Skywalker, there are too many of them. Obi-Wan's disappointment. Padmé's last gasps. The gaping absence where her child's presence should be. The searing obsidian sand as his fingertips clawed uselessly on the bank and his lungs bubbled and boiled and burned until he could no longer even scream. The knowledge that he had destroyed everything good he had ever known or would ever know and that everything hereafter would be horror and pain and servitude because his reprieve had ended and he was back in the slave quarters, spent and broken and alone, and he knew now that he would never leave.
He had no one left with which to share his pain so he resolved to share it with everyone: to teach to the galaxy the true meaning of pain and hate and suffering, to show them the faintest, faintest echo of that which bled ceaselessly from his heart and soaked his soul.
It never ends.
