II. Vader

The empty, dusty hallways of Theed Palace echoed under his heavy, measured steps. Cool draft swept in through empty windows — the coloured glass panes had shattered years ago, and now it seemed that winds had made their nest in the palace, bringing dry old leaves, sand and rubble from the streets and abandoning it in the corners and along the walls in unorganized piles and stripes.

Darth Vader was weary — weary and disappointed. Once again the elusive Skywalker had barely escaped, and the Dark Lord knew his time was running out. The Emperor would allow him to play cat and mouse with the young Force-wielder only for so long. And then... and then, there would come a day when he would order his Dark Lord to kill the young Jedi student. And Darth Vader would again have to postpone his hopes of overcoming the Emperor, this time indefinitely.

To his dismay, he had to admit that he didn't like the idea of killing the boy at all. And he wasn't convinced that it was merely because of the fear of losing his dream. He didn't even know when those feelings had first emerged — he was almost sure he'd gone to Bespin without them, but there, seeing the boy just... let go... and fall, fall, fall... Vader had grabbed the railing to hold himself upright, so sharp and sudden had the shock been. And the next moment he had rediscovered fear. Fear for the foolish youth who was his son. It was all he could do to reach out with the Force and soften Skywalker's impact with the bottom of the air shaft. Even now, remembering, his gloved hand clutched at the handrail and his gaze turned downwards. But of course, this time there was no pit filled with howling wind, just the mosaic floors laid in the pattern of some mythological monsters, half-birds, half-serpents. And tainted with dust like his memories.

Yet bitter as they were, those memories kept luring the Sith, calling him back to the moment when he had stood at the viewport on the bridge of the Executor and called out to his son. And the boy — and the boy had called him —

Father! The longing and betrayal that had been in Luke's voice cut right through the shell that Darth Vader had surrounded himself with, and he felt his heart lurch down into his stomach. Son... with a tremor in his mental voice that now made the Dark Lord wince in embarrassment.

With paranoid perseverance he kept replaying their brief mental touch in his mind, seeking for any connection, any memory, anything, and each time reliving the wonder, the pain and the embarrassment.

My son. Mine. Blood of my blood, flesh of my flesh. His fist curled possessively around empty air. And oh, how he resented his Master calling the boy Son of Skywalker! "One day," he vowed, "one day the Galaxy will know that he is mine."

How long, how much longer?

Why don't you listen to reason, boy? Join me, it is the only way!

Having reported his failure at Bespin — with growing unease — he had felt the urgent need to gather his thoughts, so he had set his course to Naboo. Only now he was not entirely sure if this had not been a mistake. The planet had been laid bare, the royal palace ruined. Nothing of the serene happiness of its former atmosphere remained, and nothing to anchor his anger to. Nobody to blame or punish. Just... memories.

He stepped over a chunk of marble, the head of a statue, empty lifeless eye sockets staring up at him, eternal benevolent smile on stony lips. He remembered the sculpture, it had stood in a shallow niche, in such a position that light and shadow had always played on its face in a most peculiar way. If you ran down the corridors at night, it seemed as if the lips smiled and the eyes turned to follow you...

A two-meter-tall Sith Lord wouldn't run in the palace hallways, even though there was nobody to see him. But something stirred in his memory, something that he had kept and treasured, hidden from his master, and he could almost hear a boy's feet thud and skid on the polished marble floors.

An empty doorway, bearing burn marks, led to a room that was bare, except for a huge, floor-to-ceiling mirror that had miraculously remained intact. Vader stopped, staring at it thoughtfully. A piece of childhood, that. Childhood of a long forgotten man, the remnants of whom were still lurking in the dark corners of his mind. No matter how often his master had told him to get rid of those remnants, he had never been able to — he had never quite managed to stop looking back. Almost for as long as he remembered, in the slave dens of Tatooine, in the bustle of the Temple, in the turmoil that was the crumbling Republic and the emerging Empire, maintaining identity had been a question of survival.

He remembered having been quite fascinated with that mirror — why, he couldn't recall. Must have been its aura of luxury. Of course, as he grew older and saw more of the world, the wonder of the piece diminished, but a ten-year-old Padawan Skywalker had really stood before this mirror open-mouthed, awed at the sheer size of it, at the luxuriously carved golden frame, and wondering whoever it was who might have use of such things. That some things were made for beauty alone had not yet occurred to him. On Tatooine nothing had ever been.

Vader stepped into the room and tried to picture himself as he had been then, as yet unmarred... Gloved fingers ran almost reverently over the dim splashes of coloured light and traced the carvings on the mirror frame: no, it was not entirely intact, there was a crack running diagonally across the face of a fantastic sea-creature, making it grin slyly.

Laughing at me, are you?

The creature's slightly bulging eyes and seemingly toothy grin reminded him of... Palpatine. This thought jarred him out of the reverie. Disgusted, he gathered his wandering thoughts, turned abruptly and left the room.

As he descended the broken stairs, however, something stirred in him. He stopped abruptly, looking at the pale moonlight shining through empty window frames, and tried to recapture the moment when he had stood and briefly looked at his own image in the mirror — a foul figure — but there had been something wrong with the reflection.

Splashes of coloured light on the floor. Coloured. As in through coloured-glass windows.

The windows behind the back of his mirror image were whole.

No, surely not. It couldn't be.

He shook his head, determined to dismiss it as a figment of imagination brought about by memories. But there was something... His curiosity won out. The room really wasn't that far, he reasoned, and besides, he had to trust his instincts.

Wait, who had said that? It was a long time ago...

Mentally reprimanding himself for this foolishness, he traced back his way to the mirror chamber.

The room was empty and unlit, and in the mirror image moonlight shone softly through coloured glass windows. Gasping, he turned. No. The windows behind his back were broken.

It could only be ascribed to his two decade long painful avoidance of all reflecting surfaces whenever possible that he had not realized this immediately. Where he stood, facing the mirror, he should have been able to see clearly his own full-length reflection. Only he wasn't there.

Instead...

Oh Force...

Well, he wasn't, but he was. He grasped the wall, feeling suddenly weak in the knees. Where his black form should have filled the doorway in the mirror, he saw a young and ridiculously small blue-eyed sandy-haired boy, squatting, playing with a fighter model, deeply immersed in his game.

Of course, he knew the boy. The one who had died in the lava pit.

Time shattered into tiny pieces, each a still frame. He felt the mirror-boy become aware of him, he felt rather than saw him raise his eyes, in slow motion but with a heavy sense of inevitability. Suddenly he felt as if an ice lump in his chest began to melt, or a door had opened somewhere. And he remembered the taste and feel of the world back when the Palace had not been empty, when the beautiful statues and works of art had taken the breath away as a slave-boy from Tatooine had seen them for the first time. And simultaneously he saw with his own eyes. He saw the boy—himself—still so young, pliable, still untouched by grief and pain, full of hopes, staring at the world, staring at him through the mirror, eyes full of wonder.

NO!

It was all too much, too sudden. He wanted to back away and hide. He didn't want to remember. He didn't want the boy to see him—not yet, not like this.

He fled.

TBC