Okay, I usually don't do this ... but here's what happens next, at least in my mind. It just kinda begged to be written.

Perhaps I shouldn't be all that surprised when you run me through with your blade.

Yet, somehow, I am. Somehow, I never expected it to get this far, never expected to be here dying at your hand as you look on with those cold, impassive blue eyes. Some part of me still insists upon thinking of you as my son, even after all this -- still a boy, still the compassionate almost-Jedi who risked his life and his soul for his father's redemption.

But you aren't, are you? You're not Luke Skywalker anymore, no longer the boy I had come to admire, maybe to respect, maybe even to love. You're something totally new, forged from the fires of darkness and reborn in a holocaust of death and despair and destruction -- not my son, not now, never again.

Perhaps it's fair, in a way -- as father kills the son, the son kills the father.

And yet you aren't a stranger at all. Because if you were a stranger and I the same Lord Vader I've been pretending to be for so many long years, you'd be dead by now, on the floor gasping for breath or writhing in pain. Even if it cost me my life, I would have taken you down with me, because I am a Sith, dammit, and the fool who tries to kill a Sith buys his own death as well.

But I don't strike, don't move at all. Because the boy who was my son was right, and just as surely as my darkness poisoned his light, his light has poisoned my darkness; just as surely as my darkness changed you, you've changed me.

And in these dying moments, I find that there is only one thing I need to do.

"I'm sorry," I whisper, even as I fall to the ground.

I don't even know if you can hear me, without the help of these machines I've depended upon for so long. But I have to say it, even if you can't hear it, have to get it out even if you can't accept it. Because you have to know, have to know that your father loved you, have to know that I never meant for it to end like this. I wanted what was best for you, my son, and it wasn't this.

I'm sorry for so much, Luke, you who were once my son. I'm so sorry I brought you to this, led you to this, damned you to this. Your eyes have lost their brightness because of me, your life lost its meaning, your soul lost its luster ... all because of my own mistakes and blunders that brought everything to ruin.

You were meant for a good life, Luke, a better life than the darkness can ever offer. You were destined for great things, things that will never happen now because of what I wanted, because of the path I chose for the both of us. Before you die, you'll know that -- and you'll hate me for that, even more than you hate me now, because it was I that damned you to this mockery of a life and doomed you to this fate from which you will never escape.

I never meant to damn you to this existence I've suffered through for all these long years, never meant for it to come to this. I wasn't thinking enough, only wanted to defeat the Emperor, to make things better ... but none of that matters, because it's you who will have to pay the price for your father's mistakes and your father's hubris. And you will pay it, my son, a thousand times over.

Force, I'm sorry.

And as I die, it's the weight of a thousand regrets that pulls me down into the darkness.

Finis (For Real This Time)