A Single Thread
Part I: A New Hope
Act VIII
Meditation had gotten easier over the years.
In his youth, it had been a task that he struggled with, not because it was hard to find the right connection to the Force, that had always come as instinctively as breathing, but because he had never been one for sitting still.
Outside in the rain with a broken droid in your hands? Not a meditation technique I taught you, I think.
Moving meditation had been his forte, much to Obi-Wan's chagrin, but his mind could float free and unrestrained while his hands were occupied with a malfunctioning droid or a speeder in need of tuning. Sometimes his hands would still and he'd zone out without noticing, but most of the time he would just completely finish the project without even a moment of conscious thought.
Over the years, Darth Vader had managed to find a degree of blankness that allowed him to meditate still and quiet, but he could not call it peace, that was forever unattainable to him.
In half-foggy memory, he suspected that he had known moments of it in the past, another lifetime ago. On short leave from the war and watching his wife sleep nestled in his arms, or listening to the sound of Leia's laughter as his little girl raced across a meadowy field on Alderaan chasing a decorative sphere that he'd levitated for her.
But even those dreams seemed beyond his reach today.
It had been several hours since Leia's escape aboard the Millennium Falcon, and he ventured that the rebels who'd come to her rescue would be nearing their base soon, and assuming that the tracking device placed on the ship worked, it was only a matter of time until Tarkin discovered their location.
Of course, he could have just asked Vader.
Yavin Four was a curious choice for a rebel base, full of symbolism that he doubted its leaders were even aware of. The Massassi Temples there held great power, and represented an era in the history of the Sith long past, but the jungle moon also held a more personal history for Darth Vader.
A lifetime ago, when he'd been just a foolish boy blinded by the lies of the Jedi, he'd fought Asajj Ventress there.
Come and play, Chosen One... come and die.
He had not thought of the dark witch in decades, not since her death, but perhaps it was to be expected today, a day when ghosts of a past life were free to roam about his quarters, haunting him.
Obi-Wan had been obsessed with bringing Ventress to justice, she'd killed many Jedi during her time serving Count Dooku, but his determination had been more personal than that. After all, Ventress had tortured him for weeks while the Order believed him dead, and, more importantly in Kenobi's eyes, she'd been charged with the task of assassinating his young, stubborn Padawan.
A foolish man, that Kenobi, driven by sentiment whether he could admit it or not.
Please, Anakin, don't do this! I don't want to fight you, Padawan.
Blades clashed furiously, over and over, the air shimmering with putrid heat from the lava boiling beneath the surface, and thick, acrid black smoke billowed just above their heads, filling their lungs and choking their throats.
Parry. Slash. Block. Cut.
Both pushed themselves to the limit, driven by ravenous emotion that threatened to consume them.
Anakin... Padawan... don't make me strike you down, I beg you!
It had been foolish of Obi-Wan to confront him that day, to track him down on Mufustar instead of seeking shelter to hide instead. Had he not been distracted and emotionally unstable during that fight, Vader would have finished his old Master off easily that day.
But Obi-Wan had known what buttons to push, as always.
Fourteen long years together had made his former Master an expert at dealing with a troublesome Padawan, even when said Padawan was no longer an apprentice but a Knight in his own right.
Your mother would be horrified to see what you've become. Qui-Gon should have left you as a slave on Tatooine.
Perhaps he should have, at that.
At least then fate would have been kinder. His mother would not have suffered the way she did, his wife would not be dead, and he would not be living a half-life, a broken shell of a man clinging to the physical world with all the wretched desperation of a withering shadowmoth.
But it had not been his destiny to deteriorate in the Force-forsaken desert, growing old and weak before his time.
No, his destiny was much greater.
What would Padme say if she could see you now?
For a fleeting moment, he could almost sense her presence on the outer edges of his perceptions, just out of sight, out of reach, but he knew it to be just another illusion his traitorous mind turned against him, as it had done often enough through the years.
And though he knew it to be a figment of his imagination, of the sobbing wretch within him that still cried out for her touch, her warmth, a part of him still sought her out, reaching blindly into the endless abyss.
Are you an angel?
It seemed so long ago, a hundred lifetimes, that she'd first walked into that dusty shop and into his life.
He'd known from the moment he first laid eyes on her that she was the only woman he'd ever love, that one day she would be his wife. At the time, he hadn't known how he knew this, just as he never knew how he knew things he shouldn't have been able to know, but after being taken to Coruscant, he'd come to realize it had been the Force speaking to him that day.
The Force had brought Padme to him, and it had taken her away again.
Daddy, how did Mama die?
As if to balance the scales, it had in turn given him a daughter, a brilliant and bright little girl who was the spitting image of the mother she would never know save in memories he shared with her.
And he had come close to losing Leia, as well.
To think that he might never have gotten to see that special smile she reserved solely for him, or listen to her mutter under her breath about some rival senator in the Imperial Senate, looking and sounding exactly like her mother in those moments, was a daunting thought.
He would have hated Obi-Wan for stealing his only child from him.
Did you really think that you could hide my own child from me and I would not know?
Ever since the day he's discovered he had a daughter, Vader had been waiting for the chance to throw yet another of Obi-Wan's failures in the old man's face and crush his spirit with the revelation that Vader had known about Leia since she was just a child. He had given it much thought over the years, imagining the look on his former Master's face, and he'd pondered what words to use in order to make the blow that much more painful.
Let Obi-Wan understand the faintest hint of what Vader had felt upon discovering that his own child had been hidden from him, by the man he'd once considered a father of all people.
Then my Padawan is truly dead, and I have no choice but to destroy what's taken his place.
Ever since clawing his way out of that molten pit, he had yearned for the chance to repay the living death that Obi-Wan had bestowed upon him in the fires of Mufustar.
It hadn't been what he expected.
For eighteen years, he had waited for that moment, for the day when he would defeat Obi-Wan Kenobi once and for all. He'd dreamed of it, hungered for it, and yet when it came he found he took none of the exhilaration in Kenobi's downfall that he'd assumed he would.
Instead, he felt as if he had been abandoned in the fathomless waters of Mon Calamari, the nearest spec of land out of sight and out of reach, desolate and quiet emptiness all around him, beneath him, enveloping him.
If he screamed, would anyone even hear?
There had been no body, which unsettled him deeply. He had seen hundreds of Jedi die in his lifetime, and killed just as many himself, but not once had a body ever disappeared like that.
In some ways, it simplified things, because what would he have done with the body on a battlestation?
Obi-Wan would have deserved a funeral pyre, but Vader was no Jedi and performing such a ritual was not something he would have deigned to do for the man who had put him into the suit he loathed in the first place.
Perhaps he could have taken the body to Mufustar and dumped it into the lava flows.
It would have been morbidly fitting, really, for Master and Padawan to be consumed by the same flames. He suspected that Obi-Wan, at least, would have seen the irony in that, the macabre symbolism of letting his body be burned up in the same fire that had burned away Anakin Skywalker forever.
Padawan, I know the odds are against us, we most likely won't make it through this battle. But if this is truly the end,then we'll face it together. Side by side.
Shaking his head in an attempt to clear out the whispers of memory, Darth Vader abandoned his attempts at meditation, since it was clear that he wouldn't be achieving much success today.
There were too many ghosts lingering over his shoulder.
Instead of freeing him as he'd expected it to do, Obi-Wan's death had opened a gateway to a life he'd forsaken, and the floodgates of memory were beginning to crack.
He needed Leia.
There was something soothing about his daughter's luminous presence, something deep and calm that kept the ghosts at bay. He could speak of her mother without the yawning black hole opening within his chest, he could recall stories of his youth in the Temple without malice or fury.
Leia was his anchor in the sea of his own dark despair.
And with Obi-Wan's death hanging over him like a black veil, ushering in demons and ghosts that he had thought to be long banished, he needed her now more than ever.
The sooner they reached Yavin, the better.