A/N: It's kind of weird how the muses work sometimes :) Four years ago I happened to read a hilarious oneshot from BloodyMary over at AO3, titled "In Which Palpatine Suffers a Ghost Infestation," wherein Palpatine is heckled for his fashion choices by his deceased fellow Nubians, Padme included. I was immediately delighted by the idea of Padme haunting Palpatine and irritating the hell out of him for decades.
When I actually sat down to write the fic, though, a second inspiration tangled itself into things, which is Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy. If you're not familiar with it, the Divine Comedy is a three-part epic poem from the Italian Renaissance. Seeing that Dante has lost his righteous way in life, his beloved Beatrice-who has already died-takes pity on him and sends a mentor to guide him through hell (Inferno) and up the mountain of Purgatory (Purgatorio), and finally brings him herself into heaven (Paradiso).
Result: this is most definitely not a humor fic.
This will most likely have 12 chapters (most of which will be relatively short). Roughly 10 are already written, but I'll be posting them slowly in hopes of finishing the end in time :)
"Midway upon the journey of our life, I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost."
Dante's Inferno, Canto I
He recalls having a governess, briefly, in his nearly-forgotten childhood—a stupid woman who'd believed passionately and superstitiously in luck. Bad luck, according to her, could be caused by practically anything: breaking mirrors, stepping on a nuna's tail, watching the chrono when it ticked to 00:00 at night, and above all else the number thirteen. Even at five years old he'd known her for a fool.
Ironic, then, that thirteen is precisely the number of years he has been sowing the seeds of corruption in his apprentice-to-be—or rather his apprentice-to-have-been.
What remains of Anakin Skywalker—and by all the Sith who've ever stalked this galaxy, it isn't much—lies like so much overdone steak in the medical capsule, monitors faltering around him, droids working in a frenzied and ultimately useless effort to stabilize a patient who literally has no leg to stand on. Nothing but his new master's forty-five years of cunning in the ways and sorceries of the Dark Side has preserved him long enough to reach the surgical center. Even that cannot sustain such total wreckage much longer. Too weak to risk anesthesia, too damaged to delay operating; the stress of surgery will shortly finish the job Kenobi began.
He ought to have just shoved the whole mess off the bank where he found it, probably, rather than keep burning through credits staving off the inevitable, but the thought boils his blood. Thirteen years of scheming, of painstaking dissembling, of pruning and poisoning and dreaming and grooming—and then just when he's finally begun to see some return on that investment, this! no, he isn't about to let this lump of charcoal off the hook while there's even the slightest chance of keeping it alive enough to be useful…but what more can he do?
He sinks himself in the Force again, re-checking, re-examining, trying to belay the failing life. But the anchors are crumbling. The will to live is succumbing, punished past endurance by scalpels and antiseptics and scrubbers and sponges and scorching. Minutes more at most, and—
—a dim light breaks through the dark storm of death and despair. Unlooked for; unforeseen. A presence, fainter and weaker than the feeblest Jedi youngling, but there nonetheless; and slowly, stubbornly, it takes form.
What in all the eternal Sith hells is she doing here?
He stares in blunt surprise, waiting for this fluke of probability to evaporate—she should not be capable of such a thing for the merest instant—but she does not yield to the laws of the universe. Against every one of them she struggles forward, a hand flung out towards the failing presence of her lover. "Ani! Ani, no! Do you hear me? No!"
He sneers at her. "You little fool, he's—"
Long past hearing anyone, he is about to say, but at that instant comes the end. Like so much cotton filament the chains he has woven to bind Vader's life to his torched body snap, and the spirit plunges away—down, down—a one-way dive to death—she lunges after him in a desperate bid, but she'll only fall with him—he knew it was inevitable, and still his teeth grind in helpless rage—
A great cry breaks from her, and then they stop. The boy still lives, tethered now by her will alone. Thin, but silken-strong. Perhaps her appearance here is not such a fluke after all. Perhaps there is some small nugget of real power in the woman—though she's only bought a little more time. If the strain was too much for a Sith Master, it is surely too much for her, frail creature that she is.
"Ani." It's barely even a gasp. "Anakin, don't!"
As if there's anything of her precious Anakin left to hear her. "You cannot save him."
Her frantic gaze flashes to him, her whole being shuddering with the effort of what she is trying to do. Doesn't she know this is going to kill her?
"Help me! You want him alive, don't you? Help me save him!"
"Save what, my dear?" He casts a contemptuous eye over the wreckage she clutches as if it were the prize of a thousand lifetimes. "Let go, Senator, before you die with him."
His barely-anointed apprentice is a lost cause…but that infant she is carrying is not, even if the idea of spending another two decades waiting for it to grow up into something useful makes him want to dismember things. An infant apprentice is better than none, however, so he casts a claw towards her, false mercy, to pry her away from her perishing mate—
There is a terrible cry, a burst of light, hammering him backward—and then the third impossible thing in as many minutes happens.
The whole of Padmé Amidala empties herself outward—all strength, all hope, all will, all soul, all spirit—into what is left of Anakin Skywalker.
He hears the sudden burst of the monitors as vital signs begin to tick upward. He hears a heartbeat, two, three, ten—the rasp of the temporary respirator steadies—and in the Force, a mighty presence jump-starts, clawing at the feeble light in reflexive panic. Greedily he springs in, guides that frantic grasping touch to the strength of the Dark, shows him how to channel strength from the very agony wracking him. For a breathless moment there is desperate flailing—and then he catches it. The Dark Side surges, bellows, like killing blood in the veins, and just like that the pendulum has swung.
Darth Vader lives.
"Anakin…"
She is still somehow here, nothing left now but a gasping, drowning shade. He stares at her, momentarily silenced.
He could even stop the ones he loved from dying.
A power his old master had often claimed, but never proven, much less taught—a power that has eluded all his focus and experimentation and study—and this, this nonentity of a being, this feeble girl, has bested them both—!
He'd dearly love to kill her himself for that, even if she did only manage to do what he wanted. Unfortunately, he'll have to settle for whatever spite he can fit into the next few seconds. "Another moment and he might have escaped me. How kind of you to give him back…and at such expense."
"Anakin…" She tries to touch him; her hand of smoke and mist evaporates in the whirlwind of his rage and torment, a storm no feeble sentiments can penetrate. Not now, and not ever. "Ani, come back. I love you…"
"And he loved you, my dear. Oh, how he loved you." He leers. "What will he say, do you imagine, when he knows he has killed you?"
"Ani," she whimpers. Her arm cradles her full bully.
He tsks like that old governess used to do. "And the sweet little child too." The smile twists his lips in a spasm of pleasure. "How dreadful."
She is faltering badly now—but for a split second she steadies and flashes fire behind her veil of tears. "You haven't won," she whispers. "He isn't yours. There is still—good in him—I know—there is still…"
A gale of laughter seizes him—giddy victory laughter, as death seizes her. "My poor girl. Do give my regards to the Jedi when you see them."
Farewell, Padmé Amidala.
tbc