Anakin Skywalker had been a handsome and healthy youth before he'd been dismembered and set aflame by one master, only to be entombed in a grotesque cybernetic carcass by another.
Upon regaining consciousness after his near-death on Mustafar, the younger Sith, now known as Darth Vader, had awakened to a life of constant hellish torment. Every movement, breath, and feeling was punctuated by suffering.
But even Vader had never been fully inured to it. He felt pain like any other man. And now, Kenobi had made him suffer once again.
What remained of Vader's torso looked stark white instead of ashen gray against the sterile walls of the surgical suite. But the snow-white surface belied the fiery red pain lighting up what nerves remained beneath the skin. The pain would wash over him whenever his meditative concentration broke; it felt as if the pumps circulating blood in his thoracic cavity might stop altogether; it was like drowning despite the air forced into his ruined lungs. He had tried to let go and slip away before, but something always pulled him back, and, to his disappointment, he never found oblivion.
Each brush with death sent him back to this private medicalized hell, where he would long to relive the feeling of dying, because then, at last, it would all be at an end.
This was no different.
His encounter with Obi-Wan had almost finished what the old Jedi had started all those years ago on Mustafar.
But it was not to be.
His body was not the only thing that had suffered. His bond with his Obi-Wan had torn open like the wounds in his body, and he felt his own anger bleeding senselessly into it like a pitcher leaking into the ocean.
No matter how much he poured out, it seemed to make no difference. Obi-Wan had turned his back on him again, leaving him once again to die on a deserted rock.
But he did not die. The Force willed that he lived. His master willed that he lived. If one could call this living. But no. This would be to his advantage. It was the Sith way. This pain. This hate. It would fuel him. It would drive him. Empowering him with pure and utter rage.
The medical droids surrounded him, buzzing like flies picking at the wounds in his open flesh and circuitry. The hum of their machinery was drowned out by the grating of his broken respirator. He did not hear any of this. The burning, the cutting, the tearing all clawed for his attention, but Vader ruthlessly grabbed hold of them, adorning himself with them like a cassock as he communed with the Dark Side.
His meditation had nothing to do with comfort.
No.
Its only purpose was control.
Control the pain.
Control the rage.
Control his destiny.
Sidious would not be pleased. But that was a concern for later. For now, the Emperor would let him heal, even if it was just so he could later punish his pet all the more for his failure.
Vader sank into the agony, blanketing himself in it, his mind oblivious to all but the Darkness. Hours passed as the droids continued to work, their approach more reminiscent of an abattoir than of a surgery. And yet, Vader abided. Unflinching. Nestled in excruciation.
Pain was his homeostasis. However, the sudden warmth pressing his shoulder was not.
The instant he felt it, the Darkness lashed out defensively. Unsuspecting droids were sent smashing into the chamber walls, instruments crashing after them. Vader's eyes flew open. He would kill whoever had dared to touch him.
His eyes darted around the room, the vital monitors screaming warnings at his rapid heart rate and elevated respiration. Even without the aid of his HUD, the Sith Lord could see that he was alone. And yet…the pressure remained. A hallucination, perhaps? The fruit of his delirious brain?
The half-broken droids obediently but stiffly tottered to their feet and set about fixing the damage inflicted by his wrath. He flexed the muscle, attempting to make the sensation disappear, but it stubbornly remained as tactile as the table beneath him. It was unlike the itching of his phantom limbs, unlike the burning. He had sensed no disturbance in the Force to suggest the presence of another being.
It was inexplicable.
Vader uneasily quieted himself. Even so, he found it difficult to meditate with the persistent sensation. Pain was trivial. But this…feeling…it was as foreign as sunlight on his skin. It persisted throughout the repair process and stayed with him, until, at last, the droids transferred him into the warm embrace of the bacta tank.
Only then did the pressure relent, and, just as suddenly as it had appeared, it was gone.
~0~
The strange pressure did not return until an excursion suppressing rebels on the Outer Rim had seen his respirator damaged, allowing pathogens to infect his ruined lungs. The infection had spread quickly, leaving him to battle lobar pneumonia.
The Sith Lord was incensed by the fevered shaking coursing through his body. The droids had intubated him with a secondary ventilator to keep his airways open and draw out the fluid that threatened to drown him. This was a process that was normally accomplished under sedation but one which Vader had endured while fully conscious. With the ventilator in place, every involuntary movement aggravated his normal pains and added to them.
There was little else he could do. Until they reached Mustafar, he could not leave his quarters and was left soaking in the small bacta tank aboard The Executor.
As he drifted, once more immersing his mind in the Darkness, Vader gradually became aware of the same sensation of pressure that had visited him before. Wracked as he was, the feeling was almost unnoticeable at first. But as he turned his attention toward it, he became aware of its heavy warmth and weight, pushing steadily on the place where his shoulder met his chest.
He lashed out, summoning the Darkness to repel the sensation, if, indeed, it was the work of another force user. His own use of the Force was met with no resistance, and the pillar of energy merely passed through the pressure like sand through a sieve. When he opened his eyes, he found, as before, that he was alone. But still, the feeling remained.
Warily, Vader reached out through the Force, searching for a being, an entity, a presence, anything in the fluid or the room beyond…But, again, he found nothing.
Impatiently, he widened his mind, casting the Dark Side around him, stretching out into the blackness of space. He could sense the heartbeats of his crew, the humming of the ship's engines, and all the thousands of little motions of man and machine. Still, he could not explain the cause of the feeling. It seemed tangible…but gentle. Maybe it was nothing but his own lapsing sanity, so starved for humanity that he had created his own tactile hallucination.
Though Vader rarely slept, he eventually lapsed into unconsciousness, mind still puzzling over the strange sensation that had yet to leave him.
~0~
Vader's infection worsened over the following days and the Sith Lord's mind became consumed in black and delirious rage. He became convinced that the fluid sloshing in his chest was a horde of flies crawling beneath his ribs. It took nearly a dozen reinforced droids to restrain and prevent him from tearing open his own torso. The same droids filled him with antibiotics and lowered the temperature of the bacta tank to the point that a normal man would have died of hypothermia. Despite their efforts, the Sith Lord failed to improve.
Days passed with no change in Vader's condition.
On the fourth night, Vader became inexplicably agitated, groaning and twisting in his harness. There was no discernible reason for the behavior, but, after several hours of this agitation, the Sith Lord's fever finally broke. As his core temperature stabilized, Vader's lucidity returned to him gradually, and he slowly became aware once more of the pressure on his torso. Only this time, the pressure was deliberate and came in repetitive waves that rippled from his ribs up to his shoulders. Vader could do nothing but submit to the phantom ministrations; in such a state of exhaustion, he did not have the will to fight.
At first, he conjured images of a brunette beauty, massaging away his wounds. But, no. Her hands had been too frail, too delicate. It was then that he pictured another face at the edge of his vision, but before he could focus on it, the dreamlike quality faded away.
As Vader gradually hovered on the edge of the waking world, he heard a mechanical voice inform him that not only had his blood-oxygen level improved, but the infection was clearing his lungs at a rapid rate.
When he once again lost consciousness, it was to fall into the first restful sleep cycle he had experienced in months.
~0~
The next time Vader felt the ghostly hands was when he found himself half-conscious, immobilized under a pile of rubble. A terrorist cell had detonated an incendiary device, causing a building collapse. The explosion damaged the servos in his neck, leaving him unable to move.
Vader's men were working to dig him out. However, their efforts caused the rubble to shift around him, jostling and grinding the pieces of his broken bionic spine. As he bit back a scream of pain, Vader felt a weight settle on his cheek. Distantly, the Sith Lord registered that the phantoms had returned. Though it still made him uneasy, the sensation did not seem malevolent; if the hands had meant to harm, they would have done so by now.
The weight stayed on his face for several moments, accompanied by a motion that felt like a thumb caressing his cheekbone. He fought to breathe, focusing on the rhythm of the feeling of the ghostly fingers as they stroked his face. The Sith flinched as the weight moved from cupping his cheek and shifted to his skull.
When he felt two palms cradle his naked scalp, stabilizing his fragile spine, Vader reluctantly accepted and entrusted himself to the benevolent presence. The steadying touch remained for hours, until, at last, the medical droids strapped and stabilized him on a gurney that carried him back to the hellish medical facilities.
~0~
In the beginning, the touches had been hesitant. Tentative. But they had grown bolder. Over the years, the ghostly hands became familiar companions. When the last vestiges of his humanity would cry out in pain, the ghostly hands would appear to soothe his hurts.
They had held shut his wounds, massaged the aching stumps of his limbs, and touched him with a gentleness that had become foreign. The sensations appeared in moments of great distress, and, over time, Vader became accustomed to their comfort.
It seemed such a simple thing. But in his deepest and most private thoughts, the Sith believed the phantom touches kept him sane. Vader was not the first man to be entombed in a cybernetic suit. Deprived of human contact, many others had gone mad inside such claustrophobic tombs.
Though he would deny it, he was still ultimately made of the flesh and blood that had once been called Anakin Skywalker. Hallucination or not, without the phantom touches, Vader would not have kept his sanity.
He never knew the nature of the phantasm, whether it was a projection of his own broken subconscious or some benevolent deity. All Vader knew was that he held the Presence close to his black heart, like a hoarded treasure. It was the one thing not even Sidious knew. The one indulgence he allowed himself. He did not care if it subdued the sacred rage that fueled the Sith. He was too tired. Too sick. Too old.
For ten years, he could reach out into the Force, calling upon the Presence.
But then, Luke Skywalker appeared. And in Vader's hour of greatest need, the Presence vanished just as mysteriously as it had appeared.
It was as though it, too, had finally turned against him.
Vader cried out for it ceaselessly. But it seemed deaf to his despair.
It was not until Anakin Skywalker lay dying, that he once more felt the familiar weight of the Presence. As his eyes fell shut, its ethereal embrace enveloped him to soothe the burned trunk of his flesh beneath the damaged armor, cradling his recumbent form with all the tenderness of a loving mother.
A sigh of relief guttered out of the stricken man's lungs, and so with it went his tortured spirit.
IMPORTANT; PLEASE READ! I will be updating this story to flesh this out and give more explanation, but please give me your thoughts in the reviews on who the Presence is/should be. Please also feel free to PM me with your ideas!