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I typed up the Vader stuff.
This is how it feels to be Anakin Skywalker, forever:
The first dawn of light in your universe brings pain.
The light burns you. It will always burn you. Part of you will
always lie upon black glass sand beside a lake of fire while flames
chew upon your flesh.
You can hear yourself breathing. It comes hard, and harsh,
and it scrapes nerves already raw, but you cannot stop it. You can
never stop it. You cannot even slow it down.
You don’t even have lungs anymore.
Mechanisms hardwired into your chest breathe for you. They
will pump oxygen into your bloodstream forever.
Lord Vader? Lord Vader, can you hear me?
And you can’t, not in the way you once did. Sensors in the
shell that prisons your head trickle meaning directly into your
brain.
You open your scorched-pale eyes; optical sensors integrate
light and shadow into a hideous simulacrum of the world around
you.
Or perhaps the simulacrum is perfect, and it is the world that
is hideous.
Padme? Are you here? Are you all right? you try to say, but
another voice speaks for you, out from the vocabulator that serves
you for burned-away lips and tongue and throat.
“Padme? Are you here? Are you all right?”
I’m very sorry, Lord Vader. I’m afraid she died. It seems in your
anger, you killed her.
This burns hotter than the lava had.
“No… no, it is not possible!”
You loved her. You will always love her. You could never will
her death.
Never.
But you remember…
You remember all of it.
You remember the dragon that you brought Vader forth
from your heart to slay. You remember the cold venom in Vader’s
blood. You remember the furnace of Vader’s fury, and the black
hatred of seizing her throat to silence her lying mouth-
And there is one blazing moment in which you finally under-
Stand that there was no dragon. That there was no Vader. That
there was only you. Only Anakin Skywalker.
That it was all you. Is you.
Only you.
You did it.
You killed her.
You killed her because, finally, when you could have saved her,
When you could have gone away with her, when you could have
been thinking about her, you were thinking about yourself…
It is in this blazing moment that you finally understand the
trap of the dark side, the final cruelty of the Sith –
Because now, your self is all you will ever have.
And you rage and scream and reach through the Force to
crush the shadow who has destroyed you, but you are so far less
now than what you were, you are more than half machine, you
are like a painter gone blind, a composer gone deaf, you can re-
member where the power was but the power you can touch is
only a memory, and so with all your world-destroying fury it is
only droids around you that implode, and equipment, and the
table on which you were strapped shatters, and in the end, you
cannot touch the shadow.
In the end, you do not even want to.
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