Work Text:
Darth Vader lays his helmeted forehead on the floor of the Council Chamber, his cape spreading in dark waves across the fern pattern like wings of a fallen bird of prey.
He could not abase himself further.
”Use my knowledge,” he pleads. “I beg you.”
The Force is frozen between the Sith Lord and the Jedi Masters, tilted on the edge of fate like a starpilot the moment before the torpedo strikes.
"Why to us you turn, mmmh?"
“Indeed,” Mace Windu echoes, his insufferable haughtiness unchanged even thirty-three years in the past and twenty-one years dead at Vader and Sidious’ hands. “Why not kill this Sith Lord yourself?”
“I do not dare face him,” Vader says through clenched teeth. “He always knew me better than I ever knew myself.”
“I thought a Sith would want to claim his own revenge,” Shaak Ti said.
“Revenge is not what I seek.”
The torpedo finally hits, and it’s the dull clack of a gimer stick against the floor.
“If not revenge, what is it you want, mmmh? Selfless, a Sith is not. Something for you in this there is.”
Yoda’s voice is sharp, sharper than Vader remembered it, and it cuts right through all the layers of carefully constructed darkness to strike at the tender pulp underneath. It rakes at the hole that used to house the heart that burned to ashes on the shores of a river of fire, and it is agonizing, but Vader knows that there is freedom to be found in that pain.
And he has been in chains for so long.
“The life of my son.”
Not a single intake of harsh breath breaks the silence of the Council Chamber, but the surprise of the Masters echoes clear in the Force — and the Force opens, blooming in white and gold.
Yoda harrumphs. When he speaks there is no bite in his words, only pity.
No, worse than pity.
Compassion.
“And what help to defeat this Sith will you give us in return, mmh?”
Vader’s shoulders drop in relief, and for the first time in years he almost feels like he can breathe.
“Anything,” he says.
*
Vader could not have timed it better.
Master Dooku — and is that a strange thought — is distraught at the news; he has grown close to Sheev Palpatine of Naboo, a clever man jaded enough to challenge him on politics and engage him in duels of wits over dinner.
But Vader’s claims allow Dooku to connect the dots and see the web that the poisonous spider he has learned to call friend has laid out for them.
After that, there is no doubt that the newly elected Supreme Chancellor is, indeed, a Dark Lord of the Sith.
Dooku pretends to leave the Order and, when the time comes, records Darth Sidious’ recruiting speech. The evidence he gathers is damning enough to appease even the most skeptical members of the Senate when the truth will be revealed.
He kneels before the Sith, and pledges himself to his teachings, bowing his head when Sidious bestows upon him the moniker of Darth Tyranus.
When Sidious bids him to rise, Dooku does it — and ignites his lightsaber in one smooth flash of green.
Sidious’ head rolls to the floor, empty eyes staring in disbelief at the end of the Sith.
*
Again, Vader could not have timed it better.
Qui-Gon Jinn is still dead — he was an unknown quantity, after all, and Vader doesn’t want to risk him getting between Skywalker and Padmé, thus preventing Luke from being born — and a grieving, newly knighted Obi-Wan Kenobi still takes a young Anakin Skywalker as his Padawan learner.
*
The Jedi Order spares no expenses for Vader’s surgeries.
His limbs will never grow back, his skin will never completely mend, his lungs will never breathe again on their own, but none of it matters when compared to what he gets back instead.
He comes out of the anesthesia on a soft bed, his still dizzy mind overwhelmed by the senses that had been lost to him for twenty-one years — the iatric smell of the ward, the cool draft of conditioned air.
Most of all, he is awed at the ocher and white of the ceiling. He had forgotten that the world came in colors other than red.
“Easy,” Vokara Che says, and it’s the first unfiltered voice he has heard in two decades.
He is too astounded to even weep.
Master Che is just as good a healer as he remembers: she checks his vitals, orders him to rest, and then leaves him alone to allow him to come to terms with himself.
The man who stares back at him from the mirror looks nothing like a Sith Lord.
Tufts of sparse, graying hair cover grafts of undamaged skin, framing a face marred by blotchy patches of scar tissue on the left side, across the skull and on one cheek; the mouth, thin and bloodless, is half covered by the respirator he can never give up.
He looks into his own eyes.
The red-rimmed blue irises that stare back at him are those of a stranger.
No one who lives knows this man, him least of all.
Vader falls to his metal knees, weeping hot tears on his cold metal hands.
*
A Sith Lord roaming the Halls of the Jedi Temple was bound to garner a few raised eyebrows. A scarred, maimed war veteran appearing in the Temple right after the Sith have been found and destroyed is easily explained as a Shadow returning victorious from his undercover work in the furthest recesses of Wild Space.
What Vader feels as he dons the Jedi uniform for the first time in years sits somewhere between blasphemy and homecoming. He rejects the browns and blacks he wore when he brought down fire and blood on the Temple, choosing beiges and creams instead. Still, it takes him months to be able to wear it without wanting to rip his own skin off.
*
The Council treats him with the kindness one would show to a starved and beaten akk: they feed him, they clothe him, they care for him, but they don’t trust him further than they can throw him.
Vader wouldn’t have it any other way.
Only Master Yoda shows him something more than detached grace, but Vader rebuffs his every attempt at a closer relationship. He doesn’t want friends, he doesn’t want connections. He doesn’t want to feel grateful to that green frog.
Most of all, he doesn’t want to be known.
Even Dooku seeks him out: knowing what he had almost become, the old Master wants to understand what it takes to start down the path of self destruction. Vader laughs in his face.
“There is no man alive I wish to talk to less than you, Dooku.”
Dooku’s face is a wax mask as he leaves, bitter and wistful, and Vader swallows back his guilt.
Later, when he sees him walking through the Temple gardens in the company of no other than a young and laughing Obi-Wan Kenobi, he wishes he had killed him instead.
*
In the long run, it is not his loneliness that makes life in the Temple unbearable. It’s the looks of unabashed admiration he gets from wide-eyed Younglings, horrified and impressed and awed at the extent of his scars, which clearly qualify him as a mysterious unsung hero.
The only comfort he can find is the knowledge that they are all way too young to be the Younglings he personally killed.
Until he realizes he probably killed them as teens.
*
When Mon Mothma, Chancellor of the Republic, hosts a celebration to honor the memory of Qui-Gon Jinn and all the Jedi that helped defeat the Sith, Mace Windu is adamant.
“You and Kenobi are the most conspicuous personalities of our fight against the Sith,” he says over stapled fingers. “I don’t want a Temple in uproar and the Jedi gossip mill in full swing when everyone tries to divine why the newly minted Knight is there, but the mysterious scarred Shadow no one really knows is not. You will be at the celebration, and, for Force’ sake, you will stop moping. Were you a Sith Lord or some moody teenager?”
So Darth Vader finds himself clad in silk and sipping cocktails in a corner of the Senate ballroom, trying not to look sullen while everyone around him dances and shoots him curious — or pitying — looks.
And then, all of a sudden, a radiant shine of red and gold at the opposite end of the hall has his cardiac pump hammering in his chest with something he thought he had forgotten the name for.
He crosses the floor like a ghost, sliding among the dancing couples like a magnet drawn towards his personal eternal true north.
He plays phrases in his head, discarding all of them at once, and finds an ounce of dark humor in thinking he’s grateful that he no longer has his hands, so that he is at least spared the awkwardness of sweating palms.
When he finally reaches her, he is feeling again like a nineteen year old virgin on his first wedding night. But when Padmé turns her head, he can only wish he were dead.
How come he didn’t think of that?
That is not his wife looking at him with warm chestnut eyes.
It is a child.
She won’t be the Padmé he has married for ten more years, and, even then, she will never be her.
If the Force is merciful, this girl will give her love to the only man Vader still hates.
“Master Jedi, is everything alright?” Padmé asks, with nothing but kindness on her beautiful face.
“Forgive me, Your Highness,” he says, unable to look at the child he loved, at the child he killed, at the child whose forgiveness he can never beg. “I mistook you for somebody else.”
*
In the following weeks, Vader does his best to avoid the boy that will grow up to live the life he has lost.
As always, the Force finds a way to catch up to him against his will.
He is utterly absorbed in his latest project when a chirpy voice makes him flinch.
“Sir, Master Ben, can I take a look at your vocabulator? Your voice was kind of funny when you arrived, Sir, I mean, Master, I’m sorry but it’s true, even Master Obi-Wan said it was creepy, and he doesn't scare easily, he killed a Sith, you know? but now it’s so wizard, it feels like a real voice, and I really want to learn how you did it, you know, I want to give Threepio a better voice — he’s a droid I made for my mum, but he is always so fussy, and I thought, if I can give him a better voice maybe he won’t annoy mum so much, I don’t want mum to be annoyed. Can I, Master? Please?”
Vader blinks, dazed by the deluge of words, then sighs. His reputation as a mechanic is already going around the Temple; he should have expected it to reach young Skywalker’s ears. He wants to shoo the prying padawan away, but something in the child’s eyes stops him.
Luke must have looked a lot like him when he was this young.
He sighs again at his old, foolish self.
“Sit down, young one.”
Anakin’s eyes light up with childish enthusiasm, and he plops down on the floor beside Vader. “What are you working on, Master Ben? Master Lars? What should I call you, Master?”
“Just Ben is fine,” Vader says, holding out to Anakin the power cell he was tinkering with. “It’s a crystal chamber prototype. I am trying to create a chamber that won’t shatter when hit by a blaster bolt. It is dangerous for a Jedi to lose their weapon, and it's a waste of kyber.”
Anakin is listening to him wide eyed. “Is this why you lost your legs, Master Ben? Because someone broke your lightsaber?”
The pain he expected doesn’t come, and only a grimace crops up on his face. The golden hues of the Force have turned Mustafar into a bad dream, a memory that has finally scarred.
Anakin apparently realizes his faux step. He blushes, stammering an apology.
“No apology needed, young one,” Vader says, and finds he can smile. “I lost my legs because I disobeyed my Master.”
Anakin’s terror freezes the Force.
“Your Master did this to you?” the former slave whispers. “To punish you? Your Jedi Master?”
It is not the blue of Obi-Wan's saber cutting him down that flashes in his mind. It's the memory of another pain, of another Master hurting him with glee and contempt where Obi-Wan had only hurt him with love and despair.
He makes himself laugh, and he is surprised he remembers how it’s done.
“No, child, no. How could you even think that? I lost my legs because he told me not to jump and I did it anyway. He was right. I shouldn’t have jumped.”
Anakin’s laugh comes tremulously, but then he wrinkles his nose and looks at Vader as if he were a foolish five year old.
“I would never not listen to my Master if he told me not to jump,” he says with the ironclad certainty of childhood.
Vader can’t help but chuckle.
“I wouldn’t be so sure, young one.”
“Well, you’re wrong. I always listen to my Master because he's always right. He killed a Sith, you know? He is the best Jedi ever,” Anakin declares, chest swollen with pride like a puffer pig.
The pain hits Vader then, when he least expects it. For all those years he had thought that slavery had killed all the innocence in Anakin Skywalker, but he can see now how wrong he was: his mother’s love had shielded the best part of him from the horrors of the world.
It had been Palpatine all along.
And he had allowed him to.
“You are right,” he manages to say. “You should always listen to Master Kenobi, young Anakin. He has your best interest at heart.”
Twilight finds them together, tinkering on Vader’s vocabulator; Obi-Wan Kenobi finds them one hour later, when he barges into the droid maintenance center in search of his wayward charge.
Vader hasn’t heard him come in, absorbed as he is in his work. It’s only when Obi-Wan hums that he lifts up his head, finding himself staring into a puzzled, alarmed frown.
Anakin is asleep by now, curled at Vader’s side, a contented smile on his face.
“What — what’s going on here?” Obi-Wan stammers.
Vader is taken aback at this awkward, suspicious version of his former Master, but he knows how to hide it.
“Your padawan came to me about his droid.”
Obi-Wan’s face relaxes, just a bit.
“Thank you for sharing your knowledge with him, Master,” the young knight says with a deferential bow — and that, being treated with deference by Obi-Wan Kenobi, is probably the most surreal thing that has ever happened to Vader. It makes him feel like a fraud.
He doesn’t know how to reply; anything he can says will either fall off the mark or be unjustly cruel.
“Anytime,” he says with a shrug, and a shroud of sadness veils his shoulders as he watches them leave, the young man that has yet to grow into himself and the kind hearted child asleep in his arms.
That night, he dreams of another child’s huge blue eyes and of her silka beads braid.
*
Predictably, it is Obi-Wan Kenobi who divines the truth.
Vader has sensed it coming for weeks, he has felt Obi-Wan’s puzzled gaze on his back, has seen how more protective of Anakin he is when Vader is around — and that is saying something, given he guards his padawan like a mother hen anyway.
“You are Anakin, aren’t you?” he asks one day, without preamble.
“What gave me away?” Vader asks back. He knows there is no denying it.
Obi-Wan’s eyes are clear, razor sharp, but a shadow falls on them, and his shoulders slump. His heartbreak crunches the vestiges of baby fat on his youthful face.
“The way you frown when you tinker,” Obi-Wan says. “And the Force. I don’t think I could ever mistake Anakin in the Force."
Vader sighs, and returns working on the motor module he is building for Threepio; little Ani has done a great job with the vocabulator, but this is quite beyond the child’s skills.
They remain in painful silence until Obi-Wan speaks again.
“How did you Fall?”
This has Vader’s head jerk up.
“How do you know?”
Obi-Wan looks away, gaze shadowed, mouth downturned.
“I had dreams,” he murmurs. “I saw you in the flames, and your blood was on my hands. And your eyes...” He swallows, and Vader can sense how the words tear him apart. “You had Darth Maul’s eyes.”
Vader sighs, drops the hydrospanner on the bench.
“It doesn’t matter,” he says. “It won’t happen again.”
“It matters to me,” Obi-Wan snaps back, the Negotiator’s glare throwing daggers at him. “Anakin is my Padawan. My responsibility.”
Vader thinks of brown curls, of bare shoulders bathed in moonlight.
Of Obi-Wan’s love, screamed way too late.
“Palpatine groomed me to become his apprentice since I was ten,” he says wearily. “It will not happen again. He is dead, and your Padawan's heart is in the right place.”
Obi-Wan’s hands are trembling in his lap. “And I allowed that?”
“There was nothing you could have done.”
Obi-Wan nods slowly, tufts of copper hair trembling in the twilight. It is clear he doesn’t believe him.
Has he really ever been so young?
“Anakin told me what you said,” he adds, and swallows. “Did I… did I do this to you?”
Obi-Wan's agony lances through the Force, taking Vader’s breath away. He knows that Obi-Wan came to love him, eventually, but he never thought it had begun so early, so deeply.
Vader looks down at his hands.
“No” he says, and it rings true. “I made you do this. And even if you had, I did deserve it.”
Obi-Wan’s heartbeat thumps in the Force. Vader is about to speak, to absolve him again and once and for all, when Obi-Wan does something that stops his breath in his throat.
He reaches out and entwines their hands, warming the cold metal with his soft flesh.
"I am sorry,” Obi-Wan says, his voice trembling. “I am sorry… Anakin.”
Vader makes himself meet his eyes.
“As am I, Master,” he replies.
The silence is so painful that they both know it can’t last long. Vader knows what Obi-Wan needs to say but won’t, so he speaks in his stead.
“I will not taint your bond with the ashes of what once was. Come morning, I will leave the Temple and never return.”
“No!” Obi-Wan drops to the floor, kneeling at Vader’s feet with Vader’s hands still clutched in his trembling hold. “Please. Stay. Help me guide him. Help me save him.”
“You don’t need my help. No one can save him but himself.”
“But I —”
“Obi-Wan Kenobi, you are the best Master he could have ever asked for. Do what you would have done, and it will all go for the best.”
He disentangles himself from the young Knight’s hold and gets up to leave, but when he’s almost at the door, Obi-Wan speaks.
“What will you do? Where will you go?”
“There is one thing I still have to set right,” Vader says. Then he realizes there is something that Obi-Wan has to set right, too. “Obi-Wan. There is one thing you can do for him, something my Master did only when it was too late.”
“Anything,” Obi-Wan murmurs. “I would do anything for him.”
“When the moment comes, tell him.”
Confusion fills the young Knight’s grief stricken eyes.
“Tell him what?”
“You will know.” Vader has to look away. “He will know it already, but he needs to hear you say it. It would have changed nothing in the end, but it would have meant the world to me. Tell him, Obi-Wan.”
*
And in the end, there is no place like the desert for the lost and forsaken.
The plastered hovel built on an outcrop of rocks that overlooks the Dune Sea is the perfect dwelling for a hermit, and Vader settles into the rhythm of binary sunset and morning dew as easily as if he never left.
Beru and her mother come by sometimes, offering mushrooms and news in exchange for blue milk from Vader’s bantha herd. It is Beru who brings him the news of the wedding, along with an invite he promptly declines, claiming asthma and sore stumps.
After all, he is an old, broken man. There is no place for him in a new bride’s life.
When the wedding has passed and the second wife of Owen Lars has come to live at her husband’s farm, Vader adds a new endeavor to his well oiled routine.
There is a hidden place, not far from his home, nestled in the shadows between the rocks. From there, he watches over her from afar.
This time, he will not fail.
*
He should have known that Shmi Skywalker would never remain idle at the news of an old hermit living alone at the edges of the Dune Sea.
She comes one day at sunrise with the morning dew, and just as gentle and sweet.
The sight of her might well undo him.
He manages to invite her in to share what meager breakfast he has.
Then he panics a little when he realizes he has flavored his pallie jam according to her secret recipe.
“This tastes just like my mother’s jam,” she says with a hint of genuine surprise. “Do you have family on
She had never told him where she came from.
Slaves never speak of the freedom they have lost — most of all to their indentured children.
This, more than anything else, drives home the point that she is finally, completely free.
They make some small talk about his herd and her husband’s farm before she mentions the reason for her visit. Owen is sick, and their medical droid has a busted power converter, and that’s beyond her ability to repair.
He follows her home with fear gnawing at his gut.
It’s only because of some miracle from the Force that he can think straight while he works on the droid with her at his side to help.
She is good at it, more than he ever realized.
“I know my way around droids a little,” she says at his surprised frown. “My son had a knack for this kind of thing, he taught me some.”
“Where is he now?” Vader asks, just to be kind.
Her smile is enough to repay him for two lifetimes of grief.
"With the Jedi,” she says. “Free.”
*
Vader has been many things in his life — slave, padawan, knight, traitor, Sith, savior, time traveler, exile, hermit — but at his core, he realizes, he is only one thing.
He is Anakin Skywalker, and Anakin Skywalker has always been drawn to love like a river to the sea.
And Shmi Skywalker has oceans to give.
*
It begins harmlessly enough — a visit to the homestead, an exchange of blue milk, recruiting her to help with the bantha calves.
*
Eventually it becomes some kind of rite for the two of them, to sit on Vader's porch and watch the suns set. She talks of her life, and he of his projects. It’s a gift he doesn’t deserve, to get to know his mother’s life and her happiness, and he tries to give back what he can. He knows she is looking for Anakin in his words, for the strange similarities this old man seems to share with her son, and he ends up telling her more than he should. Soon, he begins to tell tales of the adventures of his youth. He files off the serial numbers, but it doesn’t take her long to figure out what he was.
And yet, she never asks of the child she gave up to the Order.
She really wants Anakin to let her go.
*
Then, one day, it all falls apart.
In retrospect, it was a rookie mistake.
Cliegg is complaining over dinner about his ailments and the bad knee that keeps getting worse.
“I despise getting old,” he grumbles into his glass.
“Still better than the alternative,” Owen tries to jest with fond concern in his gaze.
Cliegg huffs out a laugh, but doesn’t relent. “I don’t recognize myself in the mirror. I hate this change.”
Shmi smiles from above her bowl.
“Cliegg, you can’t stop the change —”
“— anymore than you can stop the suns from setting,” Vader finishes with a smile that melts away as he realizes what he has done, as he sees the shock in her eyes.
*
Shmi never asks, but Vader sees the edge in her smile, the pool of sadness that deepens and widens every time her gaze sets upon him, swallowing up all her joy.
He sees in her the same heartbreak he has seen on Obi-Wan’s face.
She doesn’t know that this is theoretically possible in the Force, not like Obi-Wan did, but the heart of a mother just knows what the mind can’t begin to accept.
He considers leaving Tatooine, but he cannot abandon her to her fate of death.
So he starts making excuses.
He stops answering the door.
Her grief haunts his night.
After a few weeks her visits start to dwindle, and soon he hasn’t seen her in months.
It’s excruciating, and he starts to believe he is going mad.
Sometimes, in his loneliness, he feels as if Obi-Wan is with him in his hut.
*
But then Vader hasn’t factored in one thing.
Skywalker blood is stubborn to a fault.
*
Again, she comes to him at dawn.
When she won’t leave and keeps pounding at his door, Vader has no other choice but to let her in.
They stare at each other in the blue darkness striped with golden light, the old scarred man and the young woman withered but not hardened by her harsh life of chains and sand.
“Please, don’t make me tell,” he begs. “I couldn’t bear causing you pain.”
“There is no greater pain for a mother than not knowing what fate befell her son.”
“The son you gave birth to is safe with the Jedi. Do not ask me for more.”
Shmi grabs his hands, her skin rough against smooth metal.
“Tell me just this. Will he be happy?”
Vader looks out towards the binary sunrise, and sees cream linens and silka beads, a waterfall of brown curls, his starry-eyed son.
“He will. I made sure of that before I left.”
“And what about you?”
“I am as happy as I could ever be,” he says, closing his fingers lightly around her strong hand. “More than I deserve anyway.”
“Come live with us,” she says, bringing his hands to her lips. “Cliegg already agreed. He could use your help with the vaporators, and it would soothe my heart to know you’re not alone.”
It takes his heart breaking for Vader to realize that he hasn’t lost it to darkness and flames after all.
It is the sweetest form of pain.
*
In the end, though, he refuses.
Shmi has her own life to live, with her husband and her step-son. There is no place in it for a runaway from a future that will never come to pass.
She has her family, and Vader has his ghosts. He has come to realize that he is quite comfortable being alone with them.
In the kindness of her heart, Shmi understands.
She leaves when the shadows are long, long as they were when they parted the last time, when a boy mad with fear and rage crossed the desert only to listen to her dying breath.
And in the sunset Shmi pulls him into her arms, and Vader melts into Anakin and Anakin melts into her embrace.
They hold each other tight under the warm orange light of their weary suns, the childless mother and her motherless child.