Chapter Text
When Vader wakes, morning sunshine slanting into the room, his wife half-sprawled on his chest and drooling ever so slightly on his chest – he would have preferred to have simply looked down at her, smiled, closed his eyes, and gone back to sleep. Instead, what occurs is that he opens his eyes, looks down at her, smiles, closes his eyes again – and then spirals immediately into a great big flaming panic attack, because he can’t find the Dark, it isn’t there, it was missing, he needs it, without it he is nothing –
His rasping hyperventilation fills the air. Padme comes awake with the smoothness of a soldier and must size up the situation almost as quickly as Vader had catapulted himself headfirst into it, and after a handful of seconds that feel like an eternity a portable respirator is being clapped over Vader’s mouth. His clever wife has obviously flicked on the switch for the bilevel positive airway pressure setting he had in the suit, because air is pushed into Vader’s lungs, then the pressure relaxes, forcing an exhale. The familiar rhythm is a horrible sort of comfort – Vader still associates it with those blinding moments of relief when his Master had judged him too close to unconsciousness and put the mask back on him, forcing pressurised air into his lungs.
His heartbeat, smashing against his ribs like a tiny monster howling to be let out of its cage, slows.
But the Dark is still gone.
Vader gropes for Padmé’s hand, or at least tries to, but the electrical impulse sent by his brain dies in a crackle of nervy phantom pain at his stump. He groans on the exhale, frustration and shame and fear, and Padmé’s soft hand is there at once, brushing over his bare scalp, healed of its craggy wounds but still scarred under fingertips that have no business touching something as polluted as him. But her eyes are calm, locked on his. Vader drinks in the sight of her. He will never be so idiotic as to take it for granted ever again.
“Enough,” he rasps out on an exhale.
“Are you sure?” Vader nods. Padme looks doubtful, but pulls the mask away. Vader gasps helplessly for a few moments, but slowly his respirations even out into something maintainable. “What happened?” Padme asks. Her hand is still stroking his forehead, lingering occasionally on the old scar that once cut his eyebrow in two.
“I couldn’t touch the Dark side,” Vader rasps. Padme lifts an eyebrow.
“Surely that’s a good thing?” she queries. Vader shakes his head.
“I need it,” he finds himself saying, pinned in place by Padme’s gaze. “You don’t understand. Without it I’m weak, I’m vulnerable. They’ll come for me –”
“No one is coming to hurt you, Anakin,” Padme says immediately. Vader nearly laughs at her naivete.
“They’ll come for me,” he repeats. He’s starting to panic again. “The Jedi that escaped the Purge, the Emperor’s supporters. I don’t even know where we are –”
“Naboo,” Padme fills in at once. Vader relaxes just a touch. Of course they are. Padme would want to be somewhere as defensible as possible. “As for the Emperor’s supporters, Bail has them tied up in enough bureaucratic knots that they can’t even find their own elbows. The provisional Chancellor has things well in hand.” Vader turns his head.
“With what army?” he asks bitterly. “The Separatists will be amassing their forces once more, if the Senate is back in place –”
“You killed most of the Separatist leaders, Anakin,” Padme says softly. “Don’t you remember?”
Of course he does. It’s just that there’s been so much death between then and now, more killing in one year than in all the ones that preceded it – “And what is left of the GAR are under the command of the Senate.” Vader looks up at her in surprise.
“What’s left of it?” he asks. “Surely Sidious didn’t manage to get that many of them killed in only a year. And the Senate are fools enough to trust the clones? They turned on their Jedi easily enough –” He stops. Padme’s eyes are terribly sad.
“They had controls biochips in their brains, Ani,” she says softly. Vader stills completely stunned.
“No,” he argues at once. His voice sounds weaker than usual. “Chips, yes. To inhibit aggression. Not to completely erase the will of a sentient being. He wouldn’t do that –” His voice fails completely. Of course he would. It is an abomination that screams of Sidious. But not of Palpatine. Not of the only person who believed in him wholly when he was young, encouraged him, praised his strength in the Force – “He wouldn’t,” he says again, quietly.
“He did,” Padme says. There is a dreadful sympathy in her face. Vader wants to crawl into that sympathy and never emerge again, and simultaneously also to bury himself alive. Such a fool. He is as much fool as Skywalker. “When the chips were shut off, and the clones realised what they had done –” She doesn’t need to complete the sentence; Vader understands. Sith hells, he doesn’t blame a man against them for wanting to eat their blaster. Vader understands that sentiment all too well. “And I would remind you, husband –” Padme’s eyes have gone hard. “That you turned on your Jedi just as quickly, and without the justification of being completely unable to control your actions.” Vader shrinks in on himself. The worst of it is that she doesn’t even sound angry. Merely tired.
“I’m sorry, Padme,” he offers meekly, aware it will never be close to enough. His wife sighs, and then lays her head on his shoulder.
“I know you are, Ani.” She rests against him in silence for long minutes. “We are no longer at war. You can do without the Dark side, my dearest.” Vader feels the breath catch in his throat.
“I cannot,” he says. Padme must hear something in his voice that Vader is incapable of saying aloud, because she sits up to look him in the eye. Vader, reclined on the bed beside her and unable to get away, feels like a laser cannon has zeroed in on him. It’s hard to breathe again.
“You really do need it.” Vader nods, forcing his breathing to remain steady, half of a mind to ask for the respirator back. “It’s like a drug for you, isn’t it?” Instinctively Vader dislikes the comparison, but regardless his mind turns the notion over, peering at it from every angle until it starts to make sense. Yes. It is like a drug for him.
He nods.
Padme must see the stupidity in cold hard withdrawal. She leans in close, and Vader would be holding his breath, except he can’t. “Imagine if I died, right now.”
Vader jerks away instinctively, but Padme puts her hands on his cheeks to hold him fast in place. He is forced to look up into merciless brown eyes, who have always seen him for what he is, and love him still. “No!” The denial bursts out of him without his brain consenting to utter the word aloud. Padme digs her nails into his skin to make him pay attention; not hard enough to draw blood, but enough to hurt.
“You want the Dark side that much! Then take it! Me in the ground, rotting, with our baby dead in my belly because you caused it.” The words conjure up terrible images, but Vader can’t even bear to let himself believe it; he just gasps for breath, tears leaking from the corners of his eyes, and Padme softens, takes him in his arms, until he can breathe without fear again.
It helps, in a strange sort of way. The Darkness is there, within him, like a limb that cannot be cut away, but it does not control him; Vader’s mind is clear. Without the clawing needles of Sidious’s Force-presence against his own, Vader can touch the Dark side, but not drown in it.
“Thank you,” he says. Padme sniffs, but she shifts until she is curled against him again, her back against his mangled chest. Neither of them go back to sleep, but Vader finds a sort of peace all the same.
“Oh, shit,” Ahsoka says. “Your eyes –”
Vader waves a stump at her airily. “No need to stare, Snips, they’re just my eyes,” he says dismissively. Ahsoka makes a low growling sound in her chest that makes the skin on Vader’s neck crawl and reminds him abruptly that she is an apex predator of the highest order, and he is as vulnerable now as a sea slug squirming on the sands.
“They’re blue,” she snarls. “Is this a trick, some kind of Sith deceit –”
“I’m Dark, not Sith,” he reminds her. No one seems to listen to him. It’s been four days now since Padme moved him unceremoniously into her quarters like an especially talkative body pillow. Ahsoka had been gone until today, when Vader had looked up from trying to read a datapad with his imperfect eyesight to find her hovering in Padme’s doorway, her eyes watchful, as though sizing up her prey.
“You –” Vader’s former apprentice is struggling with her words. “You turned on us, you Fell, you committed atrocities in that wrinkled old bastard’s name –” Vader gives her his full attention, since Ahsoka doesn’t seem like she’s going to stop anytime soon. She is mostly a blue and orange blur to him, at this distance, but a towering presence in the Force, as always. “You became a monster, willingly. But after all of this, all you needed to turn back to the Light was a few nights of cuddling with your wife –” Vader sighs at the vehemence of her tirade.
“Not exactly,” he replies, and draws on the banked embers of rage and hate in his chest, fanning them up into a blaze. Ahsoka flinches, just the tiniest amount, which tells Vader he has been successful and his eyes have changed to yellow. Not that he needs outward confirmation. He feels different, his skin tighter over his ravaged frame, the Force prickly and hot at his (metaphorical) fingertips. “The Dark resides within me, always. Truthfully, it did even when I was your master, Ahsoka. I merely denied it even to myself.”
She is shaking her head. “You weren’t,” she whispers, and for a moment Vader sees his little padawan again, barely fourteen, and so innocent it used to make him seethe, that such innocence had been forced to bloody her hands to the elbows. “You aren’t. You were Light, you were good, I felt it –”
“You bring out the best in me, little one,” he rumbles, and Ahsoka releases a sharp broken sound, turns away, her hand pressed to her mouth. Vader allows her the time she needs to compose herself, staring out the window like he can see the details of the horizon, or the exact way he had shattered Ahsoka’s heart.
“So you’re a mix of both,” Ahsoka surmises, after long minutes. Vader looks over at her. She is calm, stoic again, as if the brief eruption of her sorrow had never happened at all.
“I am myself,” he replies simply. “When I think of myself, I think of myself as Vader. That may well never change. My Master –” He winces. It will take a very long time, he thinks, to break himself of referring to Sidious as his Master. Force knows the shrivelled old Sith had devoted enough time to ensuring Vader would do so, both aloud and in thought. “Sidious put a significant amount of effort into making certain I would not think of myself as –” His former name sticks in his throat. “As Skywalker,” he settles upon. “But that does not mean I am incapable of admitting that – that Anakin is still a part of me. If he were not, I would not love Padme. And if there is only one thing I know for certain, it is –”
“That you love Padme,” Ahsoka finishes for him. Which is for the best, because the relatively long speech had been taxing on his still healing vocal cords, and his voice had been thinning out towards the end. Vader nods.
“Yes. Well,” he amends, and returns his gaze to the datapad on his lap. Better not to meet her eyes, when he is ripping the scabs off his carcass of a soul. “There is also. That I – that I care for you, Snips. Deeply. I know that too.”
When he dares to look up, Ahsoka is gone.