| 
					
						 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. 
					
  
						
					 |