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Look into the dark room and find a man, on his knees.
Well. Not his knees. His legs are twisted metal things that claw and bite and turn every step into agony. It is the price paid to walk this path into darkness. It is the old price: blood and suffering. It is the kind of price paid first by the pain of others and then, inevitably, his own.
He has learned that lesson in intimate detail. It is scorched into him.
His rattling breath echoes off the walls.
Well. Not his breath. It is a terrible mechanized thing, mercilessly unceasing. It flattens him out, crushes any flicker of self into a dull hateful caricature.
He will never sigh again. He will never again choose his own breath. He will never again laugh, nor cry, nor speak in anything other than a deep monotone.
And he does wish to cry. He wants to speak his own words, to mourn in his own voice—
But everything that he was has burned to ash. First he did it himself. Then it was done to him.
He might’ve been angry. He might have cursed his enemy’s name, railed against the injustice done unto him.
But that was before the suit.
It is childish to think, let alone say, but the suit is dark and cold. It cuts and scrapes and when it was fitted to him he had screamed, loud and raw and wailing. He had choked on his bloody screams.
He cannot scream now. His respirator precludes anything other than a rasping, steady, breath.
Before, that might have filled him with the righteous rage born of indignity. Now, now he can only faintly sense the creeping touch of fearful despair. It is not the loud, over-dramatized, screeching of holodramas. It is not even the screaming of the battlefield, lurching from one near-death to the next.
It is the fear that comes from the abyss. It is the despair that waits—patiently—in the dark and hungers for the end of all things. It is the absence of hope. It is the photo-negative of love.
If one could imagine the existence of all things in a singular binary number, it would be the number one.
This is absolute zero.
It wraps its cold fingers around his soul and grips it tightly, almost like— almost like—
Almost like it was choking him.
He does not lose his breath. He cannot lose his breath.
He cannot grieve, not in any way that a real person can. That is, with tears and breath. So he reaches out with his own soul and tears at the dark room, crumpling the machinery with his fear that so very quickly slides into helpless hatred along well-laid paths.
“No,” he whispers, and his vocoder turns it into a demand.
It is not a demand.
It is anagnorisis.
It is the revelation made in the dark, all the more stark without the light. It is the recognition of what he has done in his mad scramble to conquer death. It is the encapsulation of everything he has become, in direct opposition to what he should have been.
It is mourning. He has betrayed everyone who had ever trusted him and murdered everyone who he had ever loved.
Well. Almost everyone.
He burns all the same.
What, you say. This is not an image of victory. This is a man-turned-monster on his knees in despairing defeat. He has lost everything and gained nothing but hatred, suffering, and death.
Look past him, I say. Look to the Emperor in the shadows. Look past the gnarled fingers, almost knotted into themselves.
He is silent. He is still, amongst the crushed machines and the rattling walls.
His face, rotten and corrupted, is smiling.
And under his hood, his eyes blaze a Sithly, triumphant, yellow.