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He'd forgotten to close the balcony doors.
They rattle violently against the walls, glass panes shuddering in a fierce dry wind and allowing a flurry of sharp gray dust to sweep spectral patterns through the air. His respirator hitches once when the particles find their way to him; he coughs, and tries to pretend that the burning in his throat is from old injuries and not the memory of clawing his way through that same dust as his charred flesh peeled away from his body piece by piece and his soul itself seemed to crumble apart and incinerate.
Anger flares deep in his chest, somewhere near where his machine-pumped heart still beats. He flicks one hand: the doors snap shut and those dreaded curtains that the Emperor had insisted on having installed over the doors float upwards as if they’re still caught in the wind for one last moment before drifting down into their stalwart positions. Settling back into his seat, he returns his attention to his holopad. The file spilling across the screen ignites his soul, too - though in a different way than the lava had.
It fills him with glorious, horrible purpose.
AHSOKA TANO, read the bold letters near the top. Where once the word DECEASED had been stamped under her name, the file now declares her as KNOWN INSURGENT, FUGITIVE OF THE EMPIRE. This is, of course, succeeded by the symbol of the Empire itself and a blank square which should display a picture of the Togruta but instead contains a perpetually spinning Loading… sign.
Figures. It isn’t like Mustafar is known for its thrilling holonet speeds, after all.
The wind shrieks. He scrolls down.
A number of dispassionate bullet points outline the life of the apprentice thus far. Her birth date. How many years she spent training with the Jedi Order. A list of battles she fought in during the Clone Wars. Her trial and ultimate expulsion from the Jedi Order. Her disappearance after the Siege of Mandalore.
(He tries to pretend he doesn’t notice the errors in this file that he’d requested - demanded - his officers put together the second his boots had stepped onto Mustafar after the starfighter battle when he’d sensed her presence. He tries to remain detached as he reads the file, but the whisper in his head that notices things refuses to keep quiet. They missed a few planets she fought on. This battle began two days earlier. During that battle, she turned sixteen and the clones and her Jedi Master threw her a small surprise party three hours after the fighting stopped. That’s not exactly how she left the Jedi. And worst of all: How did you possibly think you could summarize the existence of this supernova of a being in only a few short lines?)
There are facts that are new to him. Her time spent helping refugees and civilians in various systems scattered throughout the galaxy is not entirely surprising. Neither is her apparent allegiance to the misfit bands of would-be rebels that are a constant thorn in the Empire’s side these days.
He skims the list of her skills (lightsaber dueling, trained Force wielder...) and physical description (Togruta, female, blue eyes...). By all reports, she has grown into a formidable warrior against whom not even the majority of the Empire’s most skilled combatants can be compared. One section in particular catches his eye. It’s marked by an asterisk denoting it as a possible product of the Empire’s overactive rumor mill, yet the moment he reads it he knows in his gut that it is the truth.
Ahsoka Tano, recent survivor of both the Clone Wars and Order 66. Alone in the galaxy, she’d fled to the small agricultural moon of Raada. The details of her time there don’t concern him. Just one fact, rather, if the rumors are to be believed: Ahsoka Tano killed an Inquisitor. Ahsoka Tano, unarmed, single-handedly killed an Inquisitor.
She was eighteen years old.
Anakin Skywalker, he thinks vehemently, would be proud.
He scrolls back to the top of the file and feels his respirator not just hitch, but stop altogether for the space of two full, terrifying heartbeats. The picture of AHSOKA TANO, KNOWN INSURGENT has finally loaded.
The balcony doors fly open again with renewed fury, but this time he ignores them.
It is Ahsoka Tano at the height of the Clone Wars. She was still a little scrappy back then, which had caused Skywalker to worry and slip her extra rations sometimes to make sure she was eating enough. In the picture she wears her favorite gold choker around her neck; he remembers instinctively how much it had meant to her. There are no lightsabers in the image - no weapons visible at all. Nevertheless, she carries herself with a set to her shoulders that makes it clear she is both a soldier and a Jedi in spite of her youth. She is also smiling.
The photographer had caught her mid-laugh, to be precise. He’d said something long forgotten - some inside joke, perhaps - and she hadn’t laughed in so long that even after the photo had been taken she and the photographer had laughed and laughed until they cried. Her whole face is alight with it: the pure joy of a moment shared between friends forged by war that became close enough to be brother and sister in every way that mattered. He wishes selfishly that the Empire had never gotten hold of this photograph, that it had stayed locked away in some out-of-date holopad and never been used as the means to identify the apprentice as a traitor, a rebel. Her moment of happiness endangers her, nearly two decades after it was captured. He wishes he had never taken the photo to begin with.
His thoughts screech to a dangerous stop, tumbling over each other in their haste to organize themselves. Rage bubbles up in his stomach. What?
It was Skywalker who took that photograph. Skywalker who knew this laughing girl, who had trained her and cared for her and given her some of his rations and worried about whether she survived to see another sunrise or not. Skywalker who had been ripped apart piece by piece a few short years after he'd taken this picture of his young apprentice.
He was not Skywalker. He would run the apprentice through without a second glance. He would slaughter her the way she killed the Inquisitor on Raada. He would tear her into unforgiving fragments and remind her that her Master who had sworn he would always keep her safe would never again rush to her rescue.
(There had been a fraction of a moment when he might have. In the starfighter battle, when the apprentice and he had reached across the depths of time and space and found one another to be alive. Naturally, his primary concern had been contacting the Emperor immediately. But for one blazing, wondrous half second, dizzying relief and joy almost made him lay down his weapons, turn on the comms, and shout You're alive! You're alive! to the woman on the other end, Empire be damned. She wouldn't recognize his new voice, but she had grown up knowing the person to whom it belonged. She would know it was him.)
(The emotion was stamped out before he'd even fully realized he felt it. The battle wore on.)
The Dark Side pricks at his senses, reeling him further into its possessive grasp. He rises from his seat. The wind has grown stronger: it pulls at his cape with a kind of intense insistence. He sees red - an unfortunate attribute of his helmet - and doesn't notice the hated curtains as he walks by them. They are a light, sheer fabric, the exact same shade as the lenses of his helmet. He stumbles on the hem of one of them. Humiliation creeps its way into the mix of emotions that the Dark Side conjures up to keep him close, coupled with disgust at the circumstances of his own body. He wonders if the Emperor chose the curtains for that specific purpose: to remind him what he is. To remind him who controls him.
The hatred for Skywalker burns viciously inside him. Skywalker, the sentimental fool who trusted too easily. Skywalker, who let himself consider Kenobi a brother, a father, a friend. With every step, the flames are stoked. He passes by the doors and continues out to the balcony beyond. Above him, Mustafar’s atmosphere churns with heavy storm clouds. The air is so hot outside that not even his suit can completely disguise the effects of the elements. Out of habit, he searches the black glass shores of the river for the place where he burned. He never quite finds it.
You are not Skywalker, he tells himself, leaning on the railing of the balcony. The dark spire castle it belongs to cuts a threatening silhouette against a menacing sky on a planet where nothing that had ever been trusting or loyal or good could survive. This is his terrain, and he is a merciless sentinel.
But still the name repeats itself, a constant murmur in his mind to the tuneless sound of the lava rushing along the river. Skywalker, it says. Skywalker. Skywalker. Skywalker. Skywalker Skywalker Skywalker Skywalk-
Anakin Skywalker is dead, he howls noiselessly. White hot power surges through his veins, blinding him. His fists clench involuntarily; a dozen spiderweb-slender cracks race along the surface of his holopad. The hatred spreads like a wildfire, scorching everyone Skywalker ever loved in its hunger for complete and utter devastation. Skywalker’s mother, Skywalker’s Master, Skywalker’s Padawan, Skywalker’s wife -
Instantly, grief and regret smother his anger, letting it sizzle into embers as wave upon wave of feeling washes over him. Had they not been Imperial-made and synthetic, his knees would have given out from the sheer weight of it. He is suddenly aware of every tube cutting its way into his body, of every needle piercing his skin, of the crushing magnitude of the crimson lightsaber clipped to his belt. He knows she can’t hear him. Knows that even if she could, he is star systems away from the Chommell sector where she rests and no matter how far he reaches out with the Force it will never be far enough.
My love, he whispers to the invisible stars, hidden by one of Mustafar’s many tempests. He thinks of the young, unblemished face that had smiled back at him in the mirror that day on Naboo - rendered nearly speechless from a combination of overwhelming joy and nerves - and how that man had felt like the luckiest person alive because the most incredible being in the galaxy wanted to spend the rest of her life with him.
Not true, exactly. She had wanted to spend the rest of her life with Anakin Skywalker. He wasn’t Anakin Skywalker. And yet his last act as Anakin - or perhaps his first act as himself? - had been to kill her on this very planet, on these very shores.
Padmé.
A ragged scream tears itself from his ruined lungs. He draws back his mechanical arm and flings the shattered holopad as far as he can through the dust-filled air; it plummets in a graceful arc toward the ground below. As the screen reflects the light of the lava, for a split second it is a falling star, sent from the heavens by the cosmos itself, shining and burning and falling, always falling, before vanishing into oblivion and out of his limited line of sight.
Padmé, would you mourn your husband if you knew what he’d done?
He recalls Obi-Wan Kenobi’s mischievous eyes, Padmé Amidala’s powerful voice, Shmi Skywalker’s gentle gestures, Ahsoka Tano’s carefree laugh, Anakin Skywalker’s face in the mirror on the day of his wedding.
Mourn your husband, he orders the stars. I destroyed him long ago.
The destruction of the holopad rearranges the turmoil within him; it makes it easy once again to reclaim his stoic detachment. His anger is the eye of a hurricane, and may all the stars help those caught in the storm that rages in his wake.
Darth Vader turns sharply on his heel and leaves the balcony, thoughts racing. Finding Kenobi would be the next challenge, but he could wait a little while longer for that. Besides, if the Empire already had Tano within its grasp…
He reenters his chambers, locking the balcony doors firmly behind him without so much as lifting a finger. His comlink hisses to life.
“I require a new holopad,” he states, the vocoder keeping his words evenly impersonal.
“Right away, sir,” replies the officer whose name he does not care to remember at the moment. There are other matters to be attended to. He must contact the Emperor; this can wait no longer. The last of Skywalker’s connections to the galaxy must be eliminated.
“Alert all units,” Lord Vader instructs coolly. “I want the apprentice. Bring me Ahsoka Tano.”
Far below, Ahsoka Tano’s face bubbles and warps and disintegrates. She sinks into nothingness, her smile forever frozen in happier times.
The river burns.