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It’s fascinating to watch broken things get pieced back together.
That’s what Palpatine thinks while he watches Darth Vader– Anakin– get reconstructed. The process is long and arduous but he stays for the entirety of its duration, watching the way the droids unfeelingly go about their work and the way Anakin pathetically twitches and thrashes like a dying bird. The Emperor feels nothing when he sees all of this, and in a way it’s almost monotonous.
This doesn’t have to happen. Anakin was never really part of Palpatine’s plan, merely a sort of fortuitous add-on who had shown up at the perfect time, and his presence wasn’t necessary to create the Empire. And because he is so nonessential, it would be so easy to toss him away and place him down as another expendable piece that served its purpose and was appropriately discarded. Grievous, Tyranus, even Nute Gunray– every being that Palpatine has used has been disposable, and it wouldn’t be unreasonable to assume that Anakin should rightfully share that fate as well.
Palpatine is unwilling to do that. It’s a strange streak of sentimentality that’s unlike him, and he knows it. But when he had gone to Mustafar and found Anakin and in the moment when Palpatine had placed his hand on his apprentice’s forehead and willed him to live, it had seemed inconceivable to even consider leaving Vader to die. There’s a reason for that, although it’s far below the surface and somewhat difficult to discern.
It’s because of love.
Palpatine loves him, and that is why Vader is allowed to exist even when he’s failed, even when he’s been so badly ruined that anyone with half a brain and a speck of common sense would pronounce him a lost cause that’s better off dead. He loves him, and that is why Vader is reshaped and remade into something perfect, something created by Palpatine’s whims and wants. Palpatine loves Anakin, and he allows him to live because Vader will finally be something that exists only for him, and isn’t that how it’s always been meant to be? What better fate is there for him, and what could he possibly be that would be more than this?
And so the Emperor watches Vader get pieced back together, and in the aftermath of that he watches the way that his orders give Vader a sense of purpose and a reason for existence, the way that Vader grasps at them to fill the void that’s there within him. Vader kneels before him in a position of deference and servitude now, and in the moment before Palpatine calls him a friend and tells him to rise the thought of whether Anakin Skywalker would ever have submitted like this before another being comes and goes idly. Certainly he wouldn’t have, but Anakin Skywalker no longer exists, and he no longer exists because of Palpatine.
Vader is a broken thing, shattered past the limits of humanity, and Palpatine is the one to hold the pieces together and create something out of that nothingness. This is how it’s supposed to be, and he knows that Vader, desperately searching for some form of meaning amidst the fragments of his past, realizes that too.