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It is the colors that give it away. If not for that he might have been fooled. They look real. Too real, bright and vibrant. They stand out from the background, as though the sea of red behind them is the illusion. So it is the colors that give it away. He knows when he sees them that they are visions, and nothing more.
They watch him. When a mission is particularly successful, when he is dripping with gore and surrounded by corpses, he sees them. They watch him silently. Always silent. They are oddly passionless. They frown at him sometimes, disapproval writ across their faces. But mostly they look at him with pity, or worst of all boredom. He hates their pity. Where was your pity when I needed it? He wants to scream at them, Where were you? Look what I have become. I am beyond pity. I have chosen my path. He hates their boredom more. Am I not interesting? Why then, have you come to torment me? He could enjoy their anger, their hatred, feel a sense of satisfaction. Instead they observe him uncaringly, as though he is not worth their attention.
They look alive, all of them. Standing out among the red in full color, color he had nearly forgotten. Blues and greens, browns and yellows, all of them rich and vibrant, all of them alive.
He knows who they are. He recognizes enough of them to understand the pattern. They are dead, all by his hand. It is never anyone he wants to see. It is always those inconsequential to him. A padawan he occasionally saw in the mess hall, a knight that was an acquaintance of Obi-Wan’s. One of the countless rebels he had slain over the years. Never his wife, or his mother. Never any of the many who died under his command in the war. Never anyone important.
He tells himself it is madness, knows it is madness. He can not allow himself to believe it anything else. It is not a surprise that he has gone mad. The dark is madness of a sort, and no one could call his master sane. Insanity can be useful, can cause him pain and rage, can increase his power. It does not make him unfit for duty. Duty is all he has, his life is worth his service to the Empire and no more. If he can not fight, then he can not live.
He must not let his insanity show. He is the face of the Empire, its’ representative. His behavior reflects on his master, his weaknesses as well. So he ignores them, tightens his mental walls and carries on. They are not there all the time, so it is easy enough to bear. Really, they are nothing to the agony of his normal existence. He celebrates neither their presence or their absence. It is nothing to him.
Vader has little free time, but what he has is spent in study. His master teaches him the sacred Sith arts, teaches him the power of pain. In his palace Vader hoards knowledge. Ancient texts and artifacts, all of them seething with hatred, filled with power. None of them can match his hatred, his power. Still he searches them. Indulges his madness, allows himself to research. There are rituals. Ancient, nearly forgotten. Most of the mentions of them are dismissive. But they exists. He finds them. It is a simple enough procedure to banish a spirit. Vader does not bother. The count of his victims is in the thousands, and rises every day. If he tries to banish the spirits he will have time for nothing else.
He does not hide it from his master. Vader has no secrets. There is no part of him his master has not touched. Nothing left unexamined, nothing that his master does not know. So he does not mention the spirits, but he is not hiding them. His master does not remark on it. Vader knows he must know, yet he doesn’t mention it. Perhaps it is a test. A test of Vader’s loyalty to see if he will tell Palpatine his secret, or a test of will to see if he can bear it alone. So Vader says nothing, and his master says nothing, and the visions lie between them like all of Vader’s atrocities and agonies. Once, when his master is training Vader, when they have spent an hour looking over a memory from Anakin’s honeymoon, when he was for a short time happy, Palpatine almost speaks of it. Vader lies on the table, wheezing, trying to recover. He thinks there may be tears in his eyes but he cannot tell. His eyesight is already poor, and his ruined cheeks can not feel if they are damp. Palpatine strokes his head. On Vader’s scarred and damaged skin it feels distant, as though the touch is through a thick sheet of fabric.
“It is remarkable, my old friend, how strong your memory is.”
Vader says nothing. He does not yet know what he is supposed to answer.
“The lake, in your memory. The blue is as strong as ever. I would have thought over the years, your memory would fade.”
Vader’s breath catches against his will. Now is the moment. His master will punish him for his weakness, or else force him to banish the visions, or both. But his master does nothing. Simply leaves the room.
Vader’s life is entirely shades of red. The only color he sees is the colors of the dead. He does not care about them, he is indifferent to them as they are to him. But without them, he would have no respite from the red, he would lose the memory of the sky. That is the only reason he does not make them leave. That is what he tells himself, in the deepest part of his mind. He may be weak for wanting the colors, but he cares nothing for the dead, or their opinion of him. It is almost true.