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Vader knows that the Emperor loves him. The knowledge of this is strange– by all rights it should be something that’s uncertain, prone to be a topic of doubt and worry, but it isn’t. Vader knows that it’s true with a certainty that bypasses any of the hesitation that he should feel given the simple facts of the situation. The Emperor is a selfish man, bitter and cruel and unfeeling, and there’s no warmth to him, nothing vaguely human enough to suggest that he’d be capable of any sort of deep and lasting emotion. The Emperor doesn’t love.
But he loves Vader all the same, and Vader himself doesn’t know if that’s a blessing or a curse. Sometimes he wishes that it wasn’t true, that it was just a lie that he convinced himself of to make it all easier; Palpatine is a liar, he always has been, and surely that could be just another falsehood that’s convenient and easy to manipulate. And yet this isn’t the case, although Vader is unsure of what precisely makes him so certain of that.
The Emperor enters his chambers one day unannounced while Vader is in his bacta tank. Vader almost unconsciously pulls away from his presence– he knows his physical appearance is unsightly, and although his master is most likely the one being who pays no mind to that, he’s also somehow the one who Vader wants to see this the least. But he cannot, in this moment, hide behind anything, and for another moment he resents the vulnerability that the Emperor always seems to cause in him.
The Emperor says nothing at first, only studying his apprentice in a way that feels almost predatory. His gaze is steady and unyielding, consuming everything in front of him, and it seems as if he isn’t going to speak at all, but then he does. “You were always too perfect,” he murmurs, his voice low and soft, barely seeping through the glass of the tank and only reaching Vader through the Force. “It was never really you who I saw, just as you never truly saw me.” He extends his hand and presses it against the smooth surface that separates him from his apprentice, and Vader feels it as if it’s a physical touch, its presence lacking comfort but still containing a meaningfulness that surpasses the Emperor’s twisted and withered body. “I have always thought that you are so much more yourself like this.”
It’s difficult to know what the Emperor is thinking, and in the moments when Vader recalls the distant and bitter memories of life before all of this he realizes that even then it was true; Chancellor Palpatine had been equally as unknowable as his present counterpart, although he had hidden it better. But now Vader senses the undercurrent of what the Emperor means quite clearly: Even when you are like this I keep you with me, even when you are like this I value you. You are like me now and in our ruin we are together and we will stay this way until it ends.
That is how Vader knows that the Emperor loves him.