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“You bring him here? Are you insane?”
“I wasn’t sure what else to do.”
“Leave him for dead. Kill him. Not bring him here. He’s a danger to everyone around him. He’s a danger to my daughter.”
Vader knows only pain. Vader has known only pain. Vader is only pain. Since the moment of his birth in the fires of Mustafar, pain has been his sole companion. Now is no different.
“Perhaps we take this conversation elsewhere.”
Vader is surrounded by enemies. Disoriented, crushed by the vastness of himself, Vader casts out his consciousness for a foothold in the Force and finds nothing. Panic, icy cold, rushes through him, fear fueling his power, the first tenet of the dark side. Fear is the greatest motivator, only if it can be properly directed. In a different life, his fear was directionless, omnipresent, and useless. He had drowned in rivers of fear during his adolescence and was reborn learning to use it. If he cannot feel the Force, he is in danger; something is wrong, and this fear gives him enough power to once again sense his surroundings.
He is lying down.
He hasn’t laid down in a decade. He no longer has the capacity for it. In his meditation chamber, in his bacta tank, he can take off his mask, his suit, but he cannot survive long without them, and he cannot be horizontal underneath the weight of them, nor under the decreased capacity of his damaged lungs. This accounts, at least, for the tightness in his chest.
“Obi-Wan —”
Vader comes all the way back to himself. Obi-Wan.
“Not here.” One voice is mysterious to him, through the fog of drugs and smoke of his mind, somewhat familiar but unable to place it. The other is unmistakably the voice of Obi-Wan Kenobi, who, Vader remembers now, finally found the courage to come out of hiding and face him, and who has never, in fact, successfully killed a Sith Lord.
For a moment, Vader was sure that Kenobi was going to leave him for dead a second time, staring up at him through the cracked visor his mask, Kenobi’s face sickly pale in the blue glow of his lightsaber. Then —
Then nothing. The hole in Vader’s memory will have to be examined, and he will be punished for this failure, for his weakness. He deserves nothing less. Kenobi is an old man. When Vader left him to burn on Jabiim, he thought he was creating some sort of justice, some sort of balance, but his Master will accuse him of sentimentality, of weakness. Vader wanted revenge, and his desire for equal retribution, to leave Kenobi for dead, blinded him to the truth that he was still far stronger than Sidious ever believed. He did not die and he did not crawl back into whatever hole he came from, but he came back, came after Vader, helped those rebels. An unwavering, insolent do-gooder to the end. Kenobi, not Vader, is blinded by sentimentality, unable to see the truth. Whatever was left of Anakin Skywalker died; not in the lava banks on Mustafar, not by Obi-Wan Kenobi’s blade. Vader is not Kenobi’s creation. But Kenobi always had unwavering faith in Skywalker. Even now, it seems. Somewhere in the darkness of Vader’s memory, Kenobi must have scooped him from the field of their battle and brought him here, wherever here might be.
“Keep him restrained,” Obi-Wan says coolly. It is the final word he hears before unconsciousness envelops him once more.
The Force wakes him gently, an unconscious curious prodding at his mind. This is not the presence of Obi-Wan. Even in his youth, Obi-Wan had never woken him gently. Vader opens his eyes but he cannot look around. He is strapped down by his chest, his upper arms and legs, the scarred, raw skin of his body itching at this first contact in a decade. In spite of and because of his master’s efforts, Vader has never healed more than enough to do his job. The wounds on his body are permanent reminders of his failure on Mustafar and the failure of the Jedi. He relishes them. He tries to relish them.
Whoever took him here has removed his prosthetic arms and legs. It will slow him down, once he gets free, but it will not stop him. The mask over his face is not his own, but the medical kind, delivering oxygen and drugs to keep him alive but weak. He is aware of his breathing, as he always is now, as he has been for as long as he’s been himself. His chest tight, his neck too weak to look at anything beyond the pale ceiling. Vader closes his eyes. It’s easier to see with his second sight.
That gentle, curious presence returns to him with a sharp clarity. It is that of a child, a girl. A sharp mind, looking at him in horror. He relishes her horror, this child of his captors. She steps into the room, steps closer to him to get a better look at his scarred and mangled body and Vader allows her a glimpse into her mind. She backs away instinctively, shutting him out. She is not only sharp, but powerful, if untrained.
“Your face,” she says softly, but her voice is not sympathetic. It is simply a fact that she states. Gathering her courage, she ventures closer still and Vader lets her. Let her satisfy her curiosity, let her look upon the horror that her friends who hold him now created. This time she does not back away, but rather stares into it, unfazed and steel faced. “You tried to kill my friends,” she says. “Did Ben do this to you?”
Vader opens his mouth to answer, but he can make no sound, nor can he draw enough breath to even answer, his voice caught in his throat.
“Leia!” The girl pulls away again, startled. “Leia, come here. Get away from him. Now.”
“He can’t do anything,” she says defiantly, drawing towards the new voice. “Look at him.” Vader gets some satisfaction knowing that she is afraid, that she is lying to this person. Vader wants to draw her back in, lure her quietly, her fear seductive. She would be more powerful, stronger, than all his petty Inquisitors put together, and one day, he and this girl would be strong enough to break his chains under Sidious. He would be a kinder master to her than he had ever had.
“He’s dangerous, Leia.” Obi-Wan has appeared. “He’ll always be dangerous, no matter what he looks like.”
“The why’d you bring him here?”
Obi-Wan has no answer. Because he is stupid, foolish, sentimental. Because he is a coward who cannot kill him, cannot finish what he started. “One day, we will explain everything to you, but for today, you must trust me and your father,” Obi-Wan says. Vader rankles, and he knows Obi-Wan can feel it by the increased urgency he feels when he presses the girl — Leia — to promise that she understands. Once Vader was a boy, forced to make such promises to Obi-Wan, and he tries to reach Leia again, but by now, she is too guarded. Obi-Wan is blocking her for now, as her father escorts her from him, regret and grief and anger seeping from him.
These emotions from Obi-Wan are intoxicating, so longed for in his past life, so unfit for a proper Jedi like Kenobi. Kenobi is no little girl, no small child who’ emotions are his for the taking, but still, Vader can egg him on. Kenobi so loved Skywalker, loved him like a fool, and now all he does is mourn him. Vader can remind him of that. Vader can remind him of that with so little effort. All he has to do is open his mouth, say one little word. It takes more strength than it out to, his chest tight, and it comes out like a wheeze, but he manages it.
“Master?”
Obi-Wan scoffs. “Sloppy,” he mutters.
Vader opens his eyes, he manages to turn his head an inch to the left to see Obi-Wan drop into a chair. Is Kenobi sitting vigil at his sickbed, like he had for Skywalker? Is he that pathetic, that deluded? He looks terrible, beard and hair shaggy, dark bags under his eyes on his weathered face. The years had not been kind to him.
“She came looking for you because you’re like a maw in the Force,” Obi-Wan tells him, dread settling between him. “But you can’t manipulate me. And you won’t have her.”
Vader has all but exhausted himself. Obi-Wan thinks he knows him, but eventually Vader will be strong enough to speak again, and Vader has learned much more in the art of manipulation than he ever knew as a boy. He will have the girl if he wants her. He takes what he wants and he leaves only what his master tells him to.
“I took a grave risk, bringing you here, and we’ll leave before you’re strong enough to even learn where here is,” Obi-Wan is saying. “But you asked for help. I couldn’t leave you. I shouldn’t have left you on Mustafar. That’s what I’m sorry for. And I am.”
Vader wants to argue, but there are no word. He doesn’t remember what happened. They were fighting, and Kenobi injured him, damaged his suit. He would have to be punished. After, his vision grayed, the world swam around him. The next he was here. Another of Kenobi’s tricks, of his manipulations to soften Vader’s black heart, an image of a Kenobi who didn’t abandon him, who didn’t leave him to burn. The unending agony of burning. He burns even still. He wishes Kenobi could have heard him scream. He wishes —
This is Kenobi’s trick then. To have him wish and hope and imagine as Skywalker might have.
“My Master will find me,” he wheezes after a long pause.
“I imagine he will,” Kenobi concedes. “That’s why we’ll leave when you’re stable.” More silence. Vader has the distinct impression that Kenobi is not watching over him but rather guarding him. He is a prisoner, not a friend. It would have been easier to leave him again or to kill him. He still lives. He is lying down, unencumbered. He breathes on his own, labored though those breaths may be. “Why?” he chokes out, the impossibility and the rage of it suffocating him.
“Because I love you,” Kenobi says softly. “Because I love you even now, Anakin. Because Padme believed in you with her dying breath. Because you asked for my help. I - I — ” Kenobi’s words trail off into nothing, swallowed by his grief and shame. Shame at loving him, loving him, the monster, not the boy surely Kenobi is trying to remember.