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The visions started, as they always did, with fire.
Mustafar burned beneath him, lava roaring, air full of ash and the stink of his own cooked flesh.
You’re breaking my heart.
He tried to move, metal limbs dragging in the cinders. He wheezed. This was memory, not dream. He had lived this.
But then the vision shifted.
The fire died down to embers. In one possibility, he did not reach for her throat. He reached for her hand.
“Come with me,” he said, the words thick with desperation. “We can overthrow Sidious. We can make things the way we want. No more war. No more death.”
In this world, she did not say You’re going down a path I can’t follow. In this world, after a long, shaking moment, she whispered, “All right.”
He saw it play out in the Force like a holoreel: Padmé at his side as the Empire rose, her white gowns traded for black. The Senate dissolved with her signature on the decree. Planets burned while she stood beside him on the bridge of a Star Destroyer, eyes hollow.
“You said we would stop this,” she murmured, watching another world vanish into flame.
“We will,” he insisted, blood on his hands, voice filtered through the monster’s mask. “Soon. Once it’s all under control.”
But there was always another rebellion. Another world to crush. Another order from Sidious that could not be disobeyed without risking her.
She looked at him with tired eyes one day and said, “Anakin—”
“Vader,” he corrected, automatically.
She flinched.
The vision snapped ahead. An explosion. Sabotage on their flagship. The bridge decompressing, bodies wrenched into space.
Padmé’s fingers slipped from his outstretched hand, torn away into the star-streaked void before he could catch her.
She died there, with his name on her lips. Not Vader. The other one. The one he had buried.
The Force rippled.
Padmé ran this time. She did not come to Mustafar; she stayed on Coruscant, frantic and furious, working in secret with the last ragged remnants of the Republic. She tried to turn him from afar, messages smuggled through traitorous officers and brave, doomed pilots.
Anakin, please. Come back. You don’t have to do this.
He hunted those traitors down.
In the vision, he saw himself storm a hidden safehouse, troopers at his back. Padmé stood at the center, blaster in hand. There was no surprise in her eyes when she saw him. Only sorrow.
“You came,” she said. “I hoped you would. I thought—maybe if you saw what he’s doing—”
He saw his own lightsaber ignite.
He saw troopers raise their rifles.
He saw her fall, a bolt through her chest, because she stepped between him and a shot meant for the monster in black.
Padmé died there too, crumpling in his arms, whispering, “I believed there was still good in you.”
The Force shuddered again.
This time, there was no Mustafar duel. Obi-Wan never came. No blue blade slicing through his remaining limbs, no screaming ascent in a tide of fire. He walked away from the lava fortress whole, Padmé unconscious in his arms. He took her with him.
Vader carried her to a world no one cared about. He built a palace there, all sharp angles and polished stone, and locked her in a gilded cage high in its tower.
“You’ll be safe here,” he told her as the doors closed. “He can’t use you against me if no one knows you’re alive.”
Her hands pressed flat to the transparisteel as the years crawled past. Once, twice, she tried to flee. Once, twice, he brought her back.
“You’re hurting people,” she said, hoarse from screaming. “This isn’t what we dreamed of.”
“It’s the only way,” he insisted. “I did all of this for you.”
“The man I loved would rather die than become this.”
He told himself she didn’t mean it. He tightened the guard, tightened the leash. He watched the light go out of her slowly, over years. The Force showed him her health failing, her spirit thinning to a thread. He saw the day she simply did not wake up, her heart giving out somewhere between hope and despair.
The visions came faster, now that he opened himself to them.
A world where she took his outstretched hand on Mustafar and Sidious killed her for it, a lesson carved in lightning across her body.
A world where she convinced him to run, to hide, and the Empire hunted them down, their refuge destroyed, her body pinned beneath burning wreckage while he screamed and burned in turn.
In every variation where Darth Vader rose, she fell.
The Force did not lie. It folded possibilities around him, making a cage of what-ifs.
In the meditation chamber’s darkness, he floated in bacta and stared at nothing.
Padmé’s voice echoed in the spaces between heartbeats. You’re going down a path I can’t follow.
He had thought, then, that the path was necessary. That if he walked it far enough, he would find a place where she lived. He had clung to every whispered promise of power, every riddle from Sidious’ poisoned tongue, because the alternative was losing her.
He had become the very thing that ensured that loss.
The realization was a slow, cold settling in his chest.
The constant, in all those futures, was not Sidious. Not the Empire. Not the war.
It was him.
Not Anakin Skywalker, reckless and flawed and infuriatingly hopeful. But this: the armor. The mask. The choice to take power at any cost.
In the few flickers where she lived, not long enough for him to see details, only impressions of laughter, of children, of sunlight on Naboo, he could feel something else. A presence like his and not like his, bright and anchored, unburdened by the weight that crushed his lungs.
Anakin.
The name slid through him like a knife.
The only way to save Padmé, the visions whispered, would have been to remain that man. To trust the people he loved instead of clutching at nightmares. To tell the Council the truth. To walk away from Sidious on that office balcony. To accept that death comes for everyone, and that trying to cheat it can kill more than it saves.
He had not done those things.
Padmé was dead.
Not because the Force had decreed it. Not because it was written in the stars that she must die for Vader to live.
Because the moment he chose to become Vader, he made her death inevitable.