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After his confrontation with Luke on Cloud City, Vader had sought to launch a harrowing campaign of retribution. Every sensor log and medical archive — anyone who ever touched the truth of Skywalker’s past — was dragged into the light, or swiftly obliterated under his heel.
Though each answer only seemed to cleave open more scars until all the half-buried truths soon pointed here, back to a moisture farm on Tatooine. A planet he swore never to walk again; a cursed hellscape that had taken his mother and now, unthinkably, raised his son in secret.
ZED-6-7 never once stopped chattering from beside him as they exited his personal shuttle, overflowing with analyses of timelines and probability branches — not even when they approached the Lars family’s now empty homestead and ventured through their barren hallways.
He remembers the table they once discussed Shmi’s fate around, some twenty-five years ago. A resigned Cliegg Lars sitting at the head. Himself, desperately trying to imagine if his mother ever found happiness here at all.
The forensics droid’s voice echoes distantly meanwhile “Evidence confirms: Skywalker, Luke. Residence established since early childhood. Numerous domestic artefacts—” Yet Vader is no longer listening because his son’s presence is bright enough here. He can already hear the soft pitter-patter of footsteps racing through these corridors. Laughter. Traces of a life utterly ordinary.
It is this quiet instinct which he soon follows through to one particular door, standing ajar as sunlight spills from in between the slim gap. Boots thump to a halt. The threshold is much too low for him, and so he must gingerly bow his massive frame to enter. A small obstacle.
Once inside the dusty room, he is quick to find a narrow cot as well as shelves lined with personal items — a model skyhopper with its paint chipped at the wings that immediately stands out to him, for one. This must have been Luke’s sanctuary. He broods with certainty and doesn’t think to explore further, given his limited mobility.
At least not until a disturbance brushes by the edge of his awareness, too soft to exist anywhere naturally on this forsaken planet. He has felt such warmth before in nightmares and Kouhunin-induced hallucinations, though the light bends a little closer than usual now.
His beloved Padmé appears beside him then like a reluctant memory he never once allowed himself to keep. Her presence, the sunrise he has not felt upon his skin in over twenty years. A part of him is afraid to turn — afraid that she will instantly vanish like every other mercy he has tried to imagine since. Still. Some memories are more disobedient than others. They resurrect themselves when delusion becomes the only companion left to him.
See, his tongue weighs heavy because he knows that only a mind collapsing under the weight of its own ruin would dare conjure her here. Yet his mechanised voice emerges anyway, “Why?” He demands “Why do you haunt me?”
Unaffected, however, her gaze lowers to the toy ship he first gravitated towards. “Do you think Luke used to hold it in his sleep?” Padmé instead asks with a fondness reserved for the baby he knows she so often whispered her greatest hopes and dreams to every night. “He must have,” she decides. “He was always very spirited, even in my belly. Always moving. Always reaching.”
Her voice is exactly as he remembers.
Something in Vader’s chest contracts so violently that he almost cannot tell where the pain begins — whether it’s a mechanical failure or something far more treacherous. It simply lances through his durasteel plating, tearing along the seams of a heart he thought long cauterised… for how can a mere memory sound so alive? “You are not real.”
The image draws nearer then, her presence like two hands pressed against an open wound. “No,” she agrees placidly “… but you are, and you’ve foolishly walked into our son’s childhood bedroom without expecting to feel hurt.”
Sharply does he turn away as a jagged burn claws its way up his spine. “I am not hurt. I am seething with rage. He should never have been on this pathetic dustball,” the words drag through his modulator like stones scraped over metal “He should have been with me.”
Fury is easier to hold than what thrashes underneath. It pours from him like steam seeking escape, thick enough to blur the edges of sense when really? What he names as rage is no more than a hopeless reaching toward what cannot be undone — but he refuses that path and its softness for there is no power to be gleaned from sorrow. The Dark Side demands an anger far more dynamic.
Padmé does not offer him the relief of looking elsewhere for very long before she is in his scarlet periphery again “… and what life were you prepared to give him, Anakin?”
“Do not call me that.”
“It is the only name Luke recognises as his father’s.”
Vader is silent as he recoils from her words and she, ever patient, lets the quiet settle before gliding away herself to regard a collection of their son’s carved wooden banthas. “Luke was happy here. Loved. He had chores he hated, and friends he adored. A family that—”
“Stole him from me.”
It hits like a crack of thunder and Padmé blinks, startled by the nakedness around his admission. “They had what was mine. First, my mother. Then my son?” Jealousy continues to flood him, scorching and primal. A wound bursting open and left to bleed itself out. If the Sith Lord thought himself past such human impulses, he is wrong.
Thus her gaze softens in recognition and Vader can feel the monster he has long since become shrink away from beneath Padmé’s scrutiny, revealing a frightened boy curled somewhere deep within the machinery of him. “Ani…” her voice smooths into a gentle counterpoint “Owen and Beru kept him safe for nineteen years.”
“From me!” Vader repeats his earlier sentiment with a snarl, denial reverberating through the small room and rattling their modest shelves loose. He hears it. He knows. It is one thing to hold thieves accountable. It is another to realise the danger he himself had become. The storm from which his innocent son needed shelter.
Worse still, Padmé does not even try to say otherwise.
Both pierce as a blade in the hollow of his chest might and so — calming himself — he draws the ship into his grasp.
“He is strong in the Force. Like you, he must have dreamt of his fate many times without knowing why.” She returns to his side and pleads dolefully “Spare him that same suffering. Do not become yet another source of his pain.”
The blow lands cleanly and something inside him sinks, heavy and molten. “You think I do not know the cost of what I’ve done? You think I do not feel it?” He looks at the window right above Luke’s cot and imagines him staring out from it, daydreaming of bigger pastures. “There could have been… another life.” A pause. “For us.”
Padmé stands so close now that he can almost imagine the warmth of her shoulder against his arm.
“There still can be.” She says quietly.
Vader inclines his head toward her, though any such suspicion remains hidden behind the obsidian mask. “Your heart believes that I am here to torment you,” his wife carries on “… but you are tormenting yourself. Hunting down those he cares for will only bring you farther and farther away from him. You know this.”
He sounds almost hopeful “Do you come to end me then?”
“No…” she answers easily, unburdened by the wreckage he’s caused “I’ve come because this is our last goodbye.”
That strikes him like a sudden vacuum. A cold, soundless implosion freezing every system within him. Last. The man does not know how to face such an idea with Padmé, when he would rather endure an eternity of torment from these visions than her absence for even a second.
“I’ve come because one day very soon, Luke will stand before you again — and you will have a choice. The same choice you have always had.”
Does she mock him? He, whose entire existence has been nothing more than a series of collapsing bridges and tightening chains. How can she speak as though any door remains open to him? “I have none left.” The protest feels rote as consequence. A phrase he has repeated so many times, it now becomes his creed. His cage. His curse.
“Yes, you do.” Still her whisper threads through the air, soft as a breath on his cheek “… and you will make the right one when it matters most.”
He turns to face Padmé now, drawn by the certainty in her eyes. Only then is he brave enough to regard his beloved in full. There she stands wearing a simple gown from the deepest strata of his memory. Not her senatorial garb, nor the regalia of a Queen — but the soft fabric worn on rare nights where she belonged only to herself. Even the pearls that cascade around her shoulders are those he used to caress with such reverence, as though they were constellations on which his entire universe hinged.
Here, his wife looks exactly as she did in the moments he valued most. Dreamy, unguarded and carefree. Nothing like what the galaxy remembers her as.
Thus something inside him keels over with a grief so profound, it feels like dying himself, because this is the Padmé who loved him — and this is the Padmé he lost.
“After everything I’ve done… why would you believe that?” Vader asks, his vocoder nowhere near able to telegraph just how desperately he must know and yet? Her mournful expression tells him he doesn’t need to. She hears it.
“… because you are still the man that I love,” is her gentle answer, steady as moonlight on water “and no matter how far you bury him? He will always reach for the light.”
Vader’s eyes shut against the blinding pain.
Her faith acts as a blade that slips between the plates of his armour, cutting precisely where he is most vulnerable. It hurts. Force, it hurts, but nothing in the known universe will ever be strong enough to make him pull away.
“It is not too late, Anakin.”
“Padmé…” the name slips from him like a wound torn open as she lifts a hand toward his cheek. Her fingers pass through entirely and yet? He leans into the gesture, hungry for a warmth that his body can no longer feel.
When his eyes open, her outline is already dissolving. Light thins into drifting motes while edges unravel like silk being pulled apart by an invisible hand. “No,” he breathes. The smile on her face is luminous nonetheless, loving in a way that only memory can afford to be. “Padmé, don’t leave me again.” He steps forward with one hand extended — but she is gone, leaving only warm air behind as their son’s toy drops pitifully to the dusty floor.
Vader stares at the empty space where sunlight pours in uninvited. An indifferent witness to the fracture that runs jaggedly through his fury and leaves behind a hurt that stretches every which way with no visible reprieve. Time slips by in a room where each corner holds something too delicate for his large, gauntleted hands to touch.
A reminder that he did not belong in Luke’s childhood… but what of his future? Perhaps Padmé is right. The ghost of her words burn him like another scar that refuses to heal and in its wake, an even smaller ember reignites.
The end is near.
Though some endings are simply where the journey home begins.