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“Luke, help me take this mask off.”
That’s what Darth Vader said to his son as the boy helped him sit up off the ground. He was dying, he was sure of it.
“But you’ll die.” His son looked at him. He seemed surprised by the request.
“Nothing can stop that. Now, just for once, let me look on you with my own eyes.”
Luke hesitated, but nodded a slight nod and gingerly took the helmet off of Darth Vader’s head. Anakin couldn’t do anything but stare at him and Luke stared at him back. His son seemed mournful, like he couldn’t believe that he saw his father.
Luke said some things about taking Anakin with him, but Anakin dismissed them. It was his time and he knew it. It was okay. He was willing to go this time and he had some people waiting for him on the other side. He was excited to reunite with them, to finally be free of the pain that kept him alive.
“I’ve got to save you,” Luke whispered. His eyes were getting increasingly frantic and Anakin knew that he meant that he would get him out of the Empire if he could, maybe take him far away to live out the rest of his days somewhere nice.
That wasn’t what was going to happen though. They both knew that. Anyways, who had to say that Luke hadn’t done anything for Anakin?
“You already saved me,” Anakin breathed out. It was getting harder without the mask on, but it was worth it to see his son’s eyes without the dark helmet in the way. “Look, you were right. You were right about me. Tell your sister.”
With all the harsh lights and cold metal surrounding them, it wasn’t quite the right setting, but there was a little something that sparked in his brain…
“You look so much like your mother in certain lights.”
The sentence slipped from his mouth before he could even think about it, but that was it. It was true. Even in his current age, still technically young, but older due to the stress of the job and Palestine’s routine torture, Anakin remembered what she looked like. She had been so beautiful and Anakin felt his mechanical heart swell at the memory of her.
He had forgotten. He hadn’t, not entirely, not really. But he had in a way. Forgotten her warmth, the light she brought wherever she went.
Luke, his son, brought his hand up to Anakin's shoulder, but Anakin wasn’t done. It was something in his eyes that brought him back all those years ago.
They had been rolling down the hill, laughing and smiling the whole way down. Padme had looked up at him and her eyes had crinkled in that special loving way they only did when they saw him. She had pulled him close to her and they had laid in the grass until they had to return to their responsibilities.
They were fighting in battle, back to back. They were entrusted on missions together and they were a dynamic duo, cutting through anyone that stood in their path.
They slept together in the same bed. She comforted him in the middle of the night when he awoke with tears leaking out of his eyes. He reminded her to rest when the Senate was getting wild. How many times had they found each other on the balcony of their apartment, staring up at the moon? And how many times had they guided the other back into the warmth of their home?
They were getting married on Naboo. She was all dressed up in her cream colored gown, glittering and gorgeous. It was warm out, but not warm in the sticky uncomfortable way that his home planet was like, it was pleasant and nice. The trees flourished above them, their branches adorned with rich green leaves, swaying with the light breeze that tickled through them. She had taken his hand— his robotic one, not his flesh hand— and held it while the officiant droned on in the background.
Hope had been clear in her features, evident in every move she made therefore on. She used her Senator status as a way to encourage change and she fought for evil and destruction to be torn down until it was gone from every aspect of power. When she stood under the cold stares of the Senate, she didn’t waver. Her voice had rung out clearly, filled with a calm sort of fire.
It was only too fitting that her children should take after her in that regard. Even when they were separated, they both managed to find their way to the Resistance, to stand for freedom and to lead their people to it. Like her, they were strong and willing to use their strength for good. An admirable quality. It was part of the reason that Anakin had fallen for Padme.
How had Anakin fallen so far? He realized, as he laid on the floor of the ship, that he had been forced to stand for everything that he had despised. His and Padme’s lives had been ripped away from him and for what: loving too much? Too hard?
Maybe that was why seeing his son, so kind, so passionate about what he did filled him with so much emotion that he hadn’t let himself feel for so long.
He surely wasn’t the same boy who fell in love all those years ago, and he definitely wasn’t the same man that had a loving wife and was expecting kids. He had changed on that day on Mustafar, becoming more cruel, blinded by the rage and the pain.
Anakin was dying. That was already established and it was something that he and Luke knew well. But he was only dying in the physical sense. He had already died long ago, before he had become Darth Vader. He had died when Palpatine had tricked him into embracing the Dark Side. He had died when he turned on Padme, ignored her pleas for him to just come back to her.
Anakin let his heavy eyes fall shut, and he laid back on the ground. He heard Luke’s sharp intake of breath, his worried hand on his arm shaking him gently. He was saying something to Anakin, but Anakin couldn’t focus on his muffled words.
He was coming back.