“Finding Elysium”
by: AsianScaper
Disclaimer. I do not make a profit out of this, nor do I own any of the characters herein.
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There
are things that deliver the night and others that own it but it seemed that in
the duration of the dream, he carried it like a burden, like a curse, like a
limb gone awfully bent because of its own disease.
It
worried him that his mind had fallen to the same plague; he cried his anguish
when the dream peaked into the delvings of pain and revealed her face, wrought
with light yet ultimately scoured by death.
He
howled into the air exhaled by Coruscant, breathed it in with a hunger and found
himself staring at the city-lights, at the complete artificiality of it as it
stretched with its technology, politics, and a rebounding fear of its own
destruction. Death smothered his lips and he sobbed quietly.
That
was the only certainty. Death.
A
hand was on his back, soothing him.
“Another
nightmare?” Padmé asked, in a voice soft with breezes and the rustle of
sleep.
She
was used to accompanying him, even as she knew her rest was needed to keep both
herself and the child in her womb healthy. But this was to be their ritual,
rising without the sun as he convulsed in an ecstasy of pain –tortured in
sleep.
He
kissed her lips and through them, recovered the memory of all other tastes: the
tingly pickings of pine, fresh with a washing of wind, the golden aftermath of a
sunset as it set a lake afire; the grafted fields that bent in waves against a
cool, unobtrusive zephyr. It made the negative even more palpable.
“A
dream.”
There
was a difference. The former merely haunted; the latter dismissed uncertainty.
She
took his face in her hands, pushing away strands of hair that had grown by
virtue of his attitudes and the fullness of his activities. He had little time
to attend to his looks; but the virtue there was threatened by a scar that
trailed through his right brow, and a frown that added to a rugged, exhausted
beauty.
“Ani,
if I die, then I die. There’s no stopping death.” She smiled softly. Her own
fear emanated from the child growing within her, a fear of its own survival; not
the kind which devoured her husband or the kind which made him crave for a power
he had no right to gain. “Ease that frown, my love. All we know of death is
that no one ever comes back; who knows –there may be immortality to gain.”
His
defiance verged on the violent and his eyes delivered a message of tears, spent
here in their room, and in places shunned by the light. “No. I’ll not have
you speak like that. Not if I can help it.”
His
words dropped the remembrance of youth into Padmé’s eyes, and she saw the
little boy, determined to conquer fate and weave it to his fingers, as was any
child’s right. But here it came to be that she, too, was carrying a mirror of
such determination, which kicked and grew both in sleeping and in waking.
“Have
you talked to Obi-wan about this?”
“No,
I haven’t,” came his coarse reply.
“You’re
not making this any easier; not on yourself and certainly not on me.”
He
stared at her briefly, taking in the delicate tracing of pale skin and the
inward glow which had heightened because of her pregnancy. But he had forgotten
the determination exuded by her eyes, tightened by her lips, made pronounced by
an encroaching fury.
“If
you die,” he said, “I’ll not survive you long. It will destroy me; I
wouldn’t know what to do without you.”
“Live,”
she replied calmly, “And live well.”
He
chuckled. “Spoken like a true Queen, and a Senator.”
“Of
which I am neither,” she said, happy to gain some form of relief as Anakin
made an effort to please her by smiling gently and lowering her deeper into the
sheets.
He
tended to her with exquisite tenderness; a height that prickled one’s skin and
drowned his eyes with tears. And it seemed that it was the last time he had shed
them, with joy brimming and a laughter more foreign, a pocket plucked from
!-!-!-!-!
It
was death hunkering beneath the hum of machinery, the glint of metal, the harp
of cybernetics. It was power in the flesh blistered beneath, tingling in a
continuous inundation of sedatives and the surges of blood potent with the
Force. There was no reason to live well if such was the body, and hardly
virtuous, the mind.
But
the heart. Ah, the heart. Over the decades of searching for forgiveness and
finding none, in those silent hours in his white-washed chambers that reminded
him of every fault to goodness, her memory had tried tirelessly to knead it to
working. But memory was never enough. No, not the memory of her, bedecked in a
Senator’s accolades, her voice elaborating on the wishes of the people, on an
honor that made him ache.
The
ship rocked as the Rebellion bombarded the rest of the defense and Palpatine’s
demise rocked Anakin’s vision of himself and the whole of his gloomily
assiduous world.
“Luke,
help me take this mask off.”
“But
you’ll die.”
“Nothing can stop that now. Just for once...let me look on you with my own eyes.
Death
seemed near. Life, more so. The air of the ship bathed his exposed face and for
once, the mere sight of his son brought forth all the flavors of Naboo. The
glaring of a mid-day sun, the soft murmuring of a brook, the cliffs laden with
spring’s initial bloom.
What-have-been’s
once ground what was Anakin Skywalker’s heart to a halt. An absolute,
irreversible halt. Except now, he was
unmasked and his sight grew unhindered by the screens of technology; it was
Padmé staring back at him with the boy’s eyes, with the conflagration of
youth that had the ability to light up the stars with his hopes.
His
heart began to beat. Oh, the sister had her mother’s grace. If only his eyes
were then, not tortured by anger, hatred, fear; perhaps Padmé would have spoken
through her lips and given him everything he had lost.
“I
can’t leave you here,” Luke said, his face cringing in anguish. “I’ve
got to save you.”
“You already have, Luke. You were right about me. Tell your sister...you were right.”
“Father, I won’t leave you.”
Luke’s words echoed the sentiments of a younger Anakin, in a time long ago, and Anakin merely smiled up at this version of him, who was stronger, less tormented, and nobler in a way that kindled his pride differently.
This was the Jedi that he had never been and the recompense for all the torment Vader had caused. In some deeper part of him, Anakin was relieved that his own son had not turned in the way he had, when faced with an Empire’s empty promises.
Alas, the last of this world’s air cycled through his lungs. He had no breath to spare for decades of apology, of love that he had missed because of his own choosing. He wished to lift a hand, to touch Luke’s cheek and render the mother’s memory clear; to relish the ebbing of a tide, the end of a generation and the start of a saga built on the mistakes of the father.
Vader’s breath rattled to an end and the boy Anakin flitted past his eyes.
Breathe,
boy. Live!
That last breath was for her. And through it all, he gained everything he had lost.
-The
End-