Chapter Text
Vader has made many mistakes in his life. Most he didn’t regret, but there were some he did, such as: choosing Palpatine over Windu in the Chancellor’s office, choking Padme, doing that stupid flip over Obi-Wan’s head and getting all his limbs chopped off for his troubles, killing those younglings- actually, he’s killed a lot of younglings in his career as a Sith Lord, so maybe he regretted more than some of his mistakes-
Anyway. Vader has made mistakes. He basically pinballed between one terrible decision to the next, and so when he finally succumbed to death, he was completely prepared to be cast down into Super Hell for his many sins. His only consolation was that Palpatine would be there, and maybe Vader could amuse himself in eternal damnation by beating the shit out of that old prune until the end of time itself. Seemed like a suitable punishment for both of them.
But he didn’t end up in Super Hell. Or even mundane Hell. Or even the afterlife in general. No.
Vader died on the collapsing Death Star, the last thing he saw being his son’s devastated face. What a thing to die to, he had thought at the time, someone mourning me. It filled him with peace and relief, and he had prepared to meet oblivion…
…only for the worst thing to happen:
The Force intervened.
Several decades in the past, a minor disturbance in the Force rippled through the galaxy. Like a stone being cast into a still lake, the ripples were small yet noticeable, enough to make the Jedi on Coruscant raise their heads and frown, sensing something but… unable to pinpoint what.
Neither bad nor good. In fact, the Force felt almost… smug?
Coincidentally, on Tatooine, someone woke up on a hot, scorching dune to a bantha curiously snorting at their hair. Said someone reacted as anyone would to waking up to some large, hairy creature mouthing at their head: yelling at the top of their lungs and launching the poor beast away from them using the Force.
It went about four metres, its feet leaving deep grooves in the sand. Unhurt, but very startled, the bantha groaned as it ambled away at a brisk jog, leaving the Someone sitting upright in the sand, bewildered, disorientated, and squinting into the twin suns.
“…no,” said the Someone.
They laid back down in the sand and stubbornly closed their eyes. A brisk wind cut across the dunes, acting like sandpaper against the Someone’s face. It was a gritty sensation that was unpleasantly familiar, made them clench their teeth and their fists and fight down the urge to howl with rage towards the heavens.
“No,” the Someone snarled stubbornly. “No! I died! I died! I should be in peaceful oblivion around about now-!”
Another blast of wind, almost chastising this time.
“You kriffin’-!”
The Someone, once known as the swashbuckling Hero With No Fear, and later the terrifying and dreadful Darth Vader, leapt to their feet and kicked at the sand like a furious child. They screamed in inconsolable rage, their voice echoing across the dunes - only to abruptly stop because-
“I have legs,” Vader said dumbly, sticking one leg out. It was a leg. Flesh and all. He wiggled his bare toes, gritty sand clinging between them. He could feel every grain.
“And arms,” Vader added even more dumbly, sticking both arms out. Even the limb that Dooku had cut off eons ago was there, flesh and bone, and not prosthetic. He stared, fascinated…
…
…
Wait.
“Why am I naked.”
In the end, the Jedi had shrugged their shoulders at the ripple in the Force. There were more important things to focus on, you know, such as the war the Republic had hauled itself into with the newly formed Confederacy. The disturbance hadn’t felt dangerous, so it could be safely ignored, they had all decided.
(Meanwhile, Palpatine sat in his chancellor chair and wondered at the sudden surge of dread that shivered over him like a funeral shroud. That disturbance… it whispered danger, it whispered I am going to fucking kill you, it whispered… well, death threats weren’t new, but it was the first time Palpatine felt so threatened.
Maybe he should tread carefully for a bit, figure out what that disturbance was…)
On Tatooine, however, a storm was brewing. Literally. A sandstorm was blustering across the dunes of Tatooine as Vader, newly restored to a brand new body (literally brand new, he had no callouses! Or clothes!), stalked his way towards the horizon, the very malicious eye in that raging storm.
He had no destination in mind. If anything this was him being defiant in the face of the Force’s active interference. It stole his peaceful death from him? Fine. He is going to walk into the Tatooine desert until the exposure or heat killed him. He is going to ignore the Force’s very insistent wind blasts at him and stomp his way into another death experience, because Vader was, and always had been, petty.
Vader was done! He was done! He had finally done one (1) good thing and that was killing Palpatine in defence of his too good for the galaxy son, and this is how he’s rewarded? Plopped onto Tatooine without even underwear or even a slip of paper telling him what he was meant to do? What, did the Force expect him to stick out his thumb and have a well-meaning smuggler drop out of the ether to hitch him a ride to Coruscant?
He paused. He looked around him.
Nothing but sand.
Vader… stuck out his thumb.
…
…
Nothing.
“You couldn’t even arrange a chauffeur,” Vader said in disgust. “Whatever this is, it’s very half-assed.”
The Force responded by blasting a wad of sand right into his face.
“You kriffin-!”
Somehow, Vader survived his trek across the desert.
This, too, was the will of the Force… and the convenient arrival of a moisture farmer on their way to Mos Eisley.
“Surprised you survived as long as you did, son!” the moisture farmer, who was more leather than man, remarked from behind the wheel. “Those suns woulda baked ya into a lump of coal if ya stayed out there any longer!”
Vader was aware. His brand new skin was peeling from severe sunburn. The rough-spun cloak the well meaning moisture farmer had given him felt like knives were scraping his skin raw. Vader kept it on, let the familiar pain soothe his rattled nerves. Pain was good. Pain was familiar. It was also very distracting and ensured Vader didn’t lose his temper and snap this moisture farmer’s neck for his insistent need to drawl in his ear for the whole damn ride.
“Guess ya got jumped, eh?” the moisture farmer blathered on. “Eh, it happens. Least those bandits let ya keep your life, eh? Even if they thought Tatooine would sort ya out… but luck’s on your side today, son!”
Not luck, Vader thought darkly. In the back of his mind, he felt the Force shiver smugly.
you're enjoying watching me suffer, he accused it acidly.
you deserve it, the Force said.
Vader had no response to that. He did deserve it.
Anyway, the ride was short yet tortuously long, and the moisture farmer let him off at Mos Eisley without charging him (“It’s not like you’ve got anything under that cloak!”). The farmer even let him keep the cloak, and Vader watched him trundle off into the distance on his speeder, musing over his thoughtless kindness.
But it left Vader in a bit of an awkward spot. He was standing on the fringes of Mos Eisley, penniless, with only a cloak to his name… and the Force. As vindictive as it felt currently, the Force had always been Vader’s most reliable and closet companion. It keened in pain with him, it gnashed its fangs with his rage, it howled in grief when the memories of Padme and Obi-Wan grew too much… he couldn’t completely hate it, though, even if it was the source of his misery.
Still, that didn’t give Vader any guidance. What was he supposed to do?
Mos Eisley was timeless. It looked no different to the last time Vader had been here, and that had been identical to how it looked in Vader’s youth. He stood on the fringes and watched the denizens hurry to and fro: slavers and slaves alike.
He was garnering glances, though. Vader could feel their eyes, their focused malice, their consideration. He was a viable target: vulnerable and alone, clearly easy pickings… ha, haha, when had Vader ever been easy pickings? Even like this…
Palpatine was dead, Vader’s miraculous survival and unexplained teleportation aside. Whatever power vacuum would form, Tatooine would be untouched. His son and daughter didn’t need him popping his head above the parapet, throwing their lives into chaos - Vader, despite his yearning for them, was turning a sort of new leaf here. He has done enough harm to his children. The best thing he can do is stay away… let them find their feet and make peace with what happened…
(And also let Leia cool off for a good decade or two. Vader is sure that after thirty years she would forgive him for the whole blowing up Alderaan and killing her adoptive family business, so he can pull his “I have miraculously survived!” surprise then. He’ll also buy a very expensive and valuable reunion present to smooth things over…)
But just because Vader was self-exiling himself to Tatooine, didn’t mean he had to do it like Obi-Wan did. Become a hermit in the middle of the desert, acting all enlightened but in actuality was just incredibly depressed? Pass Vader with that, he was more inclined to venting his rage and grief upon well-deserving targets…
Vader smiled. It wasn’t a nice smile.
And where he was, there was no short supply of well-deserving targets for Vader’s rage and grief. Slavers as far as the eye could see, and Vader, penniless and with nothing but the cloak on his back… and the Force.
It purred, writhing with vindictive anticipation. The Dark Side was strong here, surging with the bottomless well of human misery and greed. The nearby slavers eyed him with opportunistic greed, but they had no idea that a monster stood in their midst. A benefit to this new body of his: he looked just as he did as a young man, and Anakin Skywalker had never looked dangerous.
Was this what the Force desired of him? Probably not. Vader didn’t care. He had always been a creature more concerned with his own worldly desires, than any abstract plan the Force had for him. Vader had done his one good deed, the galaxy can sort itself out and his children can find their footing out of his shadow. While he waited for their inevitable reunion, Vader can indulge in something he never got to do as a Jedi or a Sith:
Cleanse Tatooine.
Vader kept smiling as he walked up to the nearest target. Well-armed, burly, looking like he was evaluating the price of Vader’s organs… he’ll do.
“Excuse me,” Vader said pleasantly, “I will be taking your weapons.”
“What?” said the target.
“I don’t like repeating myself,” Vader said, still pleasantly. He was in a good mood.
And when the blood flowed…
…his mood was even better.
Of course, that mood soured when Vader realised that the Force had fucked him over in more ways than one.
“980 ARR…”
980 ARR. 980 years after the Ruusan Reformations. Also known as 20 BBY. Twenty years. Before. The Battle of Yavin.
Twenty years.
Before.
Vader stood amidst carnage of blood and viscera. The local slaver lord Vader had planned to usurp and use their riches for his own gains now mostly forgotten, as he looked over the date on the datapad over and over again. As if it would change if he blinked enough.
“980 ARR…”
He was like a broken record. He couldn’t stop. Everyone here was dead and Vader was dumbly processing the fact that his miraculous survival included time travel. If the Force was capable of such feats, why didn’t it vaporise Palpatine on the spot the moment he popped out of the womb? Was the Force stupid? Or was this some convoluted punishment it devised just for Vader? He wasn’t sure what was worse: the Force being so incredibly idiotic, or being so incredibly malicious.
“980 ARR…”
Twenty years. Wait. This was… this was the middle of the C lone Wars. A year before Order 66. A year before Vader did all those terrible mistakes. A year before he choked Padme. A year before he killed those younglings. A year before Obi-Wan cut off all his limbs and left him burning to death on the lava riverside, because he loved him so much he decided to leave him to die in the cruellest way possible.
Love had a way of making you do insane things, Vader had come to realise.
But.
A year before Vader’s mistakes manifested.
He dropped the datapad and stared at the unspooled guts of strewn across his bare feet. He needed boots, he thought absently. It was nice to have limbs again, but he forgot how disgusting feeling wet sand was between his toes.
Vader let his mind drift in that quiet space of inanity for a moment. Slowly, like an iceberg sliding out of the mist, he understood what a tremendous opportunity this was for him. His children weren’t born yet - weren’t conceived yet either, thinking about it - but they soon will be. Vader hadn’t burned his bridge with them yet - he hadn’t committed any crimes against them.
He hadn’t gone anything heinos in Obi-Wan’s eyes to be abandoned. He hadn’t killed the Jedi younglings or Dooku or killed anyone (of worth) just yet. Vader could- he could-!
Wait.
If he was here, in a time and place where Anakin Skywalker definitely wasn’t, then…
Vader blinked at the abrupt snarl in his nascent plan. If he was here, was there another Anakin Skywalker currently fighting with the Jedi, commanding his troops, blithely walking into his worst future because he was the stupidest and most selfish man in the galaxy? Anakin Skywalker, the corpse Vader had never been able to completely bury despite his best attempts, had hauled it around, dangling by his neck, for decades?
An obstacle.
Vader felt a fission of rage - then calm, because he understood, now. The purpose of all of this. The reason for his existence here.
Anakin Skywalker was beyond redemption. Left to his own devices, he will march into the abyss and drag everyone he loved down with him. Padme will die. Obi-Wan will become a broken shell of his former self. His children will grow up unaware of their true father. Anakin would not turn away from this path, not with only a year left before his fall. He was too stubborn, too petty, too self-centred, too Vader.
Vader was also beyond redemption, but with suffering has come wisdom. He will kill Palpatine before letting him form his Empire. He will never lay a hand - physical or through the Force - on Padme ever again. He will defend his children until his dying breath. Obi-Wan…
…
…he was complicated, but Vader won’t leave him a broken shell of his former self. Maybe.
He turned slowly. The window was polished enough that Vader could see his reflection. Anakin Skywalker, blood-soaked and wild-eyed looking, smiled back.
Vader’s path was clear.
He had to kill Anakin Skywalker.