#it’s just the smoke and dust and ash of mustafar

[unspuncreature]

I love participating in memes in a timely fashion

[sanerontheinside]

Written for the QuiObi Writing Server's Reclaim the Tag challenge, our answer to the influx of pornbots in our home tags. Prompt by the lovely @luvvewan, from angst dialogue prompts: "Why are you asking me this?" [ao3 link]

“You should take the boy,” Obi-Wan said. His voice was hoarse and strained, damaged by the acrid smoke of Mustafar. Choked with grief. Quiet, both in their cabin and in the Force: Obi-Wan was very careful not to wake the youngling in his arms. “You’ll take him, won’t you? Get him to the Lars family?”

Qui-Gon suppressed a shudder. His eyes still stung, and he felt as though his tongue and throat and lungs had been coated with ash—dry, grating. Worse than that was the chill that crept up his spine as he imagined taking Luke from Obi-Wan’s arms and turning away from him. It seemed to him that Obi-Wan was barely there as it was. That if Qui-Gon took the child from him, he would be taking away the only tether that held Obi-Wan in this Moment. 

He couldn’t bear the thought of it. After all they’d lost in one horrible, nightmarish day, after all the surreal emptiness—this, Qui-Gon knew, would break him. 

Obi-Wan looked up sharply, as if he’d sensed Qui-Gon’s doubts. “You’ll take him to them?”

Qui-Gon cocked his head, and stalled for time. “Why are you asking me this? Where will you be?” 

You know where they are, Qui-Gon almost said, and I don’t. But he didn’t voice that problem either. It seemed so unimportant, after all, when all he could see in front of him was the fading silhouette of his former Padawan, dissolving away into a cloud of Tatooine dust. 

Obi-Wan had walked away from him many times in the course of their years together. Qui-Gon had always known Obi-Wan would be well without him—until now. 

Now, Obi-Wan was staring at a point on the wall just to the left of his shoulder, chewing thoughtfully at his lower lip. His brow furrowed. “I—he must be hidden, kept safe.” 

“He is not safer with me than he is with you,” Qui-Gon said softly. 

“Of course he is,” Obi-Wan snapped, his eyes coming suddenly, brilliantly alive—though he was still careful not to wake the boy. “I already failed A-An—” for a second Obi-Wan seemed to choke, and shook his head. “His father. I will not fail him, too.”

Qui-Gon’s heart squeezed painfully. “He needs you, Obi-Wan.”

Obi-Wan’s laugh was dry and mirthless; it cut Qui-Gon to the bone to hear the desolation in it. “I am the last thing he needs. I—I can’t—” 

Obi-Wan squeezed his eyes shut. His hands clenched on the blanket, turning a bright, bloodless white. 

Qui-Gon moved without thought, crossing the cramped cabin to wrap an arm around Obi-Wan’s shoulders and drawing him into the circle of his arms. Obi-Wan buried his face in Qui-Gon’s shoulder, gasping. 

“How could I have been so blind?” Obi-Wan whispered. “How could I miss—he was—”

“Shh,” Qui-Gon whispered. “The Moment, Obi-Wan. You can’t change what is past.” 

A ragged gasp burst from him. “No. But the Moment is…”

Qui-Gon sighed and nuzzled against his hair, pressing the lightest of kisses to the crown of his head—because he couldn’t bear not to, and didn’t dare to do anything more than that. “I know.”

The Force was jarringly, horribly silent around them. Empty, burnt-out. 

“Stay with me, Obi-Wan,” Qui-Gon whispered. “I need you.”

Obi-Wan sobbed once, a ragged sound. But the fight seemed to have gone out of him, and he didn’t argue. 

Qui-Gon simply held him, slipping an arm around Luke between them. For a moment it was tempting to imagine they were simply two people with a youngling to care for. That Obi-Wan was his to care for just as much as Luke was. 

“That’s not possible,” Obi-Wan whispered into his collar. 

Qui-Gon buried a kiss in his hair and shook his head. “Then just let me have this?”

Obi-Wan huffed. “I’d give you the world, if only it was in my power.”

Qui-Gon sighed, and nuzzled against his temple. “Just having you here,” he whispered. “I don’t need anything else.”

[astarsdarkheart]

Infernal

The Force binds every part of the galaxy together. A single room cannot contain it within mere walls.

A/N: On the one hand, writing Anakin having meltdowns is fun because I get to go ham on the over the top sandstorm metaphors and there is basically no limit to how dramatic I make it save my own inability to write anything beyond a certain level of intensity.

On the other hand, settle the hell down, Ani.

Warnings for discussion of pain and injury, mention of death.

Also on AO3 and Pillowfort.

In a single blazing moment he will learn what he has wrought, and it may destroy him.

In the flames his violent heart has thrown into the dry kindling of a crumbling world around him, he will see the disasters that have befallen us all because of him.

In the afterglow of his implosion the embers of his downfall will scatter in the world and settle to the ground, awaiting his lashing out, the final cruelty of this most powerful of Sith Lords.

And we will all stand braced and awaiting his wrath, alive and dead, lost and found in the Force. We will watch the furnace swell and consume like the dark heart of a star bursting free of its plasma cage.

We will watch the son of suns explode.

And we will beg of his mother, with her ash-streaked hair and her broken, inhuman smile, that we do not all unravel as he tears the galaxy apart.

Visions ached like any war wound.

She was alive, she’d live. Twins. Ghostly cries still rang in his head, a cosmic storm beyond the stars that stained his eyelids. Her fingers tightened around his nothing more to fear.

The cold whispers were not him. The walls bowed under the weight, coalescing around the fires in his flesh, Obi-Wan’s not the only one here choking them to smoke.

His vision refocused on Padmé. Her brown eyes stared up, wide open in the same shock that the two children what world will they grow up in that the medical droid still held swaddled in off-white blankets one without masters shared.

“…Anakin?”

She knew him.

Though the fires that had torn through his flesh, she knew him.

“Yes.” Shivering fingers, the dust between stars contained by cold gravity, laced with hers. The golden afterglow of the stars they’d been born under held them tight. “You’re going to live, Padmé.”

“The child…”

“Children.” He leaned forward, the breeze between planets catching in his teeth. “They’re twins.”

“Twins?” Eyelids fluttered with the exertion of her speech.

He nodded.

“Can I…”

The droid brushed against Anakin’s over-wide robe like it had been pulled there, whisper-songs echoing as it held the two swaddled babies they will be safe out to Padmé. No more scars. No whips, no chains, no cages. A hand caught her shoulder as she sat up, shaking with the feeble effort. She flinched from the glow, but the droid moved forward, and though he could still feel her shudders what is there to be afraid of now her mouth turned up as she reached out to touch her children.

They shone as bright as he did in the galaxy’s web of matter.

“Oh…” Her smile brightened, strengthened as she took the children in her lap. Golden zephyrs made him glow brighter for a flash of a moment as he watched.

Sparking white like a bottled fire shattered the air. He froze someone’s outside. Heat cracked the fractures in the fabric of the room wider open. The transparent wall out to the corridor shimmered with low light and the haze of his stinging, soot-smeared eyes, but there were figures beyond it, moving, watching. A blaze like Obi-Wan’s slumped presence, hesitant outside who else made it out alive?

Something shuddered beneath his hand. Her head turned. He followed her gaze to the corner of the room, where Obi-Wan had fallen. “Ani…” Then a gasp.

No! “You’re safe, Padmé. You’ll live.” A feverish wordspring, gasping reassurance how hollow is it now as spectral fingers tightened. Careful, careful. No scars for the angel even if I’m made of them now. “Everything will be okay.”

“Obi-Wan…” Bright mist in her eyes fear against the shielding glass of their whites.

“Padmé, no…” Hurried shakes of his head. Soot in his throat again, charring already scorched flesh. “He’s alive. He’s alive. But he… he blacked out. When the droid said you were going into labour…” Hissing whispers scraped against the medbay’s calm, Mustafar’s simmering breeze in places it did not belong. Padmé’s jaw had lost its tension. There is no passion, there is serenity. “He’s alive. I promise you.”

She nodded. Dark eyes turned away from his gaze what is she seeing now to return to the twins. Their twins, their children, but if she won’t look at me —

“Who are you?”

He blinked, pushed away the darkness in his thoughts to the searing whitelight as a figure filled the door. Familiar. Ripples of something twisting and calculating in the void-warm glow of the Force. Bail Organa. Fists tightened, metal crunching. “What are you doing here?” Weak whispers, drawn from a broken throat but I’ve been mute before that vanished into the hum of the droids that hovered out of the way, their buzzing circuits background noise to every far-flung sound that rang in his head from everywhere and nowhere.

“I rescued Obi-Wan and Yoda from the betrayal of the clones, and joined Obi-Wan here after hearing about Padmé.” A hand drifted towards a blaster. Narrowing eyes. As he hesitated, breaths rough against a tortured throat, shattered lungs, the Senator’s gaze turned to the corner of the room turned to the corner of the room, then darkened as he drew his blaster.

He lifted a ghost-warm hand he’ll be the only one hurt but no words passed in the air before the blaster fired. Wild heat congealed between them, frozen into coherent form, frozen in place. Air rushed through him, a sandstorm seeking dust and decay to spin into the air. “Obi-Wan is alive. He blacked out. I don’t know why.”

“Who are you?”

His words rose higher now, fraying at the edges. The storm of a Senator’s anger compacted, drawing tighter as if it no longer dared approach him. “We know each other.” One of Padmé’s best allies in the Senate. But how many identifying features — the smile, the scars, the Jedi uniform — had been cremated by the aftermath of Mustafar’s forge and the void-hot presence of the Force keeping him standing despite Obi-Wan taking both his legs off?

“Bail…” Padmé’s voice cracked like a whip above his head. Shivers made his ice-glass skin flicker. “It’s Anakin.”

Another hand settled on the blaster, but shaking, shaking with a weakened spine and a storm below his skin, one of tearing power that found an echo in the thermonuclear furnace where dragons and serpents are they gone now or just asleep tore dirt off the ground and threw it into the howling space between stars.

“From what Obi-Wan said there’s no way he should have survived Mustafar.”

The words were stronger because they’re true but the blaster didn’t steady. Red pain still simmering in the air between them. He let his hand fall, slowly, mind still fixed on that bar of light. “I can’t explain it either.”

A shake of the head. “What’s happened to you? You’re half burn scars and half hologram.”

Was that what he looked like now what else would people who don’t know this supernova see to Bail — to Padmé? How had she known him when Bail hadn’t, when his old Master hadn’t but no more masters. No chains, no cages.

“Deal with this I must, Senator. Beyond your abilities this matter is.”

Bail didn’t let the blaster fall, but he stepped sideways, away from the door, closer to Padmé.

Somewhere below the folded cloak his chest rose and fell, but it didn’t trap air, just sharp stabbing pieces of something vital. Of all the people who could have survived… of course it would be the Grand Master of the Jedi Order did his clones even turn on him who was here to judge him now. The red blast in the air sputtered into nothing in a clenched fist, held as if to shield his heart, the glove hiding the metal arm, the one that the Masters had stared at with sighs in their throats is that what makes me less than human still. Through speckled vision the stooped figure of the Master of Masters never again entered the room. His ears turned down as he glared at Anakin.

Something dark like the hidden heart of a kyber star caught fire, burst through the sandstorm and through rime skin to fill the room with the spittings of the furnace that had forged his flesh anew. Below the storm he heard a muted chirp, an unfamiliar sound on a tongue not broken to a language yet. What world will they grow up in?

Bail shuddered, shoulder against the wall. Never mind. Blasters were harmless now. Gaze turned on Yoda. “You failed.”

Yoda tipped his head, large eyes narrowing. Blotting vision and shifting colours hid the rest of the room from him. Silent presences one collapsed don’t forget yourself between his furnace and whatever emptiness Yoda had managed to gather into himself in a galaxy full of feeling. “Blame us you would, young Skywalker, hmm? Suggest that becoming Darth Vader is irrelevant, do you?”

Below the blankness… there is no emotion, there is peace but something echoed from Yoda’s deep glare. There is no ignorance, there is knowledge. “A Sith Lord in the Senate and he had to tell a Jedi Knight about it himself to be discovered.” Hissing again, the sandstorm a childhood he thought he’d buried. Home is an anchor and it will drown you. Burning eyes ta vara på ditt vatten he brushed an ice-covered hand against the burn scars. Ignorance, yet knowledge. “But you couldn’t end the war. The clones, the Separatists, it was all Sidious’ work.”

“Hmm.” Yoda tapped his cane against the floor. Droids shuddered as the faint shivers chilled the room. “And you could?”

A fist clenched around the burning heat, condensing matter in his chest that would crush his ribs with its collapse. “Sidious is dead.”

“One death won’t pay for thousands.” Bail’s voice trembled, but with the serrated roughness of a rising storm.

Yoda nodded, face set as he took a shuffling step forward. “And followed him you did, hmm? Grant you greater power than we would, you thought he could?”

Knowledge, yet ignorance.

The air — the rippling warp and weft of the Force itself — cracked with the shockwaves coursing out of the explosion in his chest. The dragon lifted its head again never dead enough as burning eyes let their fire fall on this being he once called Master. A deep breath, another. Bail slumped against the wall, legs weakened. Somewhere to his side, a gasp, a faint cry. Yoda bowed further over his cane as the trapped storm began to whine, only his wide, whitened eyes to reveal the pressure at the edges as the sandstorm broke free, the dragon’s children slipping out between his ribs to hiss in the room as his fist closed, a cold hand around the heat of rage, ice to channel the fire of the furnace.

“You would have let everyone I ever cared for die!”

“And how many others have died to save those you cared about?”

Through whiteout vision he spun to face Obi-Wan. As the serpents split his ribs the man struggled upright, bracing against the corner of the room. His overflowing eyes burnt through the skull-splitting everything that ran through Anakin’s veins. “You know what you did, Anakin. What you brought on the Order. On the Republic.” Obi-Wan shook his head. “If it was so easy to kill Sidious, why wait until after thousands of us died to stop him?”

His mouth kept moving, but if he made a sound it was lost in the sudden roar of the sandstorm.

And the crying of the Force as every darkness that his kneeling to Sidious had brought on them unravelled to show its shape. No chains, no cages, and what price to pay for that ghost of freedom?

Visions ached like any war wound. Like every war wound.

The medbay blurred out behind the sandstorm, the star-fire heat of the dragon’s breath to show him every cruelty again. Watch your water, Ani as he’d gone through the Temple. Younglings, Padawans, Knights with a sick core of fear there is no emotion, there is peace, fear to anger to hate behind the bewilderment that had tainted every trembling hand reaching for a sabre hilt hate to suffering. “No…”

They’d shot Obi-Wan out of the air. Aayla had looked out among the trees for the threat her clones had to have seen. Yoda’s clones had been late to get the message — the Master of the Order had already felt that disturbance tearing the Force in two, had already been alerted to the crumbling pillars who was the Order afraid of? “Who were you afraid of, Yoda?”

A silent lake zephyr below the storm. So easily torn away into the maelstrom, the turmoil of the interstellar weave turned on itself.

Shards of faces filtered through the storm surrounding his static existence. So many identical what becomes of the clones now and so many foreign despite it. And so many faces that he should have known, should have stood side by side with as they fell but I didn’t because you were afraid of me and fear to anger, anger to hate, “…hate to suffering.”

Visions ached like every war wound, black holes in his flesh. Star-cold rage, the banked coals of pain to strike across the throat of the galaxy itself to drain the life out of us all an icy hand clenched and struck bone.

The sandstorm shattered into Obi-Wan’s ashen face, close enough that his gusting breaths like something struck him but I couldn’t have raised a hand heated the ice holding phantom flesh together. “I don’t know what you’ve become, Anakin.” He shook his head. Serpents twisted around his heart. “But justice is justice… and the Emperor’s life alone…” Slick palms slipped on the burning rime of Anakin’s Force-hot flesh.

His fingers unfolded from Obi-Wan’s wrist. Death, yet the Force. “The Force shall free me.” Silence seeped into him again as he turned away. Away from what had been, what had been torn apart just the two of us and the burning bridges by words spat on the hot rocks of Mustafar.

Shut-down droids lingered in the corners of the room, surrounded by shards of glass. Bail straightened from a braced crouch as Anakin turned, a darkness in the set of his jaw that made the dragon hiss as it curled back around his heart. One side of the Senator’s face was scratched by the glass you shattered. Only breathing and a startled child’s noises.

He turned his head. Padmé was bowed over the twins, but none of them bore a single bleeding mark.

“The Sith Code you recall, hmm?” Yoda’s usual grumble had become something flat, like a sea waiting to have its surface broken by a monster of the deep. “Consider you fallen we must, then.”

“Master Yoda…”

Padmé? She hadn’t moved, but her lifted chin carried all the confidence everything that made you call her an angel that the Queen and Senator had ever been able to summon. “We’re all distressed and in shock after the events of the last few days.” Not a quiver though her voice was weak with pain you inflicted. She shifted the weight of the twins in her lap. “Now is not the time to make rash decisions. We must return to Coruscant and attempt to salvage the political situation. If the Emperor is indeed dead, there will be chaos throughout the galaxy.”

Blue shock filtered through the Force, freezing the thoughts in his mind. Yoda sighed, ears drooping. “Defeated the Order is, Senator. Helpless we are. To restore order, those with power you need… not those scattered by betrayal.”

Too lacking in power to make a difference to this abandoned Empire. A clenched fist under the folds of his robe. Padmé sighed. “You’re the only ones with authority enough over the clones to rein them back in. We need you in the capital, Master Yoda. And you, Master Kenobi.” Her gaze only skimmed him in seeking out Obi-Wan, but something ran through the Force, a red warmth he didn’t know. “Anakin’s present situation is clearly far beyond either of you. Wait on making a judgement until that changes.”

Was that a defence? If anyone would…

Yoda gaze fell to the floor. “Much you ask of us.”

“These are desperate times, Master Yoda.”

Bail straightened his back and sighed, folding his hands over his blaster. “You’re suggesting that we leave the man who slaughtered a Temple full of youths alive and free?”

Burning ice in his veins again. The cracked edges of the window snapped with the chill.

“I don’t think we have much of a choice, Bail.” A Queen’s command in her darkening gaze.

He turned his head, glanced and Obi-Wan, Yoda, Bail. Padmé and her children. Their children.

Yoda heaved out a sigh that left him doubled over his cane. “Argue with you I cannot.”

“Then we’ll arrange for departure immediately.”

Bail started. “Padmé, you’re not well…”

“I can recover along the hyperspace rout as well as I can on a medbay bed.” She swung her legs down to let her feet hover above the floor. “Any time we lose now is time for disarray to establish itself throughout the Republic.”

Still the Republic, in her mind. His clenched fist relaxed. Democracy, a word he’d only ever had shouted at him. Obi-Wan’s allegiance, the reason he could never have been a slave because that didn’t happen in a democracy, this shining ideal of a galaxy he’d never lived in.

A galaxy sobbing a broken song of bloodshed and disaster in his head, chaos stretching out across it like shattered glass across the medbay floor.

He was reckless, impulsive, quick to act, not quick enough at thinking to make up for it. It nearly ended him once.

I nearly ended him once.

And I died for it. How many will follow my path? Fall victim to the cold blood of one born of the Force itself, a human dressing on a force so old, so inexorable, so passionate in its consuming of everything it loves that the vessel it shapes can hardly be compassionate?

I wonder still that he seemed so human when I first met him. The recklessness… it does not seem the act of something that knows it will live long. Perhaps the act of something that does not believe it can die.

Watching him now, I have to question it all. He is insecure, he trembles, he freezes when the Force begins to scream. How many others stand behind him as the glass explodes with his anger? I see shades in the mist, but I cannot speak to them. If they do not hear me, does he?

I might, perhaps, forgive him if he does not want to hear. His mother already screams at him enough, fills his head with… things that I don’t pretend to understand. It is for the best that I do not. Sidious’ teachings corrupted me enough — I feel it, now, I feel the way the aether I live in turns on me, tears at me.

He knelt for Sidious, but the Force does not consume its own tail in his chest now. That furnace no longer burns simple steel. There is kyber below the ice, and I can only fear what it means for the day he breaks.

I pray his mother will have mercy. He will not.

[astarsdarkheart]

Incandescence

Mustafar is the place where Jedi go to die. Most have forgotten that the fifth precept of their code can be taken literally.

Mustafar is the place where Sith are forged from the horror of their apprenticeships. Their masters always forget how their code ends.

A/N: Trying out cross-posting to Tumblr and seeing if anyone bites on that. The notes for this one are a little lengthy, so they’re going under the cut, with the bulk of the fic because this got ramblier than I was expecting when I started writing. This has also been posted on Dreamwidth, AO3 and Pillowfort.

Warnings for death/murder scene, mention of bodily trauma.

His old master’s silhouette blurred into the smoky darkness of the shadowed bank. He rocked and struggled forward, metal fingers slipping on the glass-smooth pebbles beneath him I hate you, I hate you that crumbled as his hand clenched around the soot-shards.

Hate from anger, from the burning in his stomach, the belly of the dragon that had now come to eat him alive. There is no emotion, there is peace. Thoughts melted in the furnace he lay trapped in. The silhouette vanished in the dimness, his last sight of his old master the faint gleam of his lightsabre in the roiling glow of the churning lava that surrounded him, drowning him in fire.

Suffering from hate, hate from anger, anger from no anger from no it cannot be anger from fear.

There is no ignorance, there is knowledge.

Fear slipping like snakes through his ribs, tightening around the spark-heavy air that charred his lungs as he settled on the rocks. Metal in his arm screamed in protest at the heat and strain. It had never been built to bear his whole weight. He’d been the hero with no fear and now... fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate...

I hate you, I hate you, I was angry at you, I feared you, I feared for you...

The fire in the air closed in like a cloak of durasteel as the snakes in his chest tangled together in his heart, hissing their coldness as he shut his eyes against the searing dust in the air.

The flaws of the Jedi Order are spectacular. This man is but the symbol of its fall. One of their greatest, their most powerful, and they wished to hold him back.

That is where they fall, these Jedi. All those who seek power fear to lose it. They learnt that lesson, then decided that they would humble themselves – and that this, this... surrender of their greatest gifts, their most awesome ability would bestow greatness on them.

Greatness is power. And all those who seek power fear to lose it.

Let the hate burn itself to embers along with his flesh. There is no passion, there is serenity. Tongues of flame tested the edges of his flesh. His teeth gritted to keep the ash out of his throat.

I am not afraid! He did not fear death. He would not fight it now the dragon that had whispered in the night had taken shape around him. Trails of water ran down his cheeks only to steam away, Tatooine’s heat in the water, watch your water but did that matter now?

Nothing matters. Obi-Wan had walked away. Padmé would join him if she and the children survive. Nothing more to think, nothing more to feel. No need to fear death now.

There is no chaos, there is harmony. He would pass away in the fire that had welcomed him to life. The glow in his chest that had answered the hearth-heat of the twin suns. The fire of passion, of the love he’d once known.

Vengeful fire stripped the skin off his flesh. Unkind, hateful. Hate from anger, anger from fear, but what could this river of failing rock fear? All this furnace would ever forge was corpses. Like the suns he’d been born under and I am their son just ashes in the howling wind left behind.

There is no death, there is the Force. The flames had grown familiar. The dragon was close to gathering in the last of him. Like sinking into home.

A shame to waste an apprentice as powerful as this one. He will be easily manipulated, as he has been for years. And his injuries will require... special attentions. He will not trouble me.

It is only a matter of ensuring that he remains volatile enough to live. His presence is fading. Despair will engender passion, so long as he remains alive long enough for the flames he has sunk into to forge that despair into rage.

He must be reminded of our code. He knows the fallen Order’s one far better. Injured and distressed as he now is, he may forget which one it is he needs to remember.

A presence in the mist of soot. He lifted his head. The hiss of his own breath let heat stir the ashes around him anew. A dark figure shuddered into dim clarity.

“Listen, my apprentice.”

The dragon coiled tight in his stomach. Pebbles crumbled between his fingers.

“You will survive this, Lord Vader.” Sidious crouched down beside him, the flushed skin surrounding his scar of a grin. “Concentrate. Remember what you have learnt.”

Orders from his master but what will a master do when his slave burns alive save laugh more pebbles crushed under his hand.

Sidious’ hiss became a sing-song whisper. A lullaby for the dragon. “There is no peace, there is only passion.”

The dragon’s fire still seamed his skin. But he no longer shook, was no longer racked with convulsing shudders of pain. Passion, yet serenity.

“Through passion I gain strength.”

Breath gusting out like a breeze as his chest lifted from the glowing obsidian beneath. His tabards were charred though, hanging in crumbling strips. Fire and ice colliding in his veins, the chill of despair tempered by a burning certainty. Chaos, yet harmony.

“Through strength I gain power.”

Weights of what he’d lost held him down. Teeth gritted, jaw tight though it tore at weakened, ashy flesh. His eyes burned. But nothing else, not anymore. To burn was to give himself up to the dragon’s temptations. Emotion, yet peace.

“Through power I gain victory.”

In a flash of clarity through the soot and smoke-haze, he remembered. Padme’s shock as he’d asked if Obi-Wan was alive. Her agony as she’d collapsed. Obi-Wan’s horror. With the power of the flames gathering in flaring muscle as he drew himself upright, he understood it is, it is because I made it so. Like strings of an instrument the Force hummed its harmony with the realisation that made his jaw relax, letting the flying embers into him again. Ignorance, yet knowledge.

“Through victory my chains are broken.”

“Death, yet the Force.” Ghostly words whispered from beyond charred lips, a scorched throat. Sidious followed him to stand as he found himself balanced on something raw and hot, not flesh but something warmly akin to it, something the Force allowed to exist without contorting and crying out the way it did in Sidious’ heart. “The Force shall free me.”

This figure in its eldritch verglas incandescence is so unlike my apprentice that something must have possessed him. Anakin Skywalker is weak, fragile, bound too tight by his own fear to break away from what he knows.

This spirit that has taken his place... I do not know it for Sith or Jedi. The heat, the passion, is something that no Jedi would condone. And yet... the ice that seals the fire, prevents it from doing harm... and the fire fails to melt the ice. Perhaps this creature is a traitor. Certainly a blasphemy in its mixing of the Jedi’s failures and our code.

But he still speaks with Anakin Skywalker’s voice, though it seems his throat is near destroyed. No matter. Words are for those like Tyranus, who can make effective use of them. Not stuttering, rambling weak-witted things like Skywalker.

The words came unbidden in the singing of the Force. “All I asked of you was that you would help me save Padmé.”

“And if in your anger...”

“No.”

The dragon in his stomach, the progenitor of all those little serpents that hissed between his ribs, in his ears, had risen to roar again. A ghost-flesh hand outstretched to Sidious’ throat. The hood fell away to reveal the eyes that shared the colour of the wounded landscape as Sidious’ breath became a wheeze, a tortured hiss like the one his own scorched lungs produced.

“You fed that fear.” Fingers tightening, cold around the soot that couldn’t fly away in time. “And you mean to make it flare brighter even now!”

“Calm... yourself, my... apprentice.” The words weak between the gasps. As feeble as this master’s weakened by his own grasping at power body. “She... lives... for now. But without... you...”

“You would let her die.” Burn wounds blazed around the snarl that twisted his lips. Sidious twitched as his feet left the bank. Pebbles and soot slipped away beneath his boots, tumbling down the bank towards the river of fire that had spawned them. “I obeyed you because you told me you knew how to save her, and you would let her die!”

“You do not... know...”

“Ignorance, yet knowledge.” Sidious hovered among the storm of sparks in the air. The hot breeze tugged his hair over his eyes, but there was no more pain in the touch of hot rocks and burning air. Flurries of hot and cold, raining ice and fire, still spun between his ears. How long had he lain prone against the volcanic marble that lined the river? Padmé, Obi-Wan... they could be long gone but if I end Sidious’ rule here that is enough.

Flickering lightning burst in the air as Sidious twitched in his grip. “You are as foolish as your masters. Arrogant enough to think Jedi ways...”

“The Force shall free me.” A burning hand closed into a fist, holding Sidious aloft. The yellow eyes rolled to expose whites flecked with soot. No more masters. Just him and the Force and none of you will fool me again!

He has become something else entirely. This is no Jedi, to attempt to murder me this way. And yet... there is so little Sith in him. His passion, his rage, it is far too controlled.

Not controlled, perhaps, so much as channelled. He has learnt... control over the suppression that I was always given to think the Jedi favoured. Yet what disciple of the Dark Side would choose to keep their passion so repressed save one who

Sidious kept gagging as he stared, breaths heaving in his chest. So little of his flesh left unscarred, but he could stand nonetheless. Some beautiful trick of the Force but how long will it last?

His eyes narrowed as he glared at Sidious. At this other master who had promised things he’d meant to take away all along. He turned to the river of orange flickers between the crust of darkness.

A twist of the arm and Sidious was flung out into the lava. His robes pooled over the crust of the river.

Perhaps that last pathetic call he heard was one of agony. The Sith Lord vanished into the fire that had taken the living flesh off him.

He turned from the river. His strides made no sound, not a single pebble shifting under his feet. He lifted his left hand – Obi-Wan had cut away flesh and blood, but some phantom remnant of the limb made of fire frozen in place still flexed with the tendons that he could still feel.

The Emperor was dead, and the Empire barely born. What now? What crimes can I answer for when death has failed to touch me?

Death, yet the Force. Whatever lay in store for this Empire built on sand and sand is quicker to fall apart underfoot than these pebbles he could at least seek out Obi-Wan and Padmé. If they will still look at me.

There is no ‘light’ and ‘dark’. Only the Force, and the ways it can be twisted.

Life lives and it suffers and it dies only to form the dirt from which new life will rise. Touch the Force and it will give rise to life unlike what most would know as such. Is it an act of darkness to raise such things, things that were never supposed to live? Or is it an act of light, to give shape to something that will not suffer for the mere crime of daring to live? Is that not what the Force wishes, for life to thrive?

Ah, but the living Force is only one side of the story.

Artoo began to squeak as he approached, rocking forwards and backwards. Like the droid was seeking an escape.

“It’s just me, Artoo.” Careful of the fiery aether that seemed to have taken the place of his limbs, Anakin bent down and put his right hand, the one of cold metal, atop Artoo’s dome head. “It’s time for us to leave.”

Artoo hesitated, before letting out a series of rapid, inquisitive beeps.

Anakin shook his head. “I... I was wrong. The Chancellor made promises he never meant to keep.”

Artoo rocked forward, letting out a dejected bloop.

“I have to try to talk to Obi-Wan and Padmé.” Anakin sighed as he straightened up. No pain, not even in the scars covering what flesh remained.

Artoo’s beep sounded much cheerier as the droid trundled around to the back of the ship. Anakin managed a smile through stiffening scars as he leapt up and hoisted himself into the cockpit.

The Force swept up a ghostly breeze around him, carrying presences and feelings from Hutts only knew where into his mind. He sat back in the cockpit and shut his eyes, letting it all just sink in for a moment.

Two familiar sparks hovered somewhere not that far away – not by hyperspace routes, at least – dimmed by something heavy weighing on them.

Obi-Wan and Padmé. He sighed as he opened his eyes and started the engine. The absence of the lightsabre on his belt still bothered him. No use dwelling on it.

Death, yet the Force. He could carry on, even in the world that Sidious had left behind before it could begin.

The Force shall free me.

The train of thought here started with that post about how a suitless Vader would just be walking around like... 'the biggest dilf in the galaxy', I believe the phrase was? That interpretation isn't one I much care for. There's a post I have a vague memory of reading at some point that mentions that the poster's idea of a suitless Vader is one who takes the whole 'The Force shall free me' schtick from the Sith Code and runs with it, and then there's @jerseydevious​ discussing the whys and wherefores of the suit (recommended reading).

So, thanks to my pettiness about the idea that Vader sans suit is just a hot Vader, we now have a situation where Anakin turns into a semi-Force-ghost thing who can't make up his mind about which code he's following and the author goes off on a (relatively short, at least) meta tangent about his views on the Force. As you do.