Lord Vader's Lament

[Jedilaw]

This is Chapter 1 of the story "Lord Vader's Lament

Darth Vader, newly annointed Lord of the Sith, is submerged in a tank full of bacta solution, his artificial limbs detached for maintenance and augmentation. He floats in a world of shadows, a formless void of dark unconciousness. A potent blend of sedatives and pain killers is being pumped into his veins, to keep him dormant during his rehabilitation. He has been known to destroy medical droids and equipment during moments of intense pain, lashing out with the Force to tear apart everything he can see, everything he can grasp with the iron talons of his mind. Imprisoned inside his tomb of ruined flesh, his armless, legless cage, devastated by burns so deep that layers of muscle were melted off of him, there are many momets of intense pain for Lord Vader. Pain is his constant companion, the first thing he feels upon awakening, and his last sensation before falling into shadowed, dreamless slumber.

Each and every night, an array of medical droids sees to it that his sleep is total and uninterrupted, far too deep for dreams. Or memories. He is sedated for his own good, so the droids are constantly telling him. His power is great, but in his current state he does not always have control over it. He has not mastered his pain yet and focused it, as Lord Sideous has instructed, into even greater power. His pain interrupts his thoughts, causes him to lose his focus, to allow his power to break free. He is a constant danger to himself and everyone and everything around him. And so, day after day, he is awoken with a rush of stimulants, then filled with a heavy dose of painkillers, enough to make it possible for him to tolerate his cybernetic limbs without his mind constantly crying out for toes that no longer exist, fingers that are lost in the fires of Mustafar, or abandoned in the dust of Geonosis. Enough painkillers to allow him to don his environmental suit without his burns screaming in constant agony at the touch of cloth and leather. Enough to almost make his helmet bearable. Almost.

He has learned to hate that helmet, the weight of it, the probes that line its interior constantly reaching into his scalp, the red-tinged video displays in front of his eyes. The voice it creates for him. That voice, low and ominous, is not his own. His vocal cords have been singed by the sulphurous fumes of Mustafar, bathed in poison until his voice is barely a croak, a dry whisper. But the helmet overcomes that for him, taking his wheezing, gasping speech and turning it into that dark, mechanical growl that is fast becoming known throughout the Empire as the voice of the Emperor's will. What the Emperor commads, that voice conveys. It is the voice of doom itself. Yet Vader cannot hear it. Encased within his metal death mask, he can hear only what the helmet's auditory sensors pick up. He has programmed the auditory input system (wired directly into his nerves by one of the helmet's many probes) never to present that voice to him. He knows what words he is speaking, there is no need to hear the processed words as they come out of the speakers mounted inside the front grille of his mask. When he speaks, all he can hear inside that mask is silence (the auditory inputs cut out auomatically when he speaks) and his own groaning whisper.

At the end of the day, he retreats to his private chambers, which are climate-controlled and pressurized with an oxygen-rich atmosphere so that his scarred and withered lungs can breath without assistance. His medical droids remove the helmet, and unwrap him from the confines of his environmental suit. At the touch of the cold air of his chambers, his burns cry out, fill his mind with a storm of agony. Those burns cover every inch of what remains of his body. When the burns are exposed to open air, the agony is complete, and unrelelnting. Most nights he allows himself to remain exposed for several minutes. To feel his burns, all of them, experience his new reality. And to attempt to master that pain, wield it in the manner that Lord Sideous is teaching. Then he is fitted with a smaller breathing mask over his mouth and nose, and lowered into the tank of bacta. The droids tell him they are optimistic that within several months the bacta will allow his skin to heal, at least to the point where it is not a constant source of pain. Multiple other skin treatments have been attempted, to no avail. He has no healthy skin to graft over his wounds, so the droids experiment with artificial skin, semi-organic coatings poured over his burns in the hope that something new willl grow. Without exception, his body has rejected every artficial graft. His suit is all that remains, his only protection from the outside world, holding in moisture, controlling temperature, blocking germs. Only his private chambers, with their anti-microbial fields, their constant sterilization, and their absolutely precise environmental controls are safe for him now. Unless he wears the suit. Without the suit, and the mask, all is lost for him. He cannot survive in the world, cannot breath the air, cannot fight the germs.

He will not be allowed to remain in the sanctuary of his chambers for long. The Emperor has plans that only Lord Vader can fulfill, tasks that only a master of the Dark Side of the Force can complete. He needs his apprentice to complete the erradication of the Jedi Order. Vader knows the ways of the Jedi, the personal habits of many of the survivors. He was, until very recently, a hero among the Jedi, legendary even within that warrior's Order for his amazing deeds in the Clone Wars. Only after the true intentions of the Jedi were revealed to him had he turned away from the Order. For the remaining Jedi Knights, Lord Vader is a nightmare cloaked in black, wielding a crimson blade. He knows more of their secrets than any other foe has known for a millenia. And his mastery of the Dark Side of the Force, his terrible, relentless power, is unlike anything the Jedi have ever faced. For these reasons the Emperor commands Darth Vader to leave the safety of his hidden chambers on Corruscant and continue the hunt for the dwindling Jedi. In Vader's eyes, it is the least he can do for Lord Sideous. Without Lord Sideous, he would be dead.

It was Sideous who, having defeated Yoda, the greatest of all the Jedi Masters, sensed his apprentice's peril, even though Sideous was on Coruscant, and Vader was on Mustafar. It was Sideous who came for him, found him lying on the volcanic sands, limbless, burned alive, utterly destroyed. And it was Sideous who kept him from dying. Vader remembers, through the almost-impenetrable fog of pain and misery that surrounds his recollections of Mustafar, the touch of Lord Sideous' hand upon his ruined brow. How the pain had not stopped, but had retreated to the back of Vader's mind. He had been on the verge of slipping away into total darkness when he felt the Emperor's hand . With that touch, he felt an overwhelming presence, an absolute will that would not allow him to succumb to death. It was as if his very soul were being held secure in the Emperor's grasp, pulled back from the heavy current that had been pushing him steadily over the brink of death. In that moment, suspended between his certain death and his devastated life, he felt within him a voice that was not a voice, a thought that was not his own, echoing inside his mind: "You will rise, Lord Vader. You will rise. Death cannot claim you here. Life will be restored to you. Vengeance will be yours."

Life will be restored to you.

At the time, those words seemed like a promise, a last bit of hope to cling to. But now, living day by day with constant pain, needing medical care every second of every day, Vader realizes that as much as that sentence contained a blessing, it contained a warning, even a threat. Yes, life had been restored. But nothing resembling life as he had known it, or as any other man had ever known it. He should be dead. His body is incapable of sustaining him on its own. Only through circuitry and chemicals, metal and leather, is he alive. He is a walking corpse, revived moment by moment by an artificial respirator, his heart shocked awake dozens of times each day by electrodes contained within his suit. He depends upon his machinery, and his machinery depends upon the vast resources of the Empire. Only the Empire itself has the technological knowledge required to tend to Vader's wounds. Only the empire has the finances to purchase Vader's equipment, maintain a swarm of medical droids to hover around Lord Vader, replace what Vader's Force-enhanced tantrums destroy. And the Empire's willingness to sustain Lord Vader depends upon the consent of the Emperor.