So Beautifully Shattered

TITLE: So Beautifully Shattered
AUTHOR: Kellyb-Pagan
RATING: NC-17
DATE: Winter 2006/2007
SUMMARY: Seven months after a slightly different outcome to the infamous duel, a suit-less Vader is in the process of hunting down the remaining Jedi who escaped the execution of Order 66. As he follows a lead to a small, out of the way planet, he meets his future in his past.
CHARACTERS: To list them would be to spoil.
TIME PERIOD: Approximately seven months after Revenge of the Sith ended.
TYPE: AU sequel to ‘Succumb’/The End Justifies the Means
GENRE: Angst, Drama, Romance, Sex.
WARNINGS: Contains Vaderesque behaviors, sex, coercion, violence, death, and heartbreak.
DISCLAIMER: I'm just a simple woman trying to make my way in the universe. I intend no infringement on the Lucasfilm characters, situations, or storylines. I'm making absolutely NO money off of this so suing would really be pointless, George dear. This rendering is merely for the titillation of rabid Star Wars fans like me who have WAY too much time on their hands. Bless us one and all.
AUTHOR’S NOTES: I have been working on this idea for the past three to four years. It’s meant to be an AU sequel to ‘Succumb/The End Justifies the Means’. I realize some basic plot devices are now rather common and can be found in fics already out there (i.e. suitless Vader, etc.) but at the time I came up with my premise, it was all new. This story has been in my head, digging at me for a long time, and I really had no choice but to write it or go insane. I can only hope I’m addressing my AU in a new and/or interesting way and that you enjoy it. Although the previously mentioned fics did not finish with endings that matched ROTS, until I have time to correct that, please consider that I am working on this fic as if they did.
NOTE: This fic will change points of view. At this time I also plan on using both first person and third person but it will not be within the same chapter. Force thoughts (if any) are designated by: //thought//. Normal thoughts are designated by: italics. Any direct lines from TPM, AOTC and ROTS (movie or novel) appear in italics and quotes if possible. Please note that in the Introduction the section in italics/quotes was borrowed directly from the Revenge of the Sith novel by Matthew Stover and I am not claiming it as my own.
ARCHIVE: Sure, just let me know where so I can visit.

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12/10/06 - I just recently found out two things. 1) There are quite a few fanfics out there already titled Beautifully Broken, though none that I could find in the SW fandom, and 2) Beautifully Broken is a frigging Ashlee Simpson song. I came up with the title 4 year ago, I'm not sure when the Simpson girl came out with her song. Needless to say, I was driven to rename my fic ASAP. I figured it was best to do this as early as possible to keep confusion to a bare minimum. My apologies.


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INTRODUCTION

Mustafar
Second Day of Emperor Palpatine’s Rule


“It is bitter to lose a friend to evil,
before one loses him to death.”

Mary Renault


Lightsabers clash. One combatant strikes; the other parries. Two figures spin and twirl in this macabre dance. It is a violent confrontation meant to have only one outcome – death for the loser.

This duel has been going on for a long time. It can be measured not in minutes or hours, but rather in years. It would not be an exaggeration to say the battle began just over thirteen years ago when a former slave boy from a small Outer Rim world became the apprentice of a reluctant and newly knighted Jedi.

The very first salvos were not made with deadly lightsabers or even with clenched fists. It was nothing so blatant. Rather, first blood was unknowingly drawn by a few careless words spoken under the burden of inexperience. Later still, misunderstood glances and dismissive gestures left wounds to fester and never quite heal. It would be a pattern which repeated itself again and again. Yet somehow, their friendship and familial love, their bonds of loyalty and trust, tempered any true discord. Still there is no denying the damage done. The tiny chinks created were merely plastered clumsily over, hidden away beneath the seemingly placid surface of normality. And every passing year saw the fissures work a little deeper, grow a little wider, weakening the foundation from within.

All was kept on a relatively even keel as long as outside forces worked with the pair, not against them; as long as something united them, bringing them together with a common goal.

Such times are in the past. Those days long over, dead and buried - the ties once holding the pair together irrevocably damaged by acts of treachery and the birth of distrust. Every past slight, whether real or only imagined, all the suppressed resentment never before allowed a voice has been unleashed. The screams of furious betrayal rise up from the black and twisted gates of the Sith’s hell; the very place where the younger of the two men has so recently consigned his soul. His opponent meets this dark rage with a mixture of heartbroken acceptance and an intractable determination to put an end to the evil that has consumed the boy he once knew.

The two combatants in this life altering duel are Jedi Master Obi Wan Kenobi and his former apprentice, Anakin Skywalker. Anakin has been many things in his young life – slave, Padawan, Jedi Knight, hero of the Republic, husband. All of these titles he has shed, some willingly, some not, but he has discarded them nonetheless - all except one. As this former hero engages Obi Wan in combat, he is unaware that very soon he will lose the title he cherishes the most. Very soon he will be a husband no longer.

For in the casting off of his old titles, Anakin has adopted a new one - Darth Vader, Sith Lord. It’s this new name and all that goes with it which already caused Padmé to refuse his offer of ruling by his side. Now it has exposed the fatal flaw existing between Master Kenobi and former Knight Skywalker.

Obi Wan and Anakin, Jedi and Sith, Kenobi and Vader. Regardless of what he calls himself it does not change what they once were: friends, brothers, sometime rivals, surrogate father and son. But it does have an affect on what they are to each other at this moment in time - enemies.

This duel is their destiny, their fate. They have been moving toward this from the day they met. It is here, on one of the most inhospitable planets imaginable, a friendship, a bond of brotherhood, shatters beyond repair. One thing is indisputable. The galaxy will never be the same again.

“Obi Wan flipped in the air and let the Force bring him to a catfooted landing. An adder-quick stab of his lightsaber disabled the platform’s guidance system, and Obi Wan was able to direct it back toward the shore with a simple shift of his weight.

He turned to watch as the collection plant shrieked like the damned in a Corellian hell, crumbling over the brink of the falls until it vanished into invisible destruction.

Obi Wan lowered his head. ‘Goodbye old friend.’”

Obi Wan’s assumption of his former Padawan’s fate is incorrect, however. Unbeknownst to one of the few remaining Jedi Knights in existence, Darth Vader still lives. Before the collection plant slides over the molten falls, the young Sith makes a Force assisted leap onto the back of a hapless collection droid. Full of rage and murderous intent, he thirsts to continue the fight. There is nothing he wants more than to see his former Master dead at his feet and by his own hand. But he miscalculates and is doomed to be disappointed.

The worker droid proves incapable of carrying such a heavy load and even the power of the dark side won’t give Vader wings of a bird. In the end, he barely makes it to solid ground. He lands hard, twisting his leg beneath him, and he goes down onto the smoking shore – the opposite one to where Obi Wan headed, where Artoo and his own transport wait, and where Padmé lies unconscious and vulnerable. It is with these ominous thoughts rattling in his head that he determinedly begins to drag himself over the smoldering black pebbles as first his clothes and then skin start to scorch and singe. Through the agony he rails against fate, against the Jedi, against the universe in a vile curse filled litany. Spittle spews from his blistering lips and his eyes turn bloodshot from the acidic fumes as thoughts of vengeance careen madly through his mind.

Gradually, painfully, he makes it to the relative cooler stretch of gray ash rimming the grotesque beach and he collapses, only to half-rise as a hacking cough grips his body. A stream of blood gushes up his throat, pouring from his mouth and down onto the gray soot beneath him. Vader stares dumbly down at the viscous pool, his world spinning drunkenly. A dull roar fills his ears. For a few wild seconds he mistakes the sound for that of the waterfalls on Naboo and he looks around with an almost hopeful, pathetic eagerness.

But the only sight greeting him is the hellish nightscape of lava, smoke and stark rock. There is no Padmé, no Naboo meadow surrounded by cool falls of water. He is alone and forsaken. The sound grows louder, the familiar whine of thrusters rises in pitch, drowning out the nearby latest explosive eruption. With another wet cough he rolls over on his back. Above him a ship is coming in. A wave of darkness, of ice cold emptiness, flows through him. Sidious has come to call.

//Master//

And then.

//Padmé, help Padmé…//

Despite what transpired on the landing platform. Despite her betrayal. Padmé is his last thought before he succumbs to the volcanic toxins as they continue their merciless attack on the soft tissue of his lungs.

It is only with the timely intervention of his new Master that Vader survives. He spends the next few weeks awash in delirium and racked with fever. Immobilized so the bone knitters can mend his broken leg, the medical droids keep him submerged in bacta to repair the damage done by the poisonous gases and to heal the superficial, but numerous burns he suffered. And while ultimately he emerges from the duel physically unscathed, his psychological state is another matter entirely.

For when he becomes conscious and is finally able to speak, he discovers a horrible, damning truth. Everything he did - submitting to a new Master, pledging allegiance to the dark side, turning on his Jedi brethren and slaughtering them in the name of the Empire - was all for nothing. His reason for living, for breathing, for existing – is gone. Padmé, and their unborn baby, are dead and the blame lies solely at his door. He didn’t lose her in childbirth as his dreams foretold. No, Palpatine informs him with a mocking air of regret and sadness, Vader killed his precious Padmé in a blind rage when he discovered her apparent collusion with Obi Wan.

It is when the dark shadow at his side murmurs these words, that Anakin Skywalker relinquishes his tentative grip on the last tattered remnants of his soul and lets Vader truly take control.

It is then the galaxy learns the meaning of terror.


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PROLOGUE


Seven months later…


“Yet, still I seek you, seek you in my mind,
And down the aisles of memory I grope.
I hate, I love, I pray, and I despair…”

Ella Wheeler Wilcox


I make my home in the black void of nothingness, alone. Only the dark side keeps me sane. Only the power of the Sith keeps me company. Surrendering to its power - the true power - is my comfort, my escape. When the occasional unwanted memory manages to break through my shields, the rage and pain surge forth like a malevolent tidal wave to beat it back. Blue fire cleanses and purifies me. It burns away the weaknesses of my former self. Soon I will exist within a hardened shell so impenetrable nothing will breach my defenses.

In the meantime, my control is infuriatingly imperfect; my willpower, so strong in the day, rarely lasts into the night, for it is then she comes to me. The damnable sun always sets and with it goes my resolve. My pathetic weakness is exposed like a gaping wound to the bacteria ridden air.

I can’t let her go - that traitorous, beautiful memory won’t be vanquished no matter how deeply I immerse myself in the dark, no matter how tightly I cling to its comforting, black embrace. In my waking dreams I see those lying eyes and betraying lips and I hunger for them still. I curse my failure over and over and yet I continue to yearn. The dark side soothes but it has so far failed to cure.

Unable to sleep, I restlessly roam, all the while remembered fragments of what I have lost rise up out of the wasted depths of my mind to torment me with a cruel maliciousness fate has reserved just for me. There is nothing I can do to cease the torture. With my newly attained powers I can control many things but to my increasing fury my subconscious is not one of them. My inability to master that one bedeviling inner aspect burns in my gut like a fiery acid and the taste of failure is bitter on my tongue. It’s like inhaling the corrosive fumes of Mustafar all over again.

Yes, I want to forget but the phantom from my former life is determined to remind me. She seems intent on taunting me with things best left in the past.

Once I would’ve been grateful for anything that brought her to mind. Now the smallest remembrance is too excruciating to bear. And what’s worse, I see traces of her in the accusing eyes of the civilians caught in the crossfire as the old is swept away to make room for the new. I hear echoes of her voice in their dying cries as they protest the injustices they believe are being perpetrated. She is the conscience of the man I used to be and I hate her for dredging up even a glimmer of inner doubt. It is too late for me to turn back even if I wanted to. I am the Empire – it is my future, my destiny.

All would be as it should if she would simply leave me be. Why won’t she let me rest?

I tread the corridors of the star ship I now command and spy her out of the corner of my eye. Fleeting glimpses of silk skirts and long, brown curls tease me; the apparition startles me out of my reverie, tearing me away from thoughts of all I must do in the coming days to serve the man who showed me the truth and the real power. But always, no matter how quickly I twist my head round, no matter how fast my reflexes, the vision vanishes and I’m left staring at nothing.

Alone once more. Empty, hollow.

Illusive like a moonbeam, intangible as a soft breeze, she follows me where ever I go, a constant and agonizing reminder of what I was and what I now am. It’s then the rage flares, it’s then the recriminations rear back on their haunches and roar, showing their sharp, jagged teeth to the universe as my fury spews forth. Lives are forfeited, fodder for my vented frustrations.

Yet as much as I wish her vanquished there is a part of me that insists on engaging in a humiliatingly pointless exercise. I resist. I fight the urge to frivolously speculate, but the ridiculous scenario always drifts back to take root. Eventually, inevitably, the threads of my pathetic musings finally come together. What would I do if ever I managed to turn my head fast enough and actually capture the spectral wraith haunting me? The answer rises up swiftly and with surety, my subconscious having come to the only conclusion possible given the man I am.

But how do you imprison a ghost?


TBC

Feedback very much appreciated.