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I waited for him in the ruin of the building I had helped destroy. I paced its broken corridors with my new eyes, felt the echo of final screams etched into the Force.
He arrived. I had tracked his progress across half the galaxy. I could feel him effortlessly, even now. My sense of the Force was always than that of any other Jedi; I felt the taint in my own soul long before even Yoda.
He landed. I let him walk around the ruined building, finally letting him feel my presence as he stood in the old dining hall. "Anakin?" he whispered.
"Anakin no more. Darth Vader now," I told him.
"Vader. Why not simply say 'Father'?" There was a strange cast to his voice--I think he knew that he had lost everything, but he no longer cared.
"You stole my child and twisted him against me," I said, and deliberately stepped into view. I saw Obi-Wan then for the first time in a year. He looked much older than his forty years. He had grown a short beard which did nothing to hide his haunted, skeletal face. But despite his worn looks, his aura was strangely peaceful; it pulsed calm blue against my snapping black energy.
"Did your Sith Master tell you that?"
"All that and more. I've learned quickly, old man."
"Have you?"
I crossed to him, showing off the power of my new electronic body.
"Where is my son?"
"Can't you feel him? He's on Tattooine."
Tattooine. The name was like a blow. It snapped me abruptly back into memory--the desert, my mother, death. I shook out of it, angered.
"You can't touch him. Contact would destroy you."
"So sure of your Jedi powers, old man?"
"He holds the power and knowledge of the Jedi Temple, Vader, the power that Palpatine thought he destroyed. It lurks within him, bright like suns, and to look upon it would destroy you utterly. Destroy you and bring my Anakin back to me."
How--I touched Obi-Wan's mind, looking for truth, and found it open as the desert sky. And I saw the love that propelled him through this year of pain. Love of Yoda, of Amidala, the infant boy on Tattooine. The lighthouse love of Qui-Gon that set his path so many years ago. The love of me, of the man I had been.
It burned. Like acid. It set my charred soul boiling. I had to turn away--I had to look away, propping myself against the wall.
I had the proof I wanted. The proof of his love that my child's heart craved; the proof of the purity of his intentions that I could no longer take on faith. They lay in his mind as clear as glass. But it was too late, too much too late, and my actions had condemned me so far from the point of redemption that I didn't know where to even look for the Light.
Regret sang through me, leaving anger in its wake--at myself, at what I had done; at what I had not the courage or strength to do. I gathered my terrible emotion and focused it through my fist, into the wall. "Go, old man! And never come back."
"I will, Darth." Footsteps, then a pause. "You are always welcome by my side, Anakin."
I slammed my fist into the wall again.
Damn him.
Damn him for giving me everything I ever wanted now that it was far too late.
I could feel the Emperor's claws in my brain, sealing off the weeping boy inside the shell of the mechanical man. And the me-that-was-Anakin fell into numbness inside the me-that-was-Vader, into a nightmarish stasis that was something like sleep.
I would have killed myself given half the chance. But he sealed that fragment of will deep inside.
Thus--I died, and something else was created.
Thus--I became Vader, as if Anakin had never lived.
Thus--I ended.
end.