Under the Hood

Novelisations tend to be kind of crappy, but I quite liked this passage (well, apart from “That burns hotter than the lava had”):

This is how it feels to be Anakin Skywalker, forever:

The first dawn of light in your universe brings pain.

The light burns you. It will always burn you. Part of you will always lie upon black glass sand beside a lake of fire while flames chew upon your flesh.

You can hear yourself breathing. It comes hard, and harsh, and it scrapes nerves already raw, but you cannot stop it. You can never stop it. You cannot even slow it down.

You don’t even have lungs anymore.

Mechanism hardwired into your chest breathe for you. They will pump oxygen into your bloodstream forever.

Lord Vader? Lord Vader, can you hear me?

And you can’t, not in the way you once did. Sensors in the shell that prisons your head trickle meaning directly into your brain.

You open your scorched-pale eyes; optical sensors integrate light and shadow into a hideous simulacrum of the world around you.

Or perhaps the simulacrum is perfect, and it is the world that is hideous.

Padmé? Are you here? Are you all right? you try to say, but another voice speaks for you, out from the vocabulator that serves you for burned-away lips and tongue and throat.

“Padmé? Are you here? Are you all right?

I’m very sorry, Lord Vader. I’m afraid she died. It seems in your anger, you killed her.

That burns hotter than the lava had.

“No … no, it is not possible!”

You loved her. You will always love her. You could never will her death.

Never.

But you remember ….

 

You did it.

You killed her.

You killed her because, finally, when you could have saved her, when you could have gone away with her, when you could have been thinking of her, you were thinking of yourself…

It is this blazing moment that you finally understand the trap of the dark side, the final cruelty of the Sith —

Because now your self is all you will ever have.

And you rage and scream and reach through the Force to crush the shadow who has destroyed you, but you are so far less now than what you were, you are more than half machine, you are like a painter gone blind, a composer gone deaf, you can remember where the power was but the power you can touch is only a memory, and so with all your world-destroying fury it is only the droids around you that you implode, and equipment, and the table on which you were strapped shatters, and in the end, you cannot touch the shadow.

In the end, you do not even want to.

(from Matthew Stover’s novelisation of Revenge of the Sith)