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The air on Mustafar tastes of iron and ash. It always has. The sky above is a bleeding wound, and the rivers of lava that cut through the blackened terrain slither like arteries, always shifting, always hungry. Mustafar doesn’t forget what it is. Neither does he.
Darth Vader sits atop his throne carved from obsidian, the stone still faintly warm from the shaping. The weight of the structure doesn’t compare to the heaviness pressed into his chest.
The throne room is silent except for the low hum of Mustafar’s core shifting below. It pulses through the obsidian floor like a second heartbeat. The lava casts moving shadows on the walls. They stretch and twist like memories do.
His hands rest on the arms of the throne—gloved in fine black leather, not the mechanical mockery they would have been in another fate. His breath is steady. Slow. The way a predator rests when it's already eaten.
Luke and Leia are training in the lower levels, far from the magma chambers. They’re learning to channel rage, to build constructs of the mind with precision. They are sharp, hungry, powerful. He watches them sometimes through the holocams. Luke is already beginning to challenge his lessons. Leia absorbs the teachings more quietly but not with less fury. Sometimes he wonders which of them will strike first. He does not fear the day.
Let them come.
The silence stretches thin. He leans back, closes his eyes. And Mustafar brings him a memory.
Obi-Wan. Obi-Wan’s dead body burning where Anakin discarded it after pushing his saber right through his chest.
Obi-Wan had smiled at him once. A real smile.
Not the kind he wore during Jedi meetings or when Anakin stormed through halls late to another Council summons. No. A real one. Small. Quiet. Shared in the dark after a battle that nearly killed them both. The sort of smile you only give to someone who knows what your nightmares sound like.
They had been stranded on a Separatist moon—ships destroyed, food nearly gone. They built a shelter from scrap. Obi-Wan had torn half his robe to bind Anakin’s leg. That night, they sat under the fractured moonlight, and Anakin said something stupid about how Obi-Wan looked like a half-drowned tooka. Obi-Wan laughed. Then smiled.
It was the smile that haunted Vader years later. Not the fights, not the battles, not even the final screams on Mustafar. That smile. That unspoken something between them, never named, never dared.
He remembers the way Obi-Wan used to say his name. Soft at night. Harsh in argument. Always with weight. Like it mattered. Like he mattered.
He remembers how Obi-Wan said it the last time.
"Anakin. Don’t."
There had been tears in his voice. Not in his eyes. Obi-Wan never cried. But Vader knew him. Knew every fracture and line in that carefully held restraint.
He had hated him for it. Hated how Obi-Wan wouldn’t fight back the way he needed him to. Hated how it hurt more when he finally did. When the blue saber slashed across his chest, Anakin realized too late that he hadn’t wanted to win.
He had wanted to be stopped.
But Obi-Wan died, broken-backed and gasping against the rocks. Anakin remembers kneeling beside him, hand trembling, the heat of the lava making his skin slick with sweat.
He wanted to say, I loved you. But his throat was closing.
Obi-Wan looked up at him one last time, and there was no hate. Just a sorrow that still claws inside Vadee when the nights on Mustafar are too quiet.
Another memory bubbles up in his stomach.
Padmé died screaming. He didn’t see her go. They wouldn’t let him in. The medics said it was trauma, but he knew better. She had lost faith in him. In what he became. Her heart gave out.
The twins were born screaming.
Leia first, fists already clenched. Then Luke, blinking against the harsh lights, silent until Vader touched his tiny hand.
He thought he would die holding them.
For a time, he almost let himself.
But Mustafar waited. The Emperor’s voice came like a razor through the comms. There was no grief in that voice, only approval. You are reborn, Lord Vader.
Reborn.
He didn’t feel reborn. He felt hollowed. Carved out like the very stone he later made into his throne.
Ahsoka.
He doesn’t know where she is. He hasn’t tried to find her. He doesn’t need to. If she’s alive, she knows. She would have felt it the moment the galaxy shifted.
He remembers her standing in front of the Council, back straight, chin high, as they apologized too late. He remembers how her eyes met his—not with resentment. With clarity.
She had known.
Maybe even before he did.
And when she walked away, he felt something inside him start to crack. It was small, but real.
He wonders now if that was the beginning. Not Mustafar. Not the slaughter in the Temple. Not even the dreams of Padmé dying.
Maybe it was the day Ahsoka Tano turned her back on the Order and didn’t ask him to follow.
She loved him enough to leave.
And he hated her for it.
The training chamber chimes.
Leia has broken through another test wall. She screams when she does it, a scream that shakes the monitors. Luke is silent, hands clenched. He’s already moving to the next target. Efficiency and purpose, just like he taught them. Rage held close like a blade against the ribs.
Vader watches from above. They do not know he’s there.
Sometimes he wonders whether introducing his children to the dark side was the right choice. It no longer holds any meaning to ponder, however, as his children have learned to use the Force like an extension of themselves.
He remembers holding Leia when she was an infant, marveling at her lungs as she screamed and screamed. He remembers how Luke used to grip his finger and not let go. Back then, the dark side had not yet claimed them. Now they breathe it. Bathe in it.
He has told them about their mother. Not everything. Enough to make her a myth. Enough to make them mourn her in their own ways. Leia never asks questions. Luke asks too many.
They are his. His legacy. His failure. His triumph.
He wonders which of them will kill him.
Maybe both.
The lava outside churns louder. A quake rolls through the foundation. The fortress groans.
Mustafar is alive, and it remembers.
Anakin Skywalker is dead. He buried that name in Obi-Wan’s chest. In Padmé’s cooling fingers. In the ashes of the Jedi Temple.
And yet, sometimes, he dreams of blue sabers.
He dreams of laughter in a starship hangar.
Of Ahsoka riding on his shoulders. Of Obi-Wan asleep beside him after a battle. Of Padmé leaning in to whisper something soft and unrepeatable.
He dreams of choices.
Different ones.
Sometimes he wonders how it would be like if he just let Mace Windu kill Palpatine right there in his office. Padmé would have survived, he knows this now. It’s frankly unbelievable how gullible a mind can be when faced with desperation.
He built this cage. He must now live in it.
When the twins are asleep, Vader walks the corridors alone. He doesn’t need rest like he once did. The dark side feeds him. Sustains him.
He enters the room he built for Padmé.
It remains untouched. Dustless. Preserved by the Force. A shrine.
Her gowns are still folded. Her perfume untouched. The holo he kept of her flickers in the corner, looped to the last image he took of her alive. Smiling. Holding her stomach. Looking at him with eyes full of hope he didn’t deserve.
He kneels.
He speaks her name aloud.
It hurts like truth.
Vader returns to his throne as the first light creeps across Mustafar’s surface.
He does not sleep. He does not weep.
But inside him, somewhere deep, the boy who loved too hard and the man who lost too much remain.
Not dead. Not quite.
Like embers beneath obsidian.
Still burning like Obi-Wan’s corpse on the lava banks where Vader personally placed it.
The Force begins to hum. Not gently. Not like memory. This is deeper—primal, ancient. It bubbles up from the obsidian beneath the throne like a boiling truth he cannot suppress anymore. The floor under Vader’s feet vibrates with it. Not heat, not pressure but presence .
He rises to his feet. Or tries to. The Force pins him there.
It begins as a whisper in his blood.
Mustafar’s sky outside cracks with unnatural lightning. The lava churns erratic. Something unseen pulls at the seams of reality like fingers tearing open a wound. The air becomes thick. Each breath Vader takes feels like inhaling ghosts.
A low sound escapes his throat—not a word, not a scream. Just a sound, involuntary and old.
He has lived with the dark side for so long. He thought he knew its face. But this—this is different.
This is the Force itself answering him back. Images rush through him—Padmé smiling through tears, Luke staring at him with questioning eyes, Leia’s silent fury, Ahsoka’s turning back, Obi-Wan dying beneath his hands—
—and Obi-Wan living , turning, calling his name.
Anakin.
The throne disintegrates beneath him as the Force swells and crashes inward, not like fire, but folding . Space curls. Time snaps.
He reaches out instinctively, but there is no control here. No will to impose. The Force drags him like a current. Back, down, through .
Everything explodes into light.
He gasps.
There is no heat. No stone. No fire.
Only sunlight.
He’s standing on durasteel. The air smells like clean fuel and Naboo blossom.
A voice cuts through the haze, too familiar. Too near.
“Anakin, are you even listening to me?”
He turns.
Obi-Wan is standing beside him, arms folded, a half-smile threatening to bloom beneath his practiced frown. His Jedi robes are sharp and clean. The soft gold of a Naboo morning light catches in the copper of his beard.
Anakin looks down at his own hands.
One flesh, the other mechanical with golden parts. He hasn’t seen this hand is a long, long time. What has happened? Is this a dream?
He looks up.
Obi-Wan is still watching him. His eyes are narrowed, but not unfriendly. He is patiently waiting for Anakin to say something. Anything.
Anakin swallows. The air is too thin. There’s a mirror next to him. When turning to look at himself, the crowfeet by his eyes are gone, the creases on his forehead are smaller. His eyes are bright and blue.
He’s back in the body of his Jedi self. Before the Fall. Before Palpatine destroyed the Jedi order.
And he remembers everything .
The worst part? Obi-Wan’s face carries the same smile that’s haunted him for years.