"Design Flaws" (Vader vignette)

This is a non-time-specific Vader vignette that I wrote thinking about how everyone makes fun of Vader's deep breathing-- ("koo-kee, koo-kee") and then it just came to me. Enjoy!

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The mask didn?t work properly, but no one knew it but Vader. Oh, it kept him existing in the half-life behind the walls of the blackness, he received warmth and could feel the simulations of touch and sight, but the respirator worked too hard to give him air. It sucked and moaned, creaking inside of his ravaged body, the technology that had been experimental when he was truly alive giving him breath, pushing damaged lungs in and out with sweet oxygen, but it did it too loudly. Sometimes he couldn?t hear what anyone was saying?their words just went right by as his mechanized body continued to breathe.

He was starting to rely more and more on the Force, following not words but senses and tenuous connections to emotion. He answered thoughts and desires. The dark nebula continued to keep him more alert than the bodysuit ever did?without the Force he would have given up long ago and turned the suit off. He might have done it extravagantly, in front of Palpatine or even summon a meeting with the Rebellion, and draw up an elaborate peace treaty (only valid if he signed it), and then switched off the circuitry and have his spirit watch, detached, as that loud and painful breathing finally stopped. But he doubted that he would have ever ended his life so elaborately. Vader was a quiet man, and he had no doubt that he would have probably resolved all of his affairs and then gone deep into meditation in the clinical white of his room, where the mask could be taken off, and then, finally, the bodysuit that sustained him.

The desire to end it all in a theatrical mess was Anakin?s influence?Vader was quiet, but Anakin, on the other hand, had always loved the wildness and chaos. Then again, Anakin was dead, so it was proven that the quietness of dark corners had to be better than the riotous sunlight.

He had the Force, though, and it spoke to him in clipped phrases, intimate and seeing straight into the dirtiness of his soul. Not always the Darkness, either, though that was what he invited. The Light just flowed freely around him, tempting him, offering itself freely. But the Light felt like Padmé and he had long stopped thinking of Padmé.

Of course you?ve stopped thinking of her, his mind said cruelly. Of course you have. You fool. You haven?t stopped thinking about her since you killed her. She is always forefront in your mind, she always has been. Obi-Wan was never there, Qui-Gon, and it had, in truth, been so long since he?d thought of that calm-eyed Jedi Master that it gave him a start to hear the syllables form in his thoughts, even your mother never had the control over you. You haven?t forgotten anything. You still remember it all.

Yes. He knew that. Even though he wouldn?t have let those memories slip away, the suit that kept electrons and neurons sparking his brain held the currents of his memory and it did not change. They could be added to, but never deleted, and he remembered almost everything about his life. His own birth was still a mystery to him, but suddenly, on a harsh sunlit world when he was nine, all of the memories started with an angel, and since her, he had forgotten nothing that he had observed.

Vader sighed but was unaware of it. His hand came in front of his sight, where black leather gloves were a poor substitute for smooth skin. He pressed down on the button and watched the holo in front of him come to a shuddering life.

First, there was a flickering orange light that filled the chambers in stuttering letters before the projector pressed all of its memory into a solidity and the vision became tight and contained, the glyphs of the menu clearly visible to him. Someday, Vader did not doubt that the projector that he had built himself would die a quiet, spark-ridden death. He had filled it with too many images and levels of

 

Very elegiac, a great vignette!

 

Thanks, DarthCuppa. It did become rather elegiac. It's original intention was to show how isolated Vader had become when he couldn't hear for his breathing, and then I used his excelled memory and the holos as a way to show how what Vader was interfered with what Anakin used to be.

 

Very good, Moonbeam. I had to look it up, but that was indeed very elegiac, very sorrowful. Would you think that Vader would go on without correcting those flaws to his suit? Or would that mean there was too much Anakin Skywalker still in him?

Once again, well done.

 

*has no idea what elegiac means, and is too lazy to look it up*

That was lovely! Truly something I would never think of, and very well executed. I should drag people to read this story. [face_innocent]

Come to think of it . . . *goes to PM's, then will go back to Lady_Moonbeam's bio*