Chapter Text
Grief
The Force howled
Lights, extinguished.
Darkness with claws and teeth.
Ripping, tearing
Devouring
…
Grief
Sandstorms choke the oxygen from lungs
Sand scours cloth from flesh and flesh from bone.
So does lava.
…
Grief, whirling.
The eye of the storm
Lukkema
Sandstorms scour. They flay. But, eventually, they pass.
…
Anakin opens his eyes to pain. This is… a medical facility? He reaches and the Force screams and the sandstorm rises again, a howling shield between burning flames and the dark.
He is always burning.
…
Anakin opens his eyes to pain. He is… kneeling? Depur exalts above him. Everything is red.
"I will obey, Master," he says with cracked lips and screaming lungs, his throat dry, so dry.
He is used to thirst, this is something more.
He finds that he has to use the Force to stand again, his legs unfamiliar and clumsy. Hot, tight skin and the pins and needles of nerve damage. He climbs to his feet… are they his feet? Didn't Obi-Wan? The pain rises and the sandstorm rises and he is swept away again.
…
He dreams. Shouts, screams echo through the susurration of the storm.
"Close yourself off, Anakin!"
"This isn't you! Please Anakin, raise your shields!"
"You're my brother, Anakin! The Darkness has clouded everything, it isn't too late!"
"It isn't too late!"
And his own voice, screaming. "Don’t lie to me!"
"I have failed you, Anakin. Perhaps if I were a better Master…"
"A better Teacher…"
"Anakin!"
"Anakin!"
"Anakin…"
…
He wakes. This is… a hyperbaric chamber? Control panels flicker around him, lighting the space in a mixture of white, green and blue. There is no red. He glances up to see a nightmarish black helmet hanging above.
He reaches out one scarred finger to press the unlit blue button just within reach.
"M-medical report," he orders the unit through a mouth so dry his lips crack on the first word, the stinging pain of split skin almost unnoticed, drowned out by the pain of moving his arm.
"Lung function improved by 2.8%. Digestive tract repair complete. Do you wish for a summary of past completed procedures?"
"No."
"Do you wish for a summary of future scheduled procedures?"
"No."
The unit flashes for a moment and then goes dormant. Anakin twists the knob that controls the main lights and looks down at himself. His prosthetic hand is damaged and in dire need of maintenance. He has extensive burn scarring across the top of his thighs. One leg is prosthetic below the knee, the other now ends at his upper thigh. The prosthetics are…trash. He could have built better from scraps out the back of Watto's junkyard.
He shifts, ignoring twinges of pain, and reaches for the drawer marked 'bacta'. The unit starts to protest, and he overrides it without much thought. He applies a whole tube of bacta to the burn scars that litter what is left of his limbs and the buzzing in his head subsides a little as the pain of scorched nerve endings eases.
It is a little easier to think.
Digestive tract repair complete.
He looks down at his abdomen, at the port for a feeding tube that has been grafted in, and lifts his flesh hand to his throat. There should be…
There.
He pushes the correct button and a thin hose descends from the top of the pod. Water. He bites at the flexible end and cool liquid fills his mouth, washing away tacky saliva and the dried fruit sweetness of bottled oxygen.
Standing in line waiting for water rations as the dry dust of a Tattooine summer fills his mouth and nose. The relief of that first splash of lukewarm water washing the grit away.
The sandstorm threatens to rise again but Anakin pushes back. Lukka has hidden him, as Lukka hides all brave enough to face his winds, but the time of hiding is over.
The water soothes his dry throat and he drinks sparingly before letting the tube fall again. To his left, there is a dormant control panel. He hits the right combination to bring it online.
First, he must find out his own capabilities. Then he must find out where he is, although the familiar resonance of engines through the metal chamber surrounding him already tells him that he is on a Venator class Star Destroyer. He needs intel before making a move. The last weeks… months? Of his life are a confusing mess of images and orders and strange, blank spaces.
The screen presents cold facts and impersonal statistics.
He was ruined.
But he is healing.
His lung function is at thirty percent, and the black armor that he has been avoiding looking at is currently his only way of surviving outside of the hyperbaric chamber.
The Hyperbaric chamber has had its processes overridden to return him to, at best, fifty percent functionality.
Anakin is enough of a slicer to fix that, at least.
He enters the final command. Immediately, equipment whirs into motion around him and he sinks into unconsciousness.
…
Anakin wakes to pain.
But the pain is so much less that the relief brings tears to his eyes.
He must not waste water.
Without the programed restrictions, the chamber has done a much better job. The prosthetic legs are still terrible, but the connection ports are no longer inflamed and when Anakin slips his legs from the padded rests and climbs tentatively to his feet, he is steady. The burn scars are reduced and more comfortable, no longer pulling with each movement. The feeding port is removed and his throat feels stronger.
He reconfigures the pod to turn the medical procedure bed into a padded chair, retrieves a nutrient pouch from the storage drawer and sits down, using the force to pull the one data screen in the pod into an easy reading position.
He is not yet ready to leave.
He is not yet ready for the suit.
Thankfully, when running at full capacity, the pod is fully capable of sustaining him for days or even weeks. Under the restrictions programmed in, it was only suitable to sustain life for mere hours.
Anakin grew up hating Depur and all of his ways. This hatred is nothing new. Depur, chain giver, wears many faces.
Anakin has been chain blind, taken in by the Jedi's belief that they are free despite the restrictions of the Senate.
Anakin has been depukrekta.
He needs to find out what has happened to his men.
…
It has been fourty-two days since Order 66 was given and the Jedi order fell. During that time the GAR has been put under the authority of the Navy Officers and assigned to a series of disconnected missions with the worst casualty rates Anakin had seen since Krell had fallen to darkness.
Thousands of Storm Troopers have joined the ranks, graduates of training camps Darth Sidious had quietly arranged on overlooked planets.
Darth Vader had been given five star destroyers and tasked with hunting down traitors to the Empire once he had been released from the medical facility on Mustafar.
That was… six day ago.
Five star destroyers could easily hold fifty thousand men.
It is time to be Ekkreth.