How to Take an Empire

Chapter Sixty-Five: Princess

Vader awoke to weight straddling his lower abdomen and slow, gentle strokes up and down his chest and part of his neck. He focused on the sensation, figuring out very quickly that the weight was Ahsoka and the strokes were her fingers ghosting across his chest. Ghosting across the scar on his chest.

She knew he was awake, but he didn't open his eyes as she traced the scar from just beneath his ribs, all the way up to the top of his neck and back down.

"Is this from Mustafar?"

"Yes."

Ahsoka hummed and retraced it a few times, and it occurred to Vader that she'd never seen it. She likely hadn't paid it any attention hours ago when he'd first bared himself to her, both preoccupied with other matters.

"I thought I killed you," Ahsoka muttered absently, still tracing the scar. "I wanted to think I didn't. I thought there might be a possibility that I didn't, but... This should have killed you. I didn't find out that I didn't until later. I first suspected that was true when I heard your name for the first time, your new one, on the news. Then on Empire Day, May had the celebrations on, and I saw you standing next to Palpatine. I knew it was you even behind the mask. May couldn't get me to come out my room for the rest of the day." She stopped talking, but Vader got the feeling she wasn't done. "How did this not kill you? How did I not kill you?"

He opened his eyes to gaze upon her contemplative expression.

"The Force. Sheer willpower?" Vader suggested. Truthfully, he didn't know. What he did remember from the immediate aftermath were choked, gasping breaths made more difficult from the thick, humid Mustafar air. An eternity that might have only been minutes before Palpatine arrived and he'd been taken back to Imperial Center. A surgery where droids had sewn him back together, replacing part of his ribs and lungs with metal, under just enough sedation to be unable to move and disturb their work but not enough to be unaware of what was happening.

She traced her finger back up again. This time, she moved her hand over to his right shoulder and what was left of his flesh arm before it turned to durasteel, tracing over the puckered pink and red flesh from where the heat from the lava next to him burned through his upper clothes on that side.

Her hand went back to the other scar.

"Did you hate me for it?"

"Yes."

"Do you still?"

"No."

"How?"

"Obi-wan would have done worse. I've seen what would have happened if you hadn't been there."

"But I was there. And I stopped him. And I did this."

Vader sighed. Even when he wanted to absolve her of her supposed sins, she resisted him. And now she was going to insist on an answer, regardless of the fact that he loathed to give it to her.

"When Sidious began teaching me the ways of the Sith—what he wanted me to know anyway—he would force me to meditate on the most painful and terrible parts of my former life to turn me into the mindless, dark side monstrosity and attack beast that he wanted me to be. That memory was one of the ones I constantly went back to. I've been over it dozens, hundreds, thousands of times. And at some point, I just stopped hating you for it. I tried to hang onto it. But the more I realized that the only reason you were in the position was because I cornered you, the more I just couldn't anymore."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be. I almost... I might have killed you. You did what you had to. Besides, it was an accidental lucky shot," he added, running a hand up and down her thigh.