The Love of a Sith (aka The Chosen One)

Blistering Wounds

Note: I know, I know, bullet wound effects are not the same as Star Wars blaster effects.  I'm sorry, there's literally nothing on them, so I just did a few hours of research and calls on good old staph infections and bullet wounds.

I'm sorry, I think "Why is she falling unconscious? Is that normal-!" has got to be one of my favorite lines of Vader's here.  Vader is a hilarious god in this chapter. You guys better be laughing . . . Or I really, really hope you will be. Comments and votes are SO much appreciated!!

Splintering pain was the only memory of the moment ingrained upon Padme's mind: the sudden, cruel shock of agony so focused in intensity it ripped through every nerve in her leg and had her crumbling unsteadily down to a cursed state of helplessness.

She could barely concentrate on the jumbled mass of words around her; not that she wanted to.  They were too much - too loud, too chaotic - for even the will to focus on something other than the searing burning.  Wincing, she closed her eyes, the lull of the steady swaying beneath her traitorously soothing.

It was disquieting how affected she still could be by him.  Even as the simmering detestation made a comfortable home within her, curling up with bitter resentment in her belly- her thoughts could not stay focused on it, straying from the vehement enmity in rebellious flickers.  If she could block out the sound of his furious voice, the rumble of his chest might have seemed almost comforting, the secure arms around her almost able to be imagined as more of a cradle than a cage.  He was carrying her rather gently, bewilderingly so, like a precious article of glass . . .  

Not that it mattered how he was carrying her, if he was only carrying her back to the prison in which he kept her.  

Padme gritted her teeth.  She was fuming, infuriated at his foiling of their plan, yet- yet it was something else as well.  Her anger could not be satisfactory, could not be justified nor righteous, because . . .

He-

He was kind.

The anger she had predicted in him was absent. 

Where she had expected murder flaring in glowing yellow eyes, a hand rising up to strangle her neck once more - in a circumstance when she truly thought his responding fury would cause all hell to rage down - there was  . . . nothing. 

 For others, ferocious wrath, but for her?  Merely curt words, an unsettlingly soft touch, and . . .

Angel.

Surely he had not been aware that he had said it, but she had heard it, even so faintly in a half consciousness dazed with pain. She had heard his voice, his tone, how he . . .

"Hold on Padme, I'm getting a medical droid."

Keeping her eyes screwed shut, she only turned her head stubbornly away, hiding her face away in the security of the black fabric of his cloak.  He could never know that she was caving; she would not go down so easily, allowing him the triumph and confidence to break her.  Surely this was all his plan, to lower her defenses and make her bow in submission, make her his possession, acquire the only thing he hadn't yet been able to get, because-

Because Sith did not love.  Whatever he might do, whatever he might say . . . he would and could never love her like he had before.

With that harrowing thought her mind sunk into the wretched state of her body, the despondency rising to seep over a spirit weary from the exhaustion of its fight.

"Quickly!" came a hiss.  "Get the med droid immediately; I'm losing her again!"

Everything was in a blur now, as if she was fast forwarding through a scene from someone else's life- she was set down on something soft, a flurry of sound and movement around her; a hand was placed on her temple and replaced by the feel of icy metal, too cold; there was a robotic voice, its monotonous speech sounding peculiar next to the furious urging of the low voice . . .