#pro vaderdala

A gauntlet tightens and durasteel groans, because alongside the now undeniable truth that Padmé Naberrie is alive? A lie festers in equal measure.

Ten years.

Ten years, he has carried her alleged ‘death’ like an open wound. He let it hollow him out until there was nothing left but purpose… and pain. So much of it was built on deception and thus the very thought now rips through him with violent clarity.

“I’ve never been kidnapped before.”

“You are not kidnapped,” he hastens to correct her. “You are under Imperial protection.”

“Ah,” a small smile graces her lips for the first time today. “Protection. How reassuring.” Padmé searches the black lenses of that blasted mask for any reaction she can glean aside from his steady breathing. “You personally escorted me from my diplomatic mission. You’ve placed me under armed guard aboard an Imperial warship,” her arms fold. “That very much sounds like a kidnapping, Lord Vader.”

I’LL KISS YOU TWICE FOR DEATH

Anidala Week 2026 Prompt: Victorian.

“I am trying to make things better for us.”

“That’s what you always say.”

“This time is different.”

“Why?”

Padmé hesitates “— because it involves your father” hangs just on the tip of her tongue.

Padmé Amidala Naberrie is dead.

The thought settles with a strange, dissonant finality.

It feels like wearing an ill-fitting dress at first — a borrowed identity loose around the seams.

“You’re the first person who hasn’t called it a suicide mission…” she searches Obi-Wan’s expression for his own rationale behind it, but finds none to fully account for this newfound certainty. “Why is that?”

“— because whatever remains of Anakin Skywalker now,” he answers plainly “it still listens for you.”

“I warned the council of this,” she breathes as he lets her boots hit the ground once more.

“The solar flare could not have been predicted.”

“Bantha poodoo!” her biting response only draws Vader’s helm a degree in Padmé’s direction as she barrels on. It’s been a while since he’s heard the Huttese language spoken aloud… much less an obscenity from his otherwise elegant wife’s lips.

It would amuse him if not for their lives hanging on the line. She huffs “The timing may have been unexpected, but the risk is exactly as I foretold.”

For too long has he refused the truth that others accept as unchangeable. Death cannot be the end, no.

Jedi once spoke of the Force as a luminous current which binds all life together.

The Sith believe that raw, unlimited power can bend those currents to one’s will.

Somewhere between those truths must exist the answer he has been searching for over a decade… and he will not be leaving here without it.