.｡.:*☆

.｡.:*☆ ━━ REY.

HE WANTS TO CLING TO HER  ——  to draw out the innocence from her, whose life spans less time than his death, and sap away the sting of rejection in a single blow. he wants to touch her with living hands and feel, not merely the force flowing through her, but the way her human heart brings warmth to her skin. he wants to see her through the eyes of those who have set her on this path  ——  his children, his grandson, countless insignificant souls in between  ——  and whose feeble minds are incapable of sensing just how    CENTRAL    she is to events in which they are all but play-actors. like the sun, something radiant within her draws his freezing being from a void blacker and colder than dead space itself. he    CRAVES    that, the light within her, that flickers and casts a shadow wider than she knows. in this moment, he needs an audience. 

                      ❛❛ i want to talk. ❜❜ 

.｡.:*☆ ━━ ACTIVITY + SELECTIVITY NOTICE!

.｡.:*☆ ━━ LEIA.

TO ALDERAAN, HE BROUGHT THE FORCE OF THUNDER. storms ravaged the capital on the night of vader’s arrival, shattering the fair weather myth of the planet at the same time that he approached with thudding boots and clenched fists to shatter its happy royal family. the weather, a HARBINGER created by the hand of fate itself, laid hazy bleakness across the gardens, beat the windows with fat drops of rain, and illuminated the dead of night with strikes of VIOLENT light. there was no need to enter the palace with the red of his saber bared as the heavens above were conspiring to aid the anticipation already stoking fear indoors. 

vader’s final words to bail organa had been simple, foretelling a certainty brought about as much by chance as force of will: you will know when.

he arrived with the force of his fist, a dozen troopers operating merely as the guise of legality. the girl was taken from her bed, awakened by the gentle arms of her father. it seemed the queen had already said her goodbyes. an elaborate lie separated this instance of selfish kidnapping from rogue TREACHERY, and alderaan’s palace suffered through the night to pay for the reliability of that lie. traitors paid with blood, he would tell his master later. little more than crushing what we knew to be growing. 

the resistance was no older than his daughter, whose little body he carried through the wind-blown gardens to the hangar. the hem of her nightgown was damp, her hair hung in wet ringlets, and the tears she shed were washed away by the rainfall. the bindings did not fit her wrists, so the troopers marched her around with them held in their fists.

the pain of gazing upon her was held off until aboard the flagship. she had been kept in a cell, tended to by a droid without the capability of explaining the situation to her, held in a state of TERROR for which vader could summon no mercy. if she was the child he had been led to believe —— that six years of observation had brought to VIVID life in his imagination —— then it would only embolden her. when he called for her, his back was to the door. in the reflection of the viewport, he watched her silhouette wrest itself from the grasp of the troopers and march across the room. 

the DEFIANCE he sensed in her was prodigious; it smarted of a forgotten familiarity. 

the mask hid the wave of anguish that seeing her inspired. in her wide eyes, in her quivering lips, in the tight fists of her hands, in the way she held her head (  born dressed in regality, blessed with innate confidence ) —— in all of her was her mother. the silence continued uninterrupted, a SUFFOCATING blanket over the room, as he stared at her and willed himself to rip her from the past. this girl, trembling child with something akin to hate growing in her eyes, embodied the future he now possessed.

      ❛ SPEAK, CHILD.”