They had put him in grey. Simple, collarless. The kind of thing they gave prisoners so they looked like prisoners.
He didn't look like a prisoner. He looked like a man who could tear that table out of the floor with his bare hands if he wanted to, restraints and all, and had simply decided not to. Which was probably why half the guards in the room kept shifting their weight every few minutes.
Luke sat next to you. Still. Hands in his lap. You could feel the tension radiating off him like heat, but his face was calm in that particular way that meant he was holding everything together through sheer force of will and possibly the Force itself. You hadn't looked at him either. If you looked at Luke, he'd see it in your face, whatever it was right now, and you couldn't afford that.
Mon Mothma was speaking again.
You were aware of the words in a distant, underwater kind of way. Charges... duration of service to the Empire... accountability... The chamber was packed. Senators, military officials, press from every system in the New Republic and a few that weren't. You had picked your seat specifically. Front row, right side, close enough to be visible as a witness but positioned so that when you looked straight ahead, you were looking at Mon Mothma and not at him.
Your choice of clothes was clearly a mistake. They were far too warm, and now the fabric was sticking to the small of your back, making you aware of it in a way that felt impossible to ignore. Impossible to ignore that, or the dozen other things pressing in on you at once. The low hum of the ventilation system. The way your pulse kept doing something strange and uneven in your throat.
Mon Mothma asked a question.
He was supposed to answer. He was looking at you instead.
Not at Mon Mothma. Not at the tribunal panel. Not at the crowd that wanted him dead or the press recording every breath he took. At you. And it wasn't the quick, careful kind of look he'd been maintaining all morning, the one that skimmed over your general area without landing. This one landed. Directly. Heavily. His eyes on yours with something in them that you could feel in your actual chest, a physical thing, pressure and ache and something too large to name sitting right behind your sternum.
You didn't blink. Neither did he.
Mon Mothma's voice cut through again, sharper now, the patience thinning at the edges. "I will ask you again, Lord Vader. Do you believe that the actions you committed in service of the Galactic Empire should be forgiven?"
His gaze stayed on you for one more second. Just one. And then he dropped it. Looked down at the table, at the restraints locked around his wrists, at his own cybernetic hands held still and open against the surface like he was studying them.
Clear. Not loud, but it carried. His voice always carried.
"I do not believe that what I have done can be forgiven." A pause. "Or should be."
Not literally. But the sound that erupted was close enough. Gasps and shouts and the sharp scrape of chairs and at least three senators on their feet and the press section exploding into movement, every recording device in the room suddenly pointed at him like weapons. Mon Mothma's gavel came down once, twice, three times. "Order. I will have order in this chamber." Her voice was steel but you barely heard it over the roar.
Luke made a sound next to you. Barely audible. His hand moved on his thigh like he'd been about to reach for something and thought better of it.
The noise kept building. Mon Mothma kept demanding silence. Guards shifted positions. Someone behind you was saying did he just and what kind of defence and this is unprecedented in a tone caught between shock and something that might have been satisfaction.
You sat very still because if you moved you weren't sure what would happen. What your face would do. What your voice would do if someone spoke to you right now.
He didn't look up again. Just sat there, head slightly bowed, hands open on the table, while the courtroom fractured around him. Like he'd expected this. Like he'd said it knowing exactly what it would cost and chose to say it anyway.
No. I do not believe that what I have done can be forgiven. Or should be.
The gavel was still coming down. Mon Mothma was still speaking. The noise was still everywhere.
You felt something crack. Not break cleanly. Crack. The way things cracked when the fracture line ran deeper than the surface and you couldn't tell yet how far down the damage went.
It felt like more than one heart was breaking in your chest. And maybe his was breaking too, somewhere behind that unreadable stillness, with the cruel knowledge that there was no room for it in him. No space for something so painfully human.
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