The Taste of Iron 1/? (Darth Vader/Anakin Skywalker Imagine)
(A/N: I’m an on and off kind of blog I think but I’m definitely not abandoned and neither are any of my unfinished works but I’m a self-indulgent person so here’s a Star Wars imagine ayeeeimsorryeee.)
The taste of iron was so familiar to you, so constant that sometimes you wondered if it was a permanent stain on your tongue, on the roof of your mouth. A lot of emotions accompanied that taste, the taste of blood. Fear, anger, submission, humiliation and the cycle continued without an end in sight.
The first time you could recount that metallic taste in your mouth was when you were eleven years old. Your long, dirty braids were wrapped in the fist of a man you’d never seen until that day, the blood of your parents smearing from his gloved hand into your hair. He taunted you, this man, dragging you from the old hut that now blazed with light. Your father and uncle had made it together with their bare hands, it was the hut you were born in.
You couldn’t be sure now that the years had passed but at the time of the attack, your mother’s horrendous scream was slowly muffled by the flames barely tickled your red ears. Clutching at the leather-bound hand in your hair and flailing frantically, you pleaded in a tongue that the man didn’t understand. He threw you into the sand alongside other children, some you recognized from your village and others from neighboring ones.
Hands clutched you as soon as you were thrown into the crowd of traumatized children, none over the age of fifteen. The oldest shielded the youngest and you found yourself huddling with complete strangers, the only thing in common was your hair. All long, all braided with small twigs, adorned by flowers and old tattered cloth. A trait of your people.
You didn’t understand what any of the shouting men in white were saying and it was terrifying, they’d come out of the sky in birds of steel and wreaked havoc over your village, tearing down huts in search of any children and murdering anyone who stood in their way. Even people who fled in fear were killed and now was a perfect example. The men in white pointed their weapons at you, the group and shouted orders at you, orders you couldn’t understand. Only after learning their tongue, English, could you translate the memories.
“Single file, all of you!” One commanded and you stared through glassy eyes up at him. His dark visor made it impossible for you to understand any kind of gesture he was making and you stayed perfectly still. A mortified gasp caught your attention, an older child reaching out as a younger one was torn from his arms, a boy you recognized as he stood up intent on protecting the smaller villager.
T'kor, a boy a year older than you but seemingly feet taller. He was a boy loved by the warriors of your village, constantly praised for his natural talents in combat. Three long scars stretched across his dark face, from his hairline to his chin on the left side of his head had him looking beyond his years and perhaps that was why the men in white did what they did in the following moments. With a loud, sharp sound accompanied with a flash of green light, T'kor was on the ground in a heap, moaning in pain as he clutched his broad sholulder. The blaster wielded by the man in white pointed it at his head and that flash of green light ended his brief cries.
You couldn’t remember much after that, every sound became one and every image did too. Colours grouped together as one by one, young villagers were executed, the oldest died and the younger huddled around them, their elder siblings, cousins and friends, mourning briefly before they too were shot down.
You didn’t know you’d been screaming until a sharp slap to your face silenced you, and that’s when you tasted it. A foreign, intense taste that you cringed at.
Footsteps circled you in an almost rhythmic sense and you couldn’t bring yourself to look up, knowing it was you who’d been last.
There were no more cries, there was no more shouting and there was no more fighting. Just the distant sound of your home burning and that awful taste on your tongue. Quivering, you heard voices that seemed authoritative but intimidating that only grew less patient and more frightening.
In the moments to come you found yourself looking into the eyes of the man who’d dragged you into this chaotic mess, out of the safety of your mother’s arms and into the cold. His bright red hair and pale blue eyes were the first thing you noticed but they were soon forgotten in favor of his horrible sneer.
“I said kneel.” He forced you onto your knees before taking a step back, a man in white taking his place and taking up all of your sight. His blood-stained armour surrounded the barrel of his weapon and you instantly began crying, a loud, ugly cry that you couldn’t stop no matter how much you tried. Their angry shouts only fueled your fear and even when he struck you with the back of his hand, you didn’t stop. You couldn’t.
It seemed to go on forever when the soldier aimed at you again and you reached out, begging to be spared as that soft green light formed in front of your eyes, the same green light that killed T'kor and every other child that now lay motionless around you.
You didn’t have time to beg further and your ears couldn’t pick up that sharp sound like it had when you watched everyone else around you be murdered helplessly. Your suffering had ended and you were pulled into the dark.
This was for the blink of an eye as you weren’t so lucky. A soft, sickly rasp roused you from that merciful darkness and instantly you felt pain like nothing else ever imagined in your small mind. Your head pounded with a ferocity that had you wanting to cry but when tears formed, your eyes quivered inside their sockets.
You couldn’t hear or see anything for a while, but slowly those senses returned to you and your eyes, swollen after the abuse you’d endured opened as much as the tender flesh surrounding them would allow.
You’d have screamed if you could as the sight of a man, the same man that had ordered your death was raised by some unseen force into the air. His gloved hand that once tore hair from your scalp were now scratching helplessly at his neck, nails digging deep into pale flesh.
“Let this be a lesson,” a deep, unnatural voice said, “to question me is to question the Empire.” With a sickening snap, the man’s flailing legs fell limp but his body didn’t. It stayed high above ground as if on display.
“Secure the area.”
With that, the men in white and spanned out across the village and their birds of steel disappeared into the sky in a search for what you understood later to be survivors. The red-haired man was released from whatever had killed him and he fell to the ground in a crumpled mess, his face landing inches from yours.
You stared into his cold, dead eyes and felt something swell deep inside of you, something you knew was somehow wrong, but still rejuvenating. A fire burned deep, deep down in your belly and you found your swollen lips curling into something akin to a smile.
“I sense your anger.” Through deep, artificial breaths, the voice that had tormented your tormentor now addressed you. “I sense your power.”
“My Lord?” A man in white questioned, though it didn’t reach your ears. You were busy taking in all the details of the dead man’s face, not even noticing the gigantic black figure that seemed to glide towards you. His skin, smooth and pale now bloated like yours, his jaw that clenched angrily at you now hanging open in an eternal gag for air.
He looked hideous, hideous like the people he’d killed brutally and you reveled in that, you reveled knowing he suffered a death just as terrible as the innocents that populated your village.
The bittersweet feeling in your chest was growing so intense that you felt the heat from your stomach expand, filling you up and swallowing you whole before it was all too much, and the familiar dark took you again, this time you hoped forever, any other sensation becoming irrelevant to you.
“Bring the child.”
