This is the death of Darth Bane.
A starburst of clarity blossoms within Anakin Skywalker's mind, when he says to himself Oh, I get it, now and discovers that the fear within his heart can be a weapon, too.
It that simple, and that complex.
And it is final.
Bane is already dead. The rest is mere detail.
Anakin Skywalker has already decided.
The play is still on; the comedy of lightsabers flashes and snaps and hisses. Bane & Skywalker, a one-time-only command performance, for an audience of one. Jedi and Sith and Sith and Jedi spinning, whirling, crashing together, slashing and chopping, parrying, binding, slipping and whipping and ripping the air around them with snarls of power.
Bane's decades of drawing on nexuses are irrelevant. His mastery of the orbalisk armor is useless. His failures to beat Zannah, his terrible showing at the mansion, pathetic capture at the hands of mercenaries, humilating fall against Fohargh, disgusting stomp by Sirak, points of pride to which he has devoted so much of his time and attention over the long, long years of his life - are now chains hung upon his spirit, bending his neck before the ax.
Even his knowledge of the Revan holocron has become a joke.
It is this knowledge that shows him his death, makes him handle it, turn it this way and that in his mind, examine it in detail like a black gemstone so cold it burns. Bane's elegant farce has degenerated into bathetic melodrama, and not one shed tear will mark the passing of its hero.
Bane understood…
Rage is Anakin Skywalker's weapon.
When Bane flies at him, blade flashing, and Skywalker strikes back. It was almost as if he was blocking another striking another.
When with all the power that the Dark Side can draw from the nearest nexus, Bane hurls a jagged fragment of the durasteel table. Skywalker smashes it aside.
He had become a storm. Bane meters back can sense the storm gathering in the boy, but not in his mind. No, his mind is as clear as a crystal bell.
Because he has decided.
Not Bane, but Skywalker.
Anakin Skywalker decides…
He decides - Bane dies.
He decides that Bane should lose the same failure as always.
And so he does.
Decision is reality here. The hand falls with a bar of scarlet blaze still extending from its spastic death grip, and Anakin's heart sings for the fall of the red blade.
He reaches out and the Force catches it for him.
And then Anakin takes Bane's other hand as well.
Bane dies.