Disclaimer: Don't own it, and more than likely never will.

A/N: This story is an AU, and it's heavily based on the original version of Beauty and the Beast (i.e. not the Disney one). I know I'm not the first person to mix Beauty and the Beast and Star Wars, but I'm hoping that I'm the only person to do this take on it. This prologue is very short, I know, but all of the following chapters will be at least 3,000 words or more. I've got some of this story already written and the other half has been planned. I'm hoping to update about once a week, but it will just depend on my schedule. I've got a million scholarships to apply for before the end of the school year. Ew...

And just so that I can clear up any confusion before it happens, in my AU world Darth Sidious is not a politician and doesn't become Chancellor. He's just a normal Sith Lord with the normal dream of destroying the Jedi. Anakin is not found by the Qui-Gon, and when the main part of the story occurs, he is nineteen.

A Tale of a Beauty and a Beast
Prologue

Once upon a time in a galaxy far, far away, a young boy lived with his mother on a remote, desert world called Tatooine. The boy had longed all his life to get away from his desert homeworld. He wanted to travel the galaxy. During the world's precious few hours of darkness, the boy would dream of journeying amongst the stars. He dreamed of becoming a Jedi and of saving the galaxy. But the boy knew they were just that. Dreams.

You see, the boy and his mother were slaves. They were owned by a blue Toydarian named Watto. He wasn't a particularly cruel master, but he wasn't exactly a kind one either. The boy and his mother worked very hard all day and went home to their sparsely furnished slave quarters at night. The boy was extremely gifted with mechanics. Often, he was able to fix things labeled "unfixable" by the other local mechanics, and Watto put the boy's talents to good use in his junk shop.

One day, when the boy was about nine standard years, an old man came into the junk shop. The man was dressed in elaborate robes and looked quite out of place when compared to the shop's usual customers.

The man claimed that he was a Jedi. He said that he had come to the Outer Rim to look for Force Sensitives that the Jedi Order may have originally overlooked. When the old man saw the boy, he wasted no time in bargaining with Watto for the boy's freedom.

Watto was reluctant to part with the boy. The boy was his favorite slave and easily the most useful. However, the old man drove a strong bargain, and Watto eventually conceded.

The boy was very excited that he was to leave the desert planet with the old man and become a Jedi, but he was also fearful to leave his mother. He was all the family his mother had, and as a slave, his mother had no friends. He wanted to leave. He wanted to live his dreams, but his worry and love for his mother held him back.

Only with much persuasion from the old man and loving assurance from his mother, did the boy turn his back on the only home he had ever known.

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The next several years were nothing as the boy had imagined. The man, whose name the boy had discovered was Darth Sidious, was neither the kind old man nor the Jedi whom he had led the boy to believe.

The boy was treated far worse as Sidious' apprentice than he had been as a slave, and he constantly longed to be back on his homeworld with his mother.

He had no time for himself. His days were filled with nothing but long, taxing training sessions, and his nights were plagued with nightmares.

Sidious was a very strict master. Failure was not an option. Sidious' punishments were much more painful than anything he'd received as a slave.

As the boy grew older, Sidious began to teach the boy to understand the mystical powers of the Force that he had been using throughout his training. Sidious told the boy to use his anger and hate to his advantage. He taught the boy cruelty and told him emotions such as love and compassion were weak and useless.

The boy resisted at first, but after suffering through several of Sidious' Force lightening punishments, the boy gave in to his master's teachings.

Over time, the boy (who by then was considered a man) became nearly as uncaring and ruthless as his master. He killed without a second thought, and he tortured without sympathy. Yet, somewhere deep inside his heart, he remembered his mother and the love she held for him and he for her. He knew it would break his mother's heart to see him as he was. When he had left her that day on Tatooine, she had hoped that her son would have a better life, not one filled with darkness.

Perhaps that was what the boy was thinking when his master gave him the orders for his final task before becoming a true Sith Lord. Sidious had ordered the boy to destroy the Jedi. Sidious told the boy that once he had completed that task, he would earn the Sith title of Darth Vader.

The boy, however, decided he'd had enough of his master's orders. Maybe the boy remembered the stories he had heard in his childhood about the great and just peacekeepers called the Jedi, or maybe he still harbored the hope of one day becoming a Jedi himself. Whatever the reason, the boy refused and turned on his master.

Their duel was long and spectacular, but at the end, the boy was neither strong nor skilled enough to defeat his master.

The boy was defeated, yet still hung on to his decision. Sidious knew the boy no longer had the potential to fully embrace the Dark side, and so he placed a curse upon the boy.

Sidious' curse encased the boy's body in a suit of black armor. The boy could no longer breath for himself, nor could he live outside of the suit. The curse could only be broken if the boy was able to find true love despite his fearsome outer appearance.

Sidious then banished the boy, and he was forced to flee to the dark, nearly lifeless planet, Vjun. There, the boy named Anakin Skywalker spent his days roaming the halls of Bast Castle and known to all as the bitter and ruthless Darth Vader...