Obi-wan Kenobi found himself on the desert plains of Tatooine. The sun beat down harshly on the flat, cracked ground. Yet it wasn't quite Tatooine. There was far less sand than he remembered, and the landscape was so flat that he couldn't see a single thing on the horizon. He started slowly walking forward, trying to figure out where he was.

Then Obi-wan noticed a small huddled figure in the distance, a child curled into itself in sadness or pain. He approached faster, almost breaking into a run. There was something awfully familiar about the boy

As he got closer, he could see that it was Anakin. He was so young, even smaller than he had been when Obi-wan first met him. Yet it was still unmistakably Anakin. The sight of the boy made something inside Obi-wan ache terribly, and he wished nothing more than to turn away and be left to his sadness. This probably wasn't real anyway, just a dream created by his own subconscious to torture him…

"Master?" Anakin said in a tiny voice. The boy was looking up at him with wide, sad eyes and a slightly open mouth. "You came."

"Yes, Anakin. I came." He wasn't sure what was going on here, let alone what to say to this version of his former apprentice, but the look on Anakin's face nearly broke his heart.

"Does this mean you still like me?"

Obi-wan bent down to Anakin's level and took the boy's head in his hands. "Anakin, I love you," he said. "Just not the things you do."

There were tears in the little boy's eyes. "Then can you take me back with you?" said Anakin plaintively. "It's so cold in here…"

"Cold? On Tatooine?" said Obi-wan in a slightly sharper tone. There was something wrong here. The scenery around him was becoming too flat and two-dimensional even for a dream, and the feeling of the situation seemed less dreamlike by the moment. He could actually feel Anakin's Force signature, though weakly, and it was tinged with the darkness of the newly christened Darth Vader.

The young version of Anakin caught Obi-wan's change in emotion and frowned. Then he suddenly sprang onto his feet and began backing away from the spot where he had been sitting a moment before. Obi-wan also drew back, for the ground at his feet was beginning to split open right before their eyes.

The cracks grew and widened, and Obi-wan began to see red-hot rivulets of lava between the patches of dried earth. Anakin was standing on solid ground, but the boy was shaking so hard he could barely keep himself upright. He raised his head to look at the man beside him, and Obi-wan could see the lava's glimmer reflected in his eyes.

"Y-y-you!" he stuttered. "It was you!" The boy's face twisted into a grimace of rage that looked downright unnatural on such a young face.

"Anakin, please!" shouted Obi-Wan. "This isn't the time." He grabbed the boy's hand and tried to lead him away from the split in the earth, but Anakin shook him off and grabbed for the lightsaber at his belt instead.

"Kill me!", he screamed, going from frightened to angry to hysterical in the space of a second. "Kill me kill me kill me!" Obi-wan grabbed Anakin's hand and flung the boy away from himself in some inexplicable horror. He started running in the opposite direction of the widening cracks of lava, racing faster and faster with the aid of the Force. There was no wind in this hellish place, but Obi-wan could feel air blowing against the tearstains on his cheeks.

As Obi-wan ran, he began to feel the ground shaking beneath his feet. A rumbling sound came from deep within the planet, and even the sky seemed to be falling down. From somewhere behind him, he heard a faint, raw-sounding scream. It was not the cry of a little boy, but a man who had felt all the pain in the Universe. As the dream world finally went quiet and faded into white, Obi-wan realized that it had not been his dream at all.


A/N: This fanfiction was just a random thought I had. It's like, what if Anakin/Darth Vader accidentally contacts Obi-Wan Kenobi after their battle? And he's so badly injured that his mind is temporarily messed up?