Authour's Note: It seems that, in my haste to add this story that I forgot you guys don't know how I write my fan fiction... Lol. The first piece is always a prologue, set in the future of the story then I bring it back to the beginning... As for a timeline, this story happens instead of Attack of the Clones but many events of AotC do happen... I can't say much more without giving too much of the story away... I do hope you enoy this and thank you.
Prologue
Jedi Knight Obi-Wan Kenobi sat in an exhausted perch beside his young, unconscious Padawan, Anakin Skywalker. His broken foot rested helplessly on a foot stool, the mending bones throbbing; his charred skin burned furiously under his bacta bandages. His black and blue hooded eyes were mere slits on his otherwise bandaged face. His ribs ached with every shuddering breath he took.
But none of those pains could compare to that in his soul. The unfamiliar and unwanted chasm that had suddenly split his body in two when he saw his young Padawan, his best friend… his saviour, lying motionless on a bed in the medi-center - it had almost floored him. A vast emptiness that he had never experienced before the previous six months. Six months of darkness and pain, where the only light had been Anakin, even in his darkest moments.
Seeing Anakin hooked up to so many different machines, droids coming and going every standard half hour to make sure that his friend was going to make it through the night (something they still weren't sure of) had only served to remind him of his failure to heal him. He was by no means a healer but his anger and hatred towards the Dark Lord who had held them for so long had clouded his mind and he had been unable to reach out to the Force for aid. It was something that he and Anakin had discussed only briefly in the few minutes where they were allowed to be in the same cell. The Force was no longer with them.
He remembered seeing Anakin change, become weaker, an aura presenting itself around him. Failure. Defeat. Hatred. Anger. Every emotion that Obi-Wan himself was feeling, knowing that he shouldn't be feeling it, that it was against the very code that he had sworn his life to. But how could he not hate the people… the beasts that were slowly taking his soul away, torturing him, killing them both so there was hardly anything left of the people, the good that they had been when they had first been captured?
And the Jedi… his people… he was beginning to feel hatred for them too, had felt the mistrust swarming off of Anakin too when he first saw Master Windu and a number of younger Knights. How could they trust in those who had taken so long to free them from their death cells? Surely they could have come sooner, as soon as they knew that the two had been captured. He knew they could have and to him, there was to be no absolution, no reasons behind this great deceit, this great failure of the brotherhood of Jedi Knights.
He only had one brother and because of the very people he had sworn to serve, to protect, that brother was lying on a medi-center bed with an artificial arm half attached, a breathing tube down his throat, machines pumping blood through his body because his heart wasn't strong enough to do it on it's own. His lungs were being held open only by small implanted spheres that contracted to allow air in. His body was badly burned, perhaps even more so than Obi-Wan's, but he couldn't be sure. Both would be scarred, regardless of the bacta treatment they received.
Several of his friend's had been in, to try and convince him to eat, to sleep, to take a respite from his vigil over Anakin's bedside but he refused. The Senator from Naboo, who he had looked after with his Padawan days before they had been captured had appeared too by his side at some point. She had tried to convince him, just like Master's Yoda, Windu and Mundi before her that injuring himself further would do no one any good, least of all Anakin when he did eventually waken. But her he could forgive, if he really wanted to, for her naivety… but the others… No. Impossible.
He knew that it was unbecoming for him to be thinking such things but how could he not? His life had been destroyed in the past few months. The Dark Side had permeated from everywhere and it had smothered him, pulling him, calling to him…
His life was not worth living if Anakin didn't make it through this trial that the Force had thrown in their path. He reached a hand out and brushed a straggly hair away from Anakin's face. He hung his head, defeated.
He could feel Anakin's life slowly draining away. His brother was dying and taking him as he went.