Shower
by ardavenport
It doesn't rain on Tatooine.
But, of course, it does.
At rare times the right confluence of weather will produce moisture laden clouds in the sky, not just the usual wispy false promises. At even rarer times the weight of that moisture become too much for the sky to bear and it falls to the ground.
Most of Tatooine's desert ecology rides on the humidity in the air that rises up from the planet's huge, poisonous salty seas. Currents in the upper atmosphere and hot winds on the ground carry it all over the globe. Some is sucked in by the life forms that inhabit the land deserts but most finds it's way into cool rock crevices, gathering and dripping lower and lower where only the rarest and most determined creatures may find it. Deep underground, filtered drips become trickles become pools become reservoirs that eons later find their way back to the oceans where the water is always evaporating, to rise up into the sky to be carried away by the winds.
And sometime it rains.
Obi-Wan Kenobi can feel it. The pressure change hurts his knees and hips and disturbs his meditation. He opens his eyes and wearily, painfully now, rises from the cushion he has set on the floor.
He can smell the coming rain in the air.
Sighing, he goes to his workroom where he saves everything. Nothing that might be useful can be thrown away in the Jundland wastes. Flat, thin plastoid panels lean against the wall behind a big canister brimming with all shapes of disused and dull metal rods and pieces. The panels were discarded packing covers he found in Anchorhead, but Obi-Wan still had to pay the shopkeeper for them. Anyone living in the desert could see their potential.
The noise of moving things around in the workroom is accompanied by thunder outside. The late afternoon temperature has dropped from oven hot to just unbearable. But the difference is enough to disturb the air and make it rumble in complaint.
Obi-Wan takes some rags and begins wiping out the sand that has accumulated in the crevices and bottoms of the thin plastoid. He has to scrub hard to get it out. It would be a simple, effortless job to just wash it out. But if he could do that, he would not need the panels. There is no water to spare for the job. Not even his own spit.
When they are as clean as he can get them, he lays them aside and retrieves tubes and jugs from a shelf and takes everything outside.
There is blue sky in the distance, but gray and black clouds glide overhead. The suns are gone, shadowed by the weather, throwing the cliff his hut perches on and the dry plains below into a weird twilight where the half-light comes form everywhere. The thunder rumbles louder.
Obi-Wan lays the panels on flat rocks, off the ground, optimistically presenting the approaching rain with a large surface area with which to catch it. One end of the tubes go into holes cut into the lowest groves of the panels and other ends go into the jugs on the ground. Lastly, Obi-Wan takes big rocks and weighs the panels down. Anything large enough to catch rain is also a sail in the wind.
Pain pierces his sinuses and behind his eyes. Obi-Wan sits down on a rock next to his rain-catcher. There will be rain. In all the settlements, the moisture farms, even the cities, the people will be doing as he is, wherever the clouds go. Rain on Tatooine is like life falling from the sky. Because it is.
Rising, he goes back inside his hut. The first time he saw rain fall on Tatooine, Obi-Wan stood outside in it, his arms spread out. But it hardly got him damp. The brief cooling effect of it vanished, evaporating from his body in minutes. He only caught a few scant drops in his mouth. He did not catch any for later. Obi-Wan knew better now.
He lay down on his pallet. It had gotten darker outside. The memory of that earlier folly pushed up more of his failures from his past. He had ceased to try to suppress them. They were like water, worse than water; they always found the crevices of his mind and if he dammed his thoughts to them, they would just crumble his defenses in other ways. Usually with nightmares.
Instead of a hermit in a pitiless desert, he used to be a Jedi Knight. He still was, whatever that meant now. Now when the Sith ruled the Galaxy. After his one-time apprentice had chosen Sith Power over the Jedi way. The boy he trained, the boy from Tatooine, he was supposed to have destroyed the Sith. He joined them instead. And Obi-Wan had not seen the danger, the signs that it was happening. He and the whole Jedi Order had never guessed that the Supreme Chancellor of the Republic, Anakin's other mentor, was a Sith Lord. Until it was too late. But Obi-Wan knew that he had been closest to Anakin. He had failed. Everyone. Now he served his time of punishment clinging to hope on this barren world.
Anakin had hated Tatooine. Obi-Wan often wondered if the Sith that Anakin had become would have found it funny that his defeated master was now condemned to a life on the home world that he hated so much.
Obi-Wan heard the first tiny pat of rain outside. Then another. And another. The pace of them picked up. They were thin, small droplets, an anemic rain, but a shower by Tatooine standards, nearly a downpour. He could smell the desert rocks, their sharp, subtle scent released by the tiny impacts of water on their surfaces.
Head aching from the change in weather, Obi-Wan closed his eyes. It was a good rain. A rare and pleasant sound, random and soothing, outside and above on the roof, surrounding him. Through his closed eyelids he could still tell that it was getting darker outside. It rained harder. . . .
Obi-Wan's eyes snapped open.
The window by his pallet was gone. He stared up at a ceiling of lines and edges, not the rounded curves of his hut dome. Shadowed daylight had turned into artificial lighting.
He could still hear the rain.
Something fell, a clinking of metal hitting a hard floor. Someone grunted.
Obi-Wan bolted upright. He stared down at his body. His shabby, tattered long tunic was gone. He wore his neat tunic and pants of years long past, the tabards and belt. Obi-Wan stared at his old boots, worn out in the brutal Tatooine heat, but still tucked away on a shelf of his workroom to be cannibalized for parts. He was wearing his old boots.
"Aaaah!"
Obi-Wan turned toward the sound.
Anakin Skywalker, wearing his dark brown tunic, the clothes of a Jedi Knight, had his fingers inside an open compartment of an R2 unit.
The fingers of his right hand. . . .
Anakin had lost that arm in a duel with Count Dooku when he was still Obi-Wan's Padawan. But there it was. And Anakin wore no braid, no lock of hair on the back of his head. He was a Knight, just as Obi-Wan had last seen him.
Standing, and stepping forward, Obi-Wan felt something under his boot. He looked down. Anakin's tools were scattered all over the floor of the small room. His old room. In the Jedi Temple.
"Anakin!" Obi-Wan exclaimed, breathless. "What are you doing?"
"I know, I know, I'm not supposed to be doing this here. But something happened and you were asleep, and I should have had this done by now. . . " Anakin explained rapidly without looking away from his work. He peered into the open panel. The R2 unit turned its single-lens eye toward Obi-Wan and made a low, unhappy sound.
What had happened? Everything was gone. Tatooine, his hut, the heat, the Sith, his failure, the rain. . . .
No.
The rain was still there.
But it wasn't all around him anymore. It just came from one place. A door on his right. Only one step brought him to it. He touched the panel by the fresher door. It slid open and he went inside.
The tiny room was white and silver. He turned right again and faced a spattered, semi-transparent door. Light glowed from inside. There was someone there in the stall. Obi-Wan touched the panel next to it.
The door slid aside. The person inside whirled, surprise on his bearded face, his long hair wet and clinging in dark ropes to his back and neck. Rivulets of water and soap ran down his body.
"Obi-Wan?" his old Master, Qui-Gon Jinn, asked.
His mind in shock, Obi-Wan stared, open-mouthed at a person who had been dead for years, who should have only been there as a sometimes fickle presence sharing his exile on Tatooine. But here he was, living, with a real breathing body, not a transparent blue image in the Force.
Taking a shower, in his fresher.
Stunned, Obi-Wan wondered, had it all been a dream?
END
Footnote: I never watched Dallas but if you watched TV at all in the 1970's - 80' then you heard about the most notorious 'shower scene' since Psycho. If you don't get the reference, ask your elders, or look it up on the web.
(this story was first posted on tf.n: 15-June-2007)
Disclaimer: All characters and situations belong to George and Lucasfilm; I'm just playing in their sandbox.