he will tear your city down

by collegefangirl3791

Obi-Wan planned to keep a low profile on Tatooine, after Order 66. He was there to protect Luke, and that was all. The only thing was, he kept trying to protect everyone else, too, and that tended to draw people's attention. Usually people whose attention he didn't want, because Obi-Wan's luck was perpetually terrible.

1. Prologue

"There will come a soldier
Who carries a mighty sword
He will tear your city down, o lei o lai o lord
O lei, o lai, o lei, o lord
He will tear your city down, o lei o lai o lord

There will come a poet
Whose weapon is his word
He will slay you with his tongue, o lei o lai o lord
O lei, o lai, o lei, o lord
He will slay you with his tongue, o lei o lai o lord

There will come a ruler
Whose brow is laid in thorn
Smeared with oil like David's boy, o lei o lai o lord
O lei, o lai, o lei, o lord
Smeared with oil like David's boy, o lei o lai o lord

He will tear your city down..."
- "Soldier, Poet, King"

Prologue

Tatooine wore everything down. Skin, stone, steel, memory, desire, resolve, grief, compassion, until they all began to look like the bare skeletons of krayt dragons and banthas that settled into the sand, worn and smooth and empty. The wind whistled as hollow through Obi-Wan's chest now as it did through those corpses, he often thought, and although later he would say that it was this that had opened him to the Force more than anything else in his life, now he simply felt like the abandoned shell of something, and there was no purpose in it.

Sometimes Obi-Wan thought that he could sit down in his hut and let time pass and never know it, that he could just drift off on the Force and, perhaps, not come back to himself. He did not wish for either of those things, but nonetheless, there seemed to be nothing else for it.

Sometimes, he saw ghosts.

He was never sure if these were visions of the Force or some madness he had succumbed to under the heat of the twin suns. Most often, they were Satine and Qui-Gon. His Duchess and his Master.

He believed Qui-Gon's ghost was real, more often than not. It was usually Qui-Gon who reminded him to get up, when he'd been wandering lost for too long, and to go check on the boy.

Luke.

He was only a baby, still, a year old now. Obi-Wan was not welcome on Owen and Beru's homestead, but he was permitted, so he went once a week, when he remembered, stopped at the farm on his way into town, the sand getting into his boots and scouring his cheeks. They had an agreement that he would help them protect their vaporators and other equipment from the Tusken raiders, in exchange for the water that he needed to survive.

Owen did not like him to hold Luke, but Beru almost always let him. Those were the good times.

Today, Obi-Wan was going into town for supplies, so he would stop and see the baby on the way there. Padme's baby. Luke was beginning to have curly blond hair, to babble (sometimes words) and grab onto things as he was crawling around. He had his father's blue eyes.

Obi-Wan put on his cloak, the same old brown one, to protect him from the sun and the sand and perhaps prying eyes, swept his fingers over the lightsaber hilts set neatly next to each other in his old chest. His saber, and Anakin's. He was saving Anakin's for Luke, really, although as time went on, even this one year, Obi-Wan had begun to realize that Owen and Beru may never let him teach Luke anything.

They didn't trust him. He understood.

When he arrived at their farm, his pack hiked over his shoulder, Owen was not in the farmhouse itself, but Beru answered his knock with Luke in her arms.

"Ben Kenobi," she said, wearily, stepping aside to let him into the house. He inclined his head, politely, easing past her through the low doorway into the cool, pale hall that led to their small kitchen. "Came to see our boy, did you?"

"I had hoped to, yes," Obi-Wan answered, smoothly, sliding a smile onto his face. He did not usually smile, lately, if only because living alone there didn't seem to be a point.

"Well. Here he is." Beru sat down in the kitchen, bouncing Luke a little on her knee. Luke laughed, sticking messy fingers into his mouth, and stared at Obi-Wan with wide eyes. Obi couldn't help a bit more of a grin, at that. He listened to the Force around the child, felt nothing but Light and warmth and a strong, strong presence that said that Luke could feel the Force too. Obi would expect nothing less from Anakin's son. "Are you taking care of yourself, Ben?" Beru asked. She always asked, because although she did not trust Obi, that didn't mean she hated him.

"Always," he said, smooth.

"Of course," she answered, just as smooth, far more sarcastic. "You're not right in your head nowadays, if I don't miss my guess, Kenobi."

"Now, Beru," Obi-Wan chided, "most people who knew me would tell you that was always true."

She shook her head at him and let Luke grab tightly onto her first finger. "I don't know why you come to see him," she told him, and Obi-Wan raised an eyebrow at her. "All you do is sit in the house and look at him and leave. What good does that do either of you?"

Obi-Wan did not answer her question, just set his hand on the table and looked at Luke, watching the baby boy staring at his own little fingers.

"I suppose you want to hold him," she said, almost sharply.

"That would be nice, if you didn't mind," he answered, as politely as he could. He was afraid one day they would feel no more obligation to him, and then they wouldn't let him come see Luke anymore.

But that was not the sort of thing he should dwell on. Such fears were baseless and premature.

So he breathed in, breathed out, and let the Force soothe that away as Beru stood up and came over to pass Luke to him. He rested Luke on his hip, noting that his yellow curls had gotten longer and lighter.

Luke, chattering about something that Obi-Wan was sure had a meaning to his little mind, reached up with a waving hand and grabbed Obi's beard, tugging on it, and it hurt but Obi-Wan smiled, caught Luke's fingers so he didn't pull so hard. "Hello, little one," he said, quietly, chuckling.

Luke said something that sounded like "hi," grinning, and Obi-Wan just breathed, for a little while. There was nothing dark or lost in the Force signature of a child, especially not one this young; and Luke, little blond Luke with his father's blue eyes, was always such a blaze of Light. This was part of why Obi always came to see him, to remind himself what he was doing.

He was protecting this child, keeping him safe. Whether Beru and Owen thought that was what he was doing or not.

"Weren't you going into town?" Beru asked, pointedly, and Obi-Wan untangled Luke's fingers from his beard, only for him to grab onto Obi's hand instead.

"Yes," he said, resting his head on top of Luke's small one for a moment. "Thank you for the reminder, Beru."

She humphed, impatiently, and reached out to lift Luke out of his arms; Luke frowned, said "No!" and curled both hands into fists, repeating "no, no, no" until he was distracted by his own talking and settled into a grumpy argument with himself in Beru's arms.

Obi-Wan smiled, trying not to feel as if he had lost something, and nodded to Beru. "I'll excuse myself, then. Thank you for allowing me to interrupt your day. I will stop by on my way back for the water." She nodded, and he looked at Luke, smiling a bit. "Bye, Luke!" he said.

"Bye-bye!" Luke answered, waving, still a bit grumpy but very enthusiastic.

Obi ducked his head, pulled up the hood of his cloak, and hurried out of the farmhouse before he could regret it.

The town itself, large and dusty and packed with criminals and thugs and bounty hunters (half of whom worked for Jabba or the Hutt clans in some capacity), was a trying place for Obi-Wan. He had told himself, when he first came to Tatooine, that he had to lay low and stay shielded, and that meant not interfering with things, however much it galled his conscience.

The longer the Empire stayed in power, though, the worse things got, and the harder it had become for Obi-Wan to just not see. With the fall of the Republic - or perhaps its transformation, Obi-Wan was never sure which he thought it was - its anti-slavery laws became a thing of the past. However poorly enforced those laws had been, they had been something.

Now there was nothing to keep the slave trade from flourishing - the Hutt clans encouraged it, and there was no Imperial presence here to affect it (whether for better or worse), and Obi-Wan himself…

If he was found, he would endanger Luke, too, so he could not risk drawing attention to himself.

That was why, as he walked into the main market center of Mos Eisley, he pulled up his strongest shields around his mind and sent the whisper into the Force that he was not important, not worth noticing. There could be no blocking out the pain and misery of this town, not entirely, but he could dull it, and so he did that and reminded himself that he held himself aloof like this so he could protect his friends' child.

It was still hard.

Ben Kenobi did not have friends in town, exactly, but the Rodian man that he bought tubers from, Tino, was at least friendly to him and entertained his pleas for news. Today, Tino waved to him as he walked up to his stand in the rowdy marketplace, smiling a little and setting down a knife and a block of wood (Tino liked to carve rough figurines, which he sold alongside his tubers and carrots).

"Hey, Ben," Tino said, leaning forward against the counter of his stand and tapping his fingers restlessly.

"Hello," Obi-Wan answered, amiably, turning over some of the tubers to decide which he wanted to purchase. "Any news?"

Tino snorted. "Same as usual, Ben, not much. The Empire keeps making new laws, and before you ask, yes, they're still staying out of everyone's business here. Nobody's got any use for Tatooine, Ben - of course the Empire isn't setting up shop here."

"Ah, yes, no use indeed," Obi said. There was a memory of Anakin telling him how, when he was a Knight, he would go back to Tatooine and free all the slaves, find his mom and bring her back with him.

Obi-Wan let the memory sift away into the Force and did not dwell on it.

Tino gave him a strange look, one that Obi had become familiar with. No one asked questions, on Tatooine, but Obi always read the questions on people's faces. What was a young man like him, with his Coruscanti accent and polite mannerisms and odd questions, doing on Tatooine, living out in the desert where most didn't risk going?

But questions had a cost, so people left well enough alone. And if anybody here remembered the face of High General Obi-Wan Kenobi, Jedi Master, there was little left about Ben Kenobi to call that face to mind. The Force was a precaution, and a powerful one.

"I'll just take a bag of these," Obi said, resignedly. "A little more than last time, Tino."

"Sure thing, Ben." Tino filled a small sack with tubers, weighed it casually, and told him the price; Obi paid it without comment and left.

He went through the rest of his errands more quietly, now dogged by the memory that he should have let go of, Anakin and his bright eyes scrambling through a lightsaber form.

"I'm going to be the best Jedi there ever was!" he says, nearly falling over because he puts his foot wrong, again, and Obi-Wan laughs. "Then I'm gonna go back, and I'm gonna make Jabba and Watto and all the slavers let everyone go, or else!" Obi tells him he shouldn't say things like that, because revenge is not the Jedi way.

Obi-Wan had always been a hypocrite.

But it did not matter, now (or perhaps it mattered more than it ever had, now that his failings were tearing the galaxy apart), so Obi bought a new blanket at the edge of the marketplace and started the walk back so he could go to Owen and Beru's on his way.

Strictly speaking, there were certain things that were not sold in the main market square. The traders who dealt in sentient flesh still did so behind closed doors, most often, because that was how it had been done in the era of the Republic. Occasionally, that unspoken rule was broken.

Today, it seemed, was to be one of those days. Obi saw them at the edge of the market, three Togruta girls (not women, still young, too young) clinging to each other's hands while a man looked them over, one at a time, and Obi did not mean to stop, but he realized that he had, anyway.

The man grasped a girl's chin, twisted her head, and Obi remembered a clawed hand on his jaw, a growled, I never forget a Jedi. They should not have brought Ahsoka on that mission – he had thought so then and he remembered now, how they had dressed Ahsoka up like a slave girl and not one of them had ever forgiven themselves for it.
Perhaps Obi-Wan was the only one left now who thought of that.

The sand chafed at Obi-Wan's feet in his boots and he thought he saw her, for a moment, with the girls at the edge of the market, and the memory of Anakin's eager face burned. He could smell the sweat and blood and electricity that was Kadavo, and Tatooine's sand on his tongue was the Slave Quarter of Mos Espa and the adrenaline of the podraces.

Our duty is compassion, Qui-Gon told him, a long time ago. A long time ago when the Jedi were not a relic of the past. Obi-Wan was walking, now, hardly thinking, only knowing that he had once promised himself never to be helpless again, that he had once told himself that he would not let others suffer for him like this again. Others will try to tell you that there are more important things, but you must not believe them. You will lose sight of what you are, if you let compassion become secondary.

So he had weaved his way between the marketplace stalls, past others who were pretending not to see, before he could tell himself this was a bad idea. He kept the Force as a cloak, a far better one than the one he wore, threaded it around him to say you do not see, and stopped behind the buyer, who had moved on to the next girl and was grabbing her shoulder and turning her around so her hands were wrenched away from her companions.

"Wait your turn," he said, to Obi-Wan, without looking.

Obi reached into the Force, felt the man's Force signature, the pattern of his thoughts, and put silent pressure there. You forgot something important. You should hurry home.

"Oh, shit," the man said, turned and strode off in a hurry. Obi-Wan stepped forward, wishing for a lightsaber to reach for, for the full power of the Force at his back. Instead, he stood here in front of the three girls and the heavyset Besalisk man who was trying to sell them, and searched for a solution. He could, of course, simply persuade the man to give the girls to him, but that was a short-term solution, and these girls would never get a day's peace again.

Obi had the money to buy them, perhaps, but he had few enough credits now as it was – he had come here with quite a lot of money (the GAR had paid its Jedi Generals well), but he has had no way to make more, so in the year that had passed, his stash of credits had grown smaller and smaller.

But these girls, the three of them, the oldest at most eighteen – Obi-Wan could not leave them here. He could find a way to get more credits, but he could not leave them.

"How much to take all three of them off your hands," Obi asked, coldly. He did not want to give this man money, but better than the alternative.

The Besalisk snorted. "More than you have," he answered, dismissive.

"I said how much."

"Alright, so fifty credits apiece. One hundred and fifty credits for 'em." The seller shrugged.

It was not as much as Obi-Wan had expected to have to pay. Still, he frowned and pulled on the Force, said, "One hundred and fifty is too much. Bring it down to ninety and we have a deal."

The Besalisk gave him a suspicious look. "Don't waste my time."

"Ninety credits." Obi-Wan pressed hard in the Force, but so careful – persuasion took subtlety more than brute force. If he could make the man think it was his own idea-

"Fine," the Besalisk growled. "I'll give you a deal. One hundred and ten credits, that's what I'll take for 'em. Scrawny little bitches anyway, not worth the effort." He shoved the girls towards Obi-Wan, who gestured for them to follow him and began cutting around the edge of the market, hands tucked in the sleeves of his cloak.

"I apologize," Obi said, gently, extending the Force to shield them, too. "Let me be clear - I'm not purchasing you to use. I intend to free you. I simply thought perhaps I could also offer you dinner?" He pulled off his cloak as he walked, handing it to the tallest of the girls (the one whose markings were too much like Ahsoka's, neat and white on orange skin), and slung his pack off his shoulders to pull out his new blanket for another of them, the thinnest.

"Why should we?" asked the third girl, blue-skinned and green-eyed and who Obi believed was the oldest.

"Because you look as if you could use the food. Do you have families to return to?"

"Not here on Tatooine," the tallest girl said.

Obi nodded sympathetically. "Well. I can't help much with that. But I can offer you dinner and a place to stay for a while."

He stopped them on the way back so he could buy a cloak to give to the blue-skinned girl, which she didn't seem to want to take from him but did anyway. She tucked it close around her shoulders, and Obi-Wan smiled a bit at her.

"I hope you don't mind a stop along the way," he said, as he resumed walking, adjusting his pack on his shoulders. "I have a few more supplies to pick up, if you want water with your dinner."

They didn't respond, which didn't particularly surprise him. He let it go, grappling again with an old feeling, remembering how the 104th had rescued he and Rex from Kadavo and he had not wanted any of them to touch him, how he had just wanted everything to be quiet.

It occurred to him, also, that this may have been a bad idea - he hardly had the resources to feed four people, but do so he must, or these girls would merely end up begging on the street, worse off than they were before. He could not have left them to whatever buyer came along, so he would find a way to make this work.

Obi-Wan took a long way back to Owen and Beru's homestead, although he regretted making the girls walk through the sand so long in their thin sandals, and, he suspected, without having had a proper meal recently. But he didn't want the questions that would come if people saw him leading three half-naked, bedraggled teenagers through the main thoroughfares.

Beru greeted the four of them at the door with a scowl that would have killed a krayt dragon and a curse that Obi couldn't quite make out. "Here for your supplies," she said, not a question, somehow an accusation.

"Yes," Obi said, smoothly.

"Owen put them where he always does," she told him, then glanced past him at the girls hovering a few meters behind him and added, "If you hired those children out there, Kenobi, you can forget about ever so much as seeing Luke again."

Obi smiled thinly. "Rather the opposite. They seemed in need of a decent meal."

"Then you aren't the one to give it to them," Beru muttered, but she did subside somewhat. "Wait there, Ben." She strode back into the house, and Obi glanced back at the girls, who all looked at a loss about what was happening.

Beru came back shortly with a small bag in her hands, which she shoved at him. "Take that," she snapped. "They need meat on their bones, poor things." Then she waved dismissively at him and shut the door in his face.

"Well," Obi said, tiredly, light. "I suppose that was our cue."

One of the girls giggled, although they were all looking away when he looked back at them. Obi just smiled and started off again for home, and the Force hummed a familiar rhythm of comfort against his skin.

It was not until the girls were safe in his hut, seated at his little tiny table, that Obi-Wan ventured to ask them their names, and then with great care.

Names were powerful.

"I'm Shahani," the tallest girl said, looking very small indeed now that she was sitting down, still wrapped up in Obi's cloak. "These are Asha and Tekli."

Tekli, the girl who clearly trusted him least, scowled and looked at the floor. Asha, the skinniest and smallest of the girls, whose montrals and lekku were still short (like Ahsoka's had been when she was younger), said, "Hi," and promptly coughed, hard.

Obi-Wan set about putting his purchases away, and looked in the bag Beru had given him – it was tubers and some actual bread, a rare enough commodity on Tatooine. Obi smiled to himself. Beru and Owen were generous people, when it came to it. He couldn't fault them for mistrusting him.

Supper was just stew, tubers that he cut up with carrots and cooked with as little water as he could make do with. He stood stirring it all together in the quiet and wished for something better than this to offer the girls. This, then, was what was left of the Jedi's legacy: feeble attempts at kindness, too few and far between. This was what was left of him.

He kept telling himself he couldn't help, that it was too much of a risk to himself and to Luke to step out and help, but what would he tell Luke, when he got older – that he, the last of the Jedi, had sat in the desert for years on end and let there be all kinds of pain and suffering outside his very door? And what would happen to him, if he stayed here and didn't help, and the desert kept gnawing away at him?

He thought he might wither into nothing, join the ghosts that spoke to him when he had been too long on his own. Like now, when he could almost feel someone standing behind him, someone disappointed at what he had become.

I'm doing my best, he thought. He knew his old Master wasn't here, but he felt the need to justify himself, somehow. I have to protect Luke, that's the most important job I have left.

You will lose sight of who you are if you let compassion become secondary.

I'm doing my best, he repeated, impatient, pausing his job to wipe his hands on a cloth. What else do you want from me?

He felt something like resignation, a sigh, and he wasn't sure if that was real or in his head. Your duty is to compassion.

Yes, well, he hardly had anything to offer, now. Jedi principles were hard-pressed without the resources to back them up - what use was all of Obi-Wan's high moral thinking if he could barely manage the credits and food to help three slave girls?

He shook himself and set about ladling cooked tubers and carrots into two bowls and a pair of cups (almost all the dishes he had, here), handed the largest helpings to the girls and leaned against the kitchen wall to eat.

"What was the point of this?" Tekli asked, a bit defiant, clearly still afraid to trust him, and Obi-Wan shrugged.

"I had a friend, a long time ago," he said, "who was a slave." There were too many memories and stories held in that one sentence. "No one deserves that."

"Oh." She looked down and pushed her spoon around in her food.

Obi focused on his own dinner with a quiet sigh. It was getting dark out, slowly, and soon there would hunting calls from the desert creatures, and soon it would be cold, too. "I'm sorry I don't have better to offer you, right now," he said. "I'm afraid I'm not exactly well off."

"Nobody around here is," Asha pointed out, timidly, glancing up at him, and Obi smiled at her before she quickly looked away.

"Except the Hutts," he said. "There's something rather ironic about that."

Asha set her bowl down and quickly put her pale ochre hands over her mouth, although it didn't quiet her little burst of laughter very much. Tekli shoved her arm, and Obi-Wan shook his head at the three of them. He wished they didn't remind him so much of Ahsoka.

He was not sure if she had survived the Order and the bloody advent of the Empire - the Empire often bragged about all the Jedi they had killed, but Obi-Wan did not entirely believe them every time they said a Jedi was dead.

After all, he always featured quite prominently on that list.

He knew that Vader and the Emperor knew he was not dead, but they had not found him yet. He could not allow them to.

That night, the three girls crammed awkwardly onto his small bed and he slept on the floor, and over the next few days he worked on finding them proper clothes and jobs. Tino hired Asha to help with his stand and painting his carved figures, seeming charmed by her (he told Obi-Wan, too, that his wife insisted they try to help). Tekli and Shahani found work with an old Lannik woman on the outskirts of Mos Eisley who worked as a seamstress and an herbalist.

And Obi, entirely by accident, found himself consistently trying to help people where he had told himself before he would not. After the girls, it was a mistreated herd of banthas; after that it was a little family that hadn't been able to eat for weeks; after that it was a woman being assaulted in a back alley of Mos Eisley. None of it was entirely planned, but Obi-Wan had lost the ability to not see, and he had never been much good at not interfering. That was how it began.

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A/N: Welcome to the fic! :)