A/N: For the most part, don't expect there to be a lot of overt hilarity in this story. It's mostly dark humor and sarcasm. If that doesn't come across than just think of it as angst and snarky comebacks from assholes. Also: cursing. Plenty of it. I promise the darker themes won't last long and the cute and fluffy bits (not that there will be a whole lot of them) will come soon.

They were his. The clones belonged to him. Not just the few clone warriors who had managed to escape the Empire's purge of such inferior soldiers, but the clones of the man who burned him.

Of Obi-Wan Kenobi.

At first it started as a sick, twisted kind of experiment. A fascination with the cloning technology that had been confiscated with the Kaminoans. At first it had started as a way to fix his own body. To clone new organs and skin for the parts of his body that could be grafted to. Of course that had been the easy part. And, while he didn't look like he once had, he could breath without the helmet and live outside the life support suit once more. He even had hair.

But an itch had begun to burn in his system; coursing though his veins with a need to know- just to find out if it was possible. To see that man once more. To see if he would look like the same person if he hadn't seen the same life or known the same hardships as the man who had cut him and left him to burn. The same man who had stolen his wife away to her death.

(Deep down, Anakin knows that it was own stupid fault and his own force damned hand that killed his beloved Padmé, but he wont admit it because that makes what he is doing the acts of a depraved monster and means that it should be his own clone that table.)

So he starts it out of curiosity and a genuine interest to see how the Force works with a clone versus the original. It began with an experiment to see how different the two really were. Perhaps there would be some sort of merit in making clones of a former Jedi. More apprentices for himself.

And then it became twisted. Then he discovered how similar they looked. He saw for himself just how much the men in those tubes looked just like his master. So he grows them older and cuts their hair and the beards to look just like that man who turned his back on him and betrayed him. Punishing and hurting and making them scream just to listen to the sound. To imagine the way his master would have sounded if he did that to him. To cut them and remove pieces of their flesh and watch them bleed all over the room. It's cathartic and it's cruel.

Its a cheap replacement for the real thing but it's all he's got in this hell he's created for himself. These clones are like infants and are only alive long enough to die. They do not speak with his master's voice and they do not think the way he does. They don't even know how to speak, they are so young and innocent.

That doesn't stop him.

Sidious knows nothing of it and he is content to keep it that way for the most part. It makes it a little difficult to explain but the feeling of his sated bloodlust is enough to hold his tongue and make the lies more believable. It's how his life is going to continue, he's sure, for the foreseeable future and he won't give it up. Not for anything. Because they are his.

Even this new one. This tiny one that hasn't yet managed to look like a person. It will take a few months for the next one to be ready and years before this one will follow it. This is their purpose and that is how it going to stay.

(The tiny little part of him that still speaks with Anakin Skywalker's voice is hoarse with the effort to stop this but Darth Vader has stopped listening. But sometimes, when the darkness is at it's quietest and the light of the youngest clones is brightest, Anakin will try and convince him to let them go and stop this horrible nightmare he's begun.)

(It almost works.)

He feels it like he feels everything that has happened these last few years. He doesn't know where they are coming from and he doesn't know how to help them, these tiny little beings who are so bright in the Force that their deaths feel like knives to his very soul.

Obi-Wan has never thought that he could be more useless than he does every time that familiar, unknown light goes out and leaves him shivering in cold and darkness. He tries to meditate the feelings away, to chase after those souls with his own and figure out why they haunt him so. He tries to find where they came from, to understand why they feel like the snapping of a rubber bands as the light in his own body slowly starts to die out.

But he never can. He never finds them, never knows where to look and only sees the sad and resigned look upon Qui-Gon's face whenever he asks. If the older man knows, he says nothing and keeps his sorrow to himself.

So he stops asking. He stops searching and he stops wishing and hoping that he could save them, just one of them.

He stops breathing each night their screams ring in the Force and his heart stops beating with every howl of their pain upon the wind. He stops because he figures this is his punishment. This is what he must endure for not being fast enough, strong enough. For not being smart enough to see what Palpatine had done to his beloved padawan; for not being brave enough to just tell his friend how much he loved and cherished him before it was too late. For his love not being enough to rescue the boy and the countless lives he took. For not being fast enough to save Padmé as she lay dying.

For not being enough.

And every sharp snap of life that stretches across the vast universe to brand his heart with another lash of death never lets him forget.