The ship's windows were tall, spare mixes of metal and glass that rose to the incredibly high ceilings in what seemed to be a novice designer's attempt at elegance. The actual effect was far more foreboding: long rows of the black slate of space, one gaping door after another that led to the unknown, to the cold, to death.
In one of these frozen doorways stood a man, dwarfed by the size of it, made almost invisible by the dark clothes he wore.
He stood alone and looked outside, at the emptiness of deep space, and waited for the feeling to return. The feeling that he was not alone in this alien ship, long ago set to autopilot in whatever language this race had spoken.
He knew what it meant.
Troops had found him.
No, he corrected himself. Not troops. This would be a few soldiers. Special forces. Assassins.
Everyone knew a squad was useless against a trained Jedi.
This junked-out ship lost in the void had been a perfect hideout for months. He was, in a strange way, going to miss the odd grinding every time it corrected its course, and the walls upon walls of unknown writing down in the lower levels, every bit as hopeful and ugly as the windows.
It had been a place for him to heal and train. To gather his thoughts and make a decision that had to be made.
The first two had been accomplished, as much as they could be. The last he was still considering. It was not a decision he wanted to make, and he'd danced around it almost nightly in his walks past these windows without ever getting closer to an answer.
It was a difficult job, talking yourself into killing your padawan.
Now, as he met the empty eyes of space on the other side of the glass, he felt no closer to accepting or rejecting such a monstrous idea and that hesitation made him loathe the soft, ghostly lines of his own reflection in the glass.
He was almost relieved to finally have a fight on his hands, something to take his mind away from it.
Let them come.
Closing his eyes, he tilted his head, reaching out with his mind to see what the Empire had in store for him this evening.
The feeling coalesced, and he frowned as it continued to shrink into something like what you see after staring at the sun, amorphous and dark against the deep blacks and greys of his closed eyes.
They hadn't sent a handful of assassins. They'd only sent one.
A Force-wielder.
The feeling pushed against him, harder, prodding him with the certainty that the other was on the move, coming closer. It would take this entity a while to cross the ship, but he would, as dangerous and inescapable as a flood after heavy spring rains.
He? Yes, he…
The Jedi knew they'd sent a man. A young one, in fact. One he knew as well as the scar across his own back or the sunsets of his homeworld.
Opening his eyes, Obi Wan felt a sudden, intense jealousy of the unknown people that had built this ship and then vanished. They were gone, all of their loves and struggles and ambitions and hopes long, long over.
He was not so lucky.
It looked like the universe had decided it was tired of waiting for his answer to the question that had plagued him all this time.
Tonight he would find out if he had it in him to kill his padawan.