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Necessary

All the way back to Tatooine, the ash hovered in his nostrils.

Not literally, of course, but it didn't matter. Obi-Wan Kenobi was a servant of the Force, of the Jedi, and of the Republic whose death he had just lived through, and he knew the grief that was overwhelming him should have been for all three. Or at the very least, for poor, brave Padme. But it was none of these, not really. Those greater deaths were too large, too outside himself. It shamed him to acknowledge the truth: they felt too distant. Qui-Gon would have been disappointed. But then, perhaps he would have understood after all. What ate at Obi-Wan—the grief that he felt had already consumed him—was the death of Anakin Skywalker.

For he was dead. Oh, Obi-Wan could still feel the distant ripples of the mind that had been Anakin's, if he listened carefully, in just the right way, lurking in the shadow of the midichlorian. But that mind was no longer what Obi-Wan had known. He more than half-wondered if it ever had been.

That was unfair, surely. Obi-Wan had trained Anakin; Anakin had been frustrated by that training—had been frustrated by Obi-Wan himself—and had become Sith; therefore Obi-Wan was the one ultimately at fault. That seemed self-evident. It was even oddly comforting, in a way: it brought a sort of order to what had happened. Qui-Gon had chided him, sometimes, for being too coldly practical.

But the only way to truly deal with what Anakin had done—destroying the Jedi, handing the galaxy to the Emperor, killing Padme—was to simply let Anakin be guilty of it. Obi-Wan did not think that he could. The sickened, constant awareness of Anakin's death (for he was dead!) was too much with him. The smell of Anakin's burning flesh, the screams of the ruined friend Obi-Wan had left to die (for he was dead!), were too much with him. Obi-Wan could see only his friend, his brother, and the gaping wound his passing had left in his soul. Whatever Darth Vader was—whatever this thing was that wore the remains of Anakin's body, that perhaps had killed Anakin long ago and moved ever since in his guise—he was not Anakin. The snarling, flame-eyed hatred tearing out at Obi-Wan on Mustafar was not Anakin.

Had it always been there, and he too willfully blind to see it?

Alone in a chamber on a fleeing starship, Obi-Wan wept.