Summary: Obi-Wan Kenobi had failed everyone and everything he ever loved. Perhaps he should submit to the judgment of the desert.

Notes: Obi-Wan handed little Luke over to his Aunt and Uncle. Then he just kept walking…

Twin Suns

by quicksilvering

But what if this Obi-Wan comes looking for him?

He won't. I don't think he exists anymore. He died about the same time as your father.

~ Luke Skywalker and Owen Lars

A Jedi Master walked across a desolate landscape.

The sand was burning hot beneath his boots, hard and sharp where rocks jutted out, and utterly barren all the way to the horizon. The world was filled with dull colors, the hazy, dirty blue of the sky – almost bled of all color from the twin suns high overhead – and the ground was all in shades of brown, light and dark, tan and grey and almost white – the color of ash. Occasionally a dry wind would blow, echoing strangely across the sandy plains and stirring the dust up until it chocked his nose and stung his eyes. He coughed then, his eyes tearing without his permission, even as he pulled his hood more firmly over his face and ducked his head lower.

And kept walking.

In the far distance, jagged peaks were just barely discernible through the heat-haze of the desert. He believed, from his studies of the maps of this place and the words of the locals at Anchorhead, that those peaks were mountains which guarded the pass into the Western Dune Sea.

A mockery. If there had ever been free-standing water in this place it was long gone.

Around him was only silence, heavy and hot and devoid of life. The Force was so distant here – like an echo from a dream – as though the dead nature of this planet had, in some way, made its presence here a memory rather than a reality.

Obi-Wan couldn't understand how anyone could live here. He hadn't understood it even back when he'd first seen this place, a heap of dust, out the view port of the Naboo Queen's damaged ship. He had no idea how Anakin could have –

His eyes burned again. From the sand. He quickly wiped them and continued trudging on, more like stumbling really, as the twin suns high above increased in combined intensity and the hottest part of the day advanced. Obi-Wan used a small amount of his carefully hoarded canteen of water to wet the cloth at the back of his neck. He was perspiring heavily, and the heat from the suns was making him dizzy.

He was glad he'd left the eopie with his supplies back in one of the caves. It would not have done to bring that poor animal with him, trekking across the Jundland Wastes.

He'd even left the small trunk with his few precious belongings – Qui-Gon's and…Anakin's lightsaber, and Ahsoka's Padawan beads – back in the cave. It was dark, out of the way of the few landspeeder routes, and should hold nothing of interest for any Tuskens that passed. The only things he had brought with him were a canteen of water and his own lightsaber.

He crested the rise of an unexpected hill – below him towered jagged rock formations, scoured by the winds – and missed his footing. He was tired, exhausted, and seeing double in this kriffin' heat and his balance, usually so precise, deserted him when he needed it most. Automatically he reached out to the Force – but it was so distant here and he had been blocked, almost afraid to touch it since Anakin –

He fell head over heels down the sandy slope, barely missing several hard rocks, until he landed heavily at the bottom, the wind knocked out of him and his head ringing.

'Obi-Wan!' Anakin shouted, as the bounty hunter's blaster rifle took him clean in the shoulder and he tumbled off the roof of the building. He was mostly gone by the time he hit the bottom, but he still remembered Ahsoka's tears, her gentle embrace, and Anakin's frantic cries as he shook Obi-Wan's unresponsive body.

Obi-Wan groaned, gingerly touching his head to see if he was bleeding anywhere. If he'd seriously injured himself then things…could get messy.

He stumbled to his feet, head swimming and blinked to try and clear the haze from his vision. Towering mesas, buttes and plateaus stuck up defiantly towards the midday sky. Some were as tall as skyscrapers, but some were even taller – bases smaller than their tops as though the passage of time and the sand storms which ravaged Tatooine's entire surface had carved them into fanciful shapes – and they looked to pierce the very dome of air above him.

Obi-Wan tipped his head back to gaze at their tops and he must have overbalanced again, for the next thing he knew, he was flat on his back, the twin suns beating down on him. He groaned, reached up a heavy hand and felt his burning face, his dry, cracked lips, the salt of sweat on his skin. His head hung in damp tendrils against his scalped, and his beard felt caked with sand. He was itchy as well. Everywhere. As though sand had gotten under his very robes and wormed its insidious way into his boots.

'I hate sand,' Anakin grumbled, teenage angst clear in his voice and very clear in the folded arms, scrunched eyebrows and forbidding scowl on his face. Obi-Wan hid a smile. 'Do you?' he teased, carefully piloting their ship in for a landing. 'I didn't know that.' Anakin's scowl intensified, but it looked like he was trying a bit too hard to maintain it once he met Obi-Wan's badly suppressed smile and felt his mirth over their bond. 'Not funny, Master,' he muttered sulkily. 'I can't believe you brought me here on our vacation.' Obi-Wan flung open the door to the ship with more gusto than was warranted. Anakin really was an awful teenager. 'The beaches of Scarif are famous, Anakin. You'll love it,' he promised.

"And you did love it," he mumbled through cracked lips. "I couldn't get you out of the water."

He blinked heavily. Above him the twin suns of Tatooine – which scorched the ground around him – hovered high and close together. Obi-Wan stared at them from underneath a shaded hand, attempting to angle his head just so in order that his retinas didn't become scorched as well. One star was huge and golden, the other slightly smaller and with more of a reddish, fiery glow – like molten embers – hovering just off to the side of its big brother. Continuously together, orbiting each other since the galaxy – and time – began.

And they would be together. Forever. Just like he and –

He turned away and stared out at the landscape, empty and desolate just like him. Who knows what the Force has in store. Perhaps Tatooine would lose one of its suns one day, and the other would be required to carry on, alone, circling a planet that would be forever changed in its wake.

His eyes were very heavy and perhaps it didn't matter that he hadn't reached the Dune Sea. Perhaps here was good enough – in the middle of the Wastes – and all he had to do was wait. It didn't sound so hard after all.

Obi-Wan let his eyes close at last.

"Obi-Wan!"

Anakin's voice. He was in pain, terrible pain, and he sounded so afraid…

Obi-Wan wrenched open his eyes, body jerking upwards as instinct pulled at him so strongly that he was certain, for a moment, that he would be back in the Temple – in his old quarters, with Anakin just in the other room – and that his young apprentice had had a terrifying nightmare.

He blinked against the burning, blinding light, his eyes hazy and unfocused, and smelled the acrid sweat of his own body…and underneath that, the faint smell of sulfur which he could not seem to wash out of these robes…

And then he was rolling over onto hard-baked, burning sand and emptying whatever remained in his stomach out onto the ground.

After his stomach stopped heaving, he reached down for his water bottle and found it empty, all the liquid that remained having burned away in the heat. The suns were setting down over the top of the ledge down which he'd fallen. For a long time, Obi-Wan watched the sun rays as they moved over the tops of the sand and began to recede out of sight. Shadows grew and lengthened, and as he pressed his burned cheek against the ground, he felt the heat leaving it as though it were being leached from the surface.

The winds whispered and a small creature, some type of lizard, scuttled out from where it had been hiding during the day. It darted across Obi-Wan's hand and scurried off out of sight. After a moment, when the Jedi didn't move, more of them came out, moving past Obi-Wan almost silently as they followed their friend.

Obi-Wan sat up.

The wind whipped through the rock formations, undulating strangely as it bent around the hindrances in its path and rolled over the sand. He closed his eyes and listened to it. Far in the distance a krayt dragon roared – a baby one by the sound of it – and closer to him, a faint hiss was heard as something slithered over the sand. A war cry sounded from a Tusken hunting party, reverberating amongst the rocks.

'The Force is life, young Padawan,' Master Qui-Gon said calmly, eyes twinkling as he deposited another stray Loth-cat into their apartment at the Temple. 'And life comes in many forms, some which we would not call life at all. At first.'

Obi-Wan had thought this planet dead, but that was during the daytime and perhaps it was only sleeping. In the evening, once the blazing suns began their descent, all sorts of interesting things began to happen. Even the rocks seemed to come alive as the wind whistled through them.

'Lost a planet, Master Obi-Wan has,' Yoda said, and the younglings giggled.

"I've lost more than that," Obi-Wan whispered, opening his eyes to see the stars above him. They were distant now, lost to him like so much else had been. He wondered if this was how…he felt as a child, looking up at the stars and knowing he would never see them.

'One day I will visit them all,' the fierce, bright little boy told him solemnly, trying to find some way to connect with the quiet Padawan who had just lost his Master to a Sith on Naboo. 'Will you visit them with me?'

"We will visit them together, Padawan," Obi-Wan said, echoing the response of his past self.

'Luke,' Padmé said, fading before his eyes, knowing he would take care of them, 'Leia.'

'My name is Ahsoka.'

'Our Padawan.'

Obi-Wan was thirsty and tired and alone. But he was also a Jedi, and the first rule of being a Jedi was to look at the world around you. To really look. Just off to his right, barely visible in the darkness, were several pointy shapes sticking up out of the sand. They didn't look like rocks.

Heaving himself to his feet, Obi-Wan shuffled over to them and knelt down. The rock-like objects were egg-shaped, with a crackled black outer shell that blended in with the night sky. Experimentally, Obi-Wan rapped on one with his knuckles. Nothing.

He dropped it to the ground…where it shattered on impact, liquid from inside it spattering the bottoms of his boots. He bent down and dipped his fingers in it, sniffing cautiously. It smelled a bit strange, but neither foul nor infested with bacteria. He moved back a way and settled onto the ground once more, legs crossed while he waited. At last, some of the small lizards, several womp rats and even a couple of scurries – small, two-legged quick, little mammals with long snouts – moved carefully past his seated form and over to the small puddle of liquid still found in the shells of the egg-like object.

Obi-Wan watched them drink up the liquid greedily before running off into the darkness again.

"Hmm," he said, before breaking over two other eggs – carefully this time – and setting them on the ground in the same place.

Once again, the small animals came back and slackened their thirst. He wondered if the liquid inside this egg would be safe for humans and other sentient species to drink. He would have to bring some back with him in order to test it.

Bring some back, where?

Obi-Wan looked up at the cloudless sky above him. Closing his eyes once more, he sought stillness and peace. The part of him he thought of as irrevocably tied with Anakin was charred and black and frightening to look at, but the Force still answered when he called. Distant and filled with sadness and loneliness.

Obi-Wan shook his head ruefully. The Force showed him not what it was, but how Obi-Wan perceived himself to be.

He opened an egg and drank the liquid.

He almost gagged. Ugh, disgusting. But he swallowed it anyway and felt slightly better about things.

Then, with a quiet sigh, he gathered up several more of the eggs-like rocks and began to make his slow and careful way back up the slope, back towards his eopie and few belongings, back towards Luke…and back towards where he was supposed to be.

The Force was with him: Even if he couldn't understand it yet. Even if everything was strange here. Even if he had failed.

He believed that.

And even if Anakin was…gone – lost to Obi-Wan even in the netherworld of the Force – he wouldn't let him down again. He wouldn't fail to protect Luke, and Leia if she needed it. It was his sacred duty…

…and he would not fail again.

End Notes: Poor Obi-Wan. Obi-Wan on Tatooine is one of those images in my head that I just have so much to say and think about and wonder and cry over, that…I'll probably write tons of different versions, or perspectives or stories about random things that happened to him there. If anyone's interested in that as well…stay tuned, lol.

Not entirely satisfied with the ending.

Also, in case anyone is interested, Obi-Wan has found black melons – which contain a 'milk' that the Tusken Raiders drink and which is, indeed, safe for humans to consume.