Obi-Wan smothered his pain in a mask of calm as he walked back to the bank where he'd left Anakin withering and screaming in hatred. This is your punishment, he thought to himself, Your foolish impulses started this, and now you'll make sure it ends.
He burned the rest of the body.
"Responsible, you are not, for the actions of others. Need to accept this, you do," Yoda had told him right before he'd left to confront Anakin. Obi-Wan disagreed, but did not have the energy to object.
The stars turned into star-lines. He slept and dreamed. Anakin, thirteen, told Obi-Wan that he'd fallen down the steps. The medics gently encased his broken arm in a bacta-sling, but the boy was obviously uncomfortable.
Obi-Wan woke up, heart racing, gasping. He frantically extinguished any hope within himself for his former apprentice, but it was too late.
Darth Vader rose, covered in ash, swearing his revenge on the whole galaxy.
Obi-Wan hung his head and went into hiding.
"Happy Naming Day!" they all exclaimed together, clapping, laughing, jumping for joy.
Ben grinned largely and laughed louder than most. Naming Day was one of his favorites. They spent so much time at the Temple learning calm, discipline, dispossession; it was a great release to have a day just for himself... well, himself and his age-mates.
Of course, the best part of Naming Day was the sweetcake, covered in sparklers and emblazed with all their names.
"All right, everyone," said their crèche master, "Pick your sparkler. It's time to make a wish and put it out!"
"What are you going to wish for?" Bant asked, her eyes glossy with delight.
"I don't know," Ben replied, but he was lying. He was sick of his name. Like many young, potential Jedi, Ben felt that he had a great destiny. Plain, short 'Ben' just wouldn't do for a Hero of the Jedi Order and of the Republic. It'd be as disconcerting as answering to a Master Bob.
Ben wished for a wise and heroic name. One by one, the age-mates reached out in the Force to snuff out the sparklers.
He hid from the universe he'd created. Obi-Wan went to Sortyk to soak his treacherous mind in cheap local brandy. Obi-Wan went to Maa, where he repaired handbags and knick-knacks from a small street-corner stall. He travelled from obscure planet to even more obscure planet, earning just enough credit to drink, staying just long enough for the Empire to arrive.
Obi-Wan was on Pairthrou, teaching in a small farming community, when they found him.
The storm troopers walked into the schoolhouse slowly, languidly, like white maggots burrowing into sweet summer melon. The students were visibly frightened. Obi-Wan was sick of running.
"I will go with you peacefully," he had said. "Please, don't do this in front of the children."
They were happy to ignore him. Obi-Wan left the schoolhouse bound and gagged like a boar to slaughter.
Obi-Wan couldn't control the wishes. They just happened, or didn't happen, without any apparent pattern or reason. Changing his name was the first change--well, the first one he could remember. One moment, he was Ben, as he always had been; the next moment he was Obi-Wan, and he always had been.
A few months after Naming Day the cafeteria had never served boiled whorltuber. Two years later they'd all started lightsaber practice at five standard years rather than twelve. Obi-Wan once spent a warm summer night on the Temple roof and woke up to find that private vehicles were no longer allowed to fly over the Jedi Temple, and they hadn't been able to for thirty years.
Obi-Wan didn't know how far it could go. He didn't know if there were others. He poured over the histories, prophecies, and data-bases for any reference, any clue.
"Why can't you all be more like Obi-Wan, so studious!" his teachers would say, and Obi-Wan would turn traffic light red.
He never told anyone. Who would believe him? He had a hard enough time keeping the old and new realities separate in his mind and conversations; he didn't want the stress of being investigated for delusions of grandeur. Besides, he liked having a secret power. Obi-Wan imagined he would save the galaxy someday. If only he could figure out how to control it.
They took him back into the heart of the galaxy in binders and chains, taking every precaution for the old General Kenobi. They took him into the moon that wasn't a moon: the Emperor's favorite technological terror. Despite his situation, Obi-Wan was impressed. He'd once thought himself powerful, but he never could have dreamed something as audacious as the Death Star into existence.
They dragged him, stumbling, into an audience chamber too large to belong on any reasonable space-craft, before abandoning him there. This is what we inevitably move towards, thought Obi-Wan, arrogance, excess, disrespect for the natural order of things. We get what we deserve, after all.The sterile white of the large space felt like bleach to Obi-Wan's soul; he felt brittle and insubstantial.
He heard heavy steps and labored breathing, and he straightened his back, held his head up high. At the very least he would have his dignity.
His bindings released and clanged to the deck floor.
"Obi-Wan Kenobi," the voice boomed, impossibly loud.
"That name means nothing to me," Obi-Wan said as he turned to face his former apprentice. "It's Ben Kenobi now." It had felt right to revert back to his original name.
Darth Vader unhooked a lightsaber from his hip. "I have waited a long time for this."
Obi-Wan felt calm. He'd been resigned to death for years, so it was a relief to finally be caught. But Vader did not ignite the lightsaber. He tossed it into the air, and Obi-Wan instinctively caught it.
It was not his lightsaber; Obi-Wan had buried his years ago. He wondered, briefly, whose lightsaber it was.
Vader ignited his own red sword. "The circle is complete. You will find that it is I who is now the master."
Force be cursed, he wants to duel, Obi-Wan realized. He wants to make me fight for my death.
"What is this? No last words, no witty repartee? You were always so fond of those." Vader waved his blade near Obi-Wan, goading him, singing the sleeves of his tunic.
"You don't know how sorry I am, Darth."
"I know you have become a sorry excuse for a Jedi."
Obi-Wan ignited his lightsaber and saw that it was green. Just like Qui-Gon's.
Obi-Wan stood alone and apart at the funeral, watching the pyre, feeling the heat. He didn't want the other Jedis' well-meant but hurtful sympathies.
"It wasn't your fault," they said, ignorantly.
They'd been practicing against the dueling droids in preparation for Obi-Wan's upcoming trials. They were beating the droids easily, and Obi-Wan had felt that there was no way to prove himself against mechanical opponents in a controlled, friendly environment.
So the next moment they were fighting in a decidedly uncontrolled, unfriendly environment. Obi-Wan, shocked by the sudden change, fell behind.
"You defeated a Sith Lord," they said, "You're a hero."
"I created the Sith!" Obi-Wan wanted to shout. "There were no Sith last week!" And then there were two, with one remaining.
He'd spent every moment since trying to take back the wish, to somehow reverse it, but he was no closer than he'd ever been to learning control.
I will carry on Qui-Gon's legacy. I will find a way to defeat the Sith, Obi-Wan thought.
He gasped as the force of the new memory hit him, disorienting him with three different accounts of the past month. In one, he and Qui-Gon had trained in the Jedi Temple. In the next, they'd fought a Sith Lord on Naboo. In the newest memory, there was a small blonde boy.
"He is the Chosen One. He will bring balance to the Force," Qui-Gon had said.
Obi-Wan looked down and to his right. There he was, shining through the Force like a supernova. He would train him in Qui-Gon's image.
He assumed a basic defensive stance. He'll fight one last duel. Then it will be over.
They exchanged blows stiffly, formally. Vader was testing, and Obi-Wan found he didn't have the energy to do anything but react. But his reactions were poor. He hadn't held a lightsaber in years, and it showed.
Vader laughed; it was a strange, choking sound. "To think I once held you in such regard. Now you are nothing but a pathetic old man." He scored the last three words with three heavy strokes. Obi-Wan barely managed to block them. "Where has Obi-Wan Kenobi gone? It is he I intended to defeat."
He doesn't realize that he won a long time ago, Obi-Wan thought. There was no hope left in the galaxy. There was no hope left in him.
Obi-Wan wished it wasn't so.
Sometimes Obi-Wan thought the war was just a bad dream. Any day now he'd wake up. Or, more plausibly, he'd make a wish, and it would all end up one of the alternate realities only Obi-Wan remembered.
He never could make the right wishes, though. When he went to Okart, it fell to the Separatists. When he didn't go to Okart, it became a nuclear wasteland. Save one woman and two die in her place. What was the use of a power that ultimately changed nothing?
"Not for us to dictate, the future is," Yoda had said, "Only the Force, there is."
It was especially hard on the young ones. Obi-Wan watched, pained, as his apprentice turned moody, distraught, jaded. He'd been that way since his mother had died right before the war started. Obi-Wan hoped that Anakin would find some iota of happiness during those bleak times.
Years later, when Obi-Wan found Padmé's small, broken body on Mustafar, he would wonder if they'd been having the affair all along, or it if was another one of Obi-Wan's horrible mistakes.
The new memory was more forceful than ever. Twenty odd years of changes swirled in his mind, making him see double, demanding to be included in his past. Obi-Wan stiffened, and almost lost his head in that moment to one of Vader's powerful attacks.
"Your powers are weak, old man," Vader intoned.
Maybe so, but not as weak as a minute ago,Obi-Wan thought. He'd never been so transformed; not only physically, but spiritually. The years had been kinder to this Obi-Wan Kenobi. He was even holding his own blue lightsaber, the one he'd deliberately left on a swamp moon in another lifetime. Here he was still a Jedi.
A twitch in the Force! Obi-Wan looked over his shoulder. There stood the young man, full of passionate optimism, ready to charge the Dark Lord and a dozen storm troopers for a crazy old hermit. The young woman, the practical one, was holding him back but swearing revenge with the set of her jaw, the steel in her eyes. The fearless warrior and the fearless leader. That is where my hope has been these two decades, Obi-Wan realized, in these children conceived and grown in the space of a whispered thought. For the first time in a long time he felt like he'd changed things for the better.
He turned back to his opponent. "You can't win, Darth. If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine."
In Vader's silence, Obi-Wan could almost see his former apprentice as a young man, staring blankly at his master, not only misunderstanding the day's lesson but also refusing to believe in the subject's significance. Obi-Wan held on to that memory—he didn't know which reality it was from but he didn't care. Another memory surfaced: Qui-Gon, smiling wryly, saying "if you have to quit, always do it when you are winning." He cast aside his weapon.
Vader triumphantly brought his lightsaber down.
"No!" he heard, but it was remote, an echo of the ghost of a call. There was a sense of falling, of regression, of the shuffling and assimilation of all his accumulated memories. Little by little, they strung together into a wider and larger picture of Obi-Wan's many lifetimes; he could see where he'd made the right choices and where he'd made the wrong ones, and that they no longer mattered because there was only the Force.
A/N: Many thanks to my beta, Elfpen. All remaining mistakes are my own. Star Wars makes money from me, not the other way around. Inspired by Ursula LeGuin's amazing novel, 'The Lathe of Heaven.' I hope you've enjoyed the story!