The pain was a welcome, hated buzz under his skin. Even when it dulled into a persistent throbbing in time with his heartbeat it hissed I'm alive, I'm alive, I'm alive.
(Alive - when his friends weren't.)
(Alive - when the Jedi, the only family he had ever known, weren't.)
(Alive - when the Republic he had given his entire life for was crumbling into ruins before his eyes.)
(Alive - when the men he had trusted his life to, fought beside, had turned on him with less than a thought.)
(Alive - when his Padawan, his brother, was a broken shell, fallen to the Dark and helping to drag the Galaxy with him.)
The initial starburst of pain, of a needle piercing flesh over and over, had brought reflexive tears to his eyes.
He'd refused to use the Force to dispel it. He had been trained his entire life to disregard pain, release it, to free his concentration for more important matters.
For once in his life, there was nothing. He existed in this moment.
Wouldn't Qui-Gon be proud. All it took to force him to focus on the present was the destruction of everything because of his lack of attention.
They had lost. The Dark was sweeping across the galaxy and the Jedi were gone.
He was stranded by choice on a miserable rock at the edge of the Galaxy, with nothing but sand for company and the vague hope that maybe, some day, if he could protect Anakin's son the way that he'd failed Anakin, he could help coax light back into the Galaxy. But some days, some days when the sand stretches forever, and the twin suns burn down on him, he finds himself forgetting why he is here, why he wasn't out there fighting (dying).
He needs to remember; he is guarding the potential. The future. Guarding his future Padawan from his former. Guarding the first of the new Jedi from one of the last of the Old.
(It's a bitter pill. Even after everything, he's still too focused on the future. On the past. On anything but the present.
(The present is always what hurts the most.))
He's no artist, but he's a fair hand with a sketch book. He has to be — had to be, to reliably complete his reports when no holorecorder was available. But he'd accumulated a mountain of crumbled flimsi trying to articulate what he wanted before he gave up.
It didn't matter.
(It was everything, but everything he created crumbled to dust.)
He couldn't etch those things he wanted to remember most onto his body. Not now. Not when they could give him away as a Jedi. As a traitor.
The Temple, raising whole against the Coruscant sky, intact and full of bright force lights.
The lightsabers for his friends, gone and dead, so many of them. Too few had even lived to see the Order. None past it.
The Code. Sometimes he felt the need to burn it into his body so his soul and mind would remember it, even when it contradicted every instinct he had.
(His Padawan, as he had been, once. Fierce and determined, a beacon in the Light that burned so brightly.)
But no.
It would not come.
The tattoo artist he found deep in the slave quarters on in Mos Espa was used to taking the pained, stumbling words and basic outlines of an idea, and turning them into works of art; acts of defiance, remembrance, pain.
Love, and grief etched into skin. The only thing broken people could hold onto.
She was some indeterminate species that Obi-Wan had never encountered before, with limpid eyes that saw into him, saw more than he ever wanted her to. Wanted anyone to. He doesn't know how, but she already knew his deepest secrets. The things he could never find the courage to say. Loves and pain, duty and doubt. So he told her. He looked into those eyes, deeper eyes than he had ever seen, eyes that already knew anything he could say, and spoke to her as he had spoken to no other being. Told her what he could bring himself to, through a throat seized tight with anguished grief.
He told her, and trusted.
He closed his eyes and let her work. Threw his faith to the Force in a way he couldn't remember doing in years. Trusted that what would come was what he needed.
The pain of the tattoo was a welcome pain, a needed pain, a physical counterpoint to the mental anguish that plagued him day and night. It traveled over his skin, and into his soul, lancing hurts, and guarding others.
It felt like hours, days, an eternity later that the needle lifted from his skin, and the Force rang with completion.
He opened his eyes, and for a moment, all he could see were her eyes, green as new grass in a dusky face and depthless as the Force.
Then he looked.
A tangled swirl of colors danced down his right arm, his saber-arm. A thousand shades of greens and blues interrupted by hints of yellows and pinks, purple, a thread of red. Every shade of lightsaber he had ever seen.
A flower bloomed just under his right collarbone, a deep burgundy edged in gold. It was a lovely thing, cradled in a bed of leaves and thorns, and set before the blue/white flare of a supernova. His smile felt like brittle glass, but was genuine. Yes.
The supernova and the deadly flower. As they had been, not as they were.
A blocky, stylized sunburst in gold on his left shoulder, and he didn't need more than a moment to recall the shape of the designs his Commander's helmet, the fiery presence of him that burned beneath his steady exterior. His eyes misted and he blinked harshly, tearing his eyes away from that brilliant gold.
(Why, Cody? Did everything between them, years of fighting, surviving, friendship forged in war mean nothing?
Why had she put this on him?
No.
No.
Trust.
He trusted, and the Force was singing a sad melody in his mind. Grief and betrayal and heartbreak and rage enough to falter armies. But not his own. Smothered under an impenetrable fog.)
He'd gotten a tattoo before, only once, in the period after his return from Melida/Dann. The symbol of the Jedi Order in black looked carved into the skin over his heart, for all it sat on the surface. Dex had been enormously helpful in finding a good tattoo artist who would tattoo a minor. He'd needed the reminder then, too, that obedience to the Order, that becoming a better Jedi, was the only way prevent pain. Prevent loss.
When he had fallen on Utapau, shot down by a man he'd trusted — betrayed, though he hadn't known it yet, by his brother — he had snagged on the rock cliff and torn a jagged cut straight through the symbol.
And the Masters of the order say — said — that the Force didn't have a sense of humor.
The tattoo artist had patched the symbol with blue, completing lines bisected by scars. It was whole again, but the damage would be obvious for the rest of his life.
It was a beautiful blue, and it drew his eye to the pulse point of his left hand; his heart-hand, guard-hand.
Jai Eyes, in perfect, 501st blue.
Obi-Wan choked on a sob, and didn't resist when the artist cooed a warbling note and pulled him forward into a cool embrace. Her long webbed fingers patted his back and stroked through his hair.
He hadn't told her about Rex.
That pain ran too deep, was too closely tangled with hope he couldn't allow himself.
The hope hurt worse than anything.
He didn't know what had happened to Rex, in the chaos of the fall of the Republic.
He hadn't seen his lover in months, crushed by the tide of war, worn thin and desperate and aching for the unexpected peace he had found in the arms of a mouthy, sarcastic asshole who's well of duty and loyalty ran as deep as his own.
He hadn't been in the Temple. Obi-Wan had forced himself to watch every frame of that massacre — heart already in tatters at his feet as his Padawan murdered younglings — but there had been no sign of blue Jaig Eyes.
Rex would not have stood for that, no matter what order Anakin gave (he hadn't thought anything could have compelled Cody to turn on him, a voice had whispered, why should Rex be any different?) but Obi-Wan had no way of knowing if he had escaped the penalties of defiance.
He hadn't told the artist about Rex.
Blue Jaig eyes stared up from his wrist.
The Force whispered to him of pain and determination, longing and stubborn defiance.
But not his own.
He closed his eyes again, and let the lancing pain of hope stab deep into his heart.
He closed his eyes, and trusted.