As the desolate ship drifted through the void, its passage as silent as the stars it blocked, a single spark of light flared to life along the thick hull, a starfighter tucked up into the odd angles and lines of the larger vessel.
The controls and panels flickering on revealed an empty cockpit and the main computer running through diagnostics and a preflight check routine. Each number ticked away in orderly shapes, its twin displayed on the com Obi-Wan tucked back into his robes.
27 minutes until it would be ready to fly.
He looked down the massive hall, its ceiling almost lost in shadows despite the harsh glare the ship's nuclear power system provided. Anakin would be here sooner than 27 minutes.
No. Not Anakin.
That thing that choked Padme to death on Mustafar is not your padawan.
Another swirl of guilt passed through him, an icy wind that bit no less each time he thought of it. In his time on the run, he'd kept hope alive that somehow she'd been all right, that C-3PO had made it back to the medics with her. That hope had lasted exactly three system transport hops and 57 standard days.
He had dared to come in from the hinterlands of a water world, face tanned and body thin, to a floating city where few questions were asked and all manner of things were available for sale. He'd been hoping to buy a ferry ticket to the capital city and then a ship for the next leg of his aimless journey away from the Empire.
"Bad season to buy," the dealer had muttered, waving his four arms but eventually taking the credits the Jedi had earned working nets on a fishing boat. "You should wait until winter."
"Why?" Obi-Wan had learned early on in his stay the dominant race here was superstitious bordering on neurotic, and his Coruscant breeding made him raise an eyebrow in exasperation.
"The little queen is dead, my friend. The one from Naboo," the man helpfully added when he mistook Obi-Wan's shock for puzzlement. He waved a green hand back and forth as if brushing away flies. "She died in some covert mission somewhere, they say. Poor girl."
Obi-Wan blinked at him, not wanting to hear the words he'd dreaded all of this time but unable to block them out. They rolled past him, each one tearing away a part of him as surely as an expert sniper using him for target practice.
"My pale offworlder, do you not have this saying on your own world? 'Start a journey in the same season as a royal death, and your journey will end badly.' My uncle had this happen to him once, you know..."
That day the Jedi got his ticket, boarded the ferry, and lost his way.
It was 11 more standard days before he stopped drinking long enough to firmly place where he was. Surprisingly, and to the disappointment of the darkest corner of his mind, he was still alive, now with a starfighter on an abandoned Jedi outpost far away from the cheerful waterworld man and his horrid news.
There were vague memories of people helping him. No one he knew. Strangers who knew his face from the holonews reports, or those who recognized the robes in his pack and the unique weapon that hung at his side as signs of an order that had helped them or their families or their peoples in the past.
Careful hands had passed him along from place to place and day to day, believing him to be good, someone worth saving.
He had doubted that. He still did.
But in the four years that had crawled by, and all of the solitary time since that first painful stirring back to consciousness in the empty base, Obi-Wan trusted that there was a reason he was still alive. His own master's memory echoed in his mind, keeping him going through the scattershot months, whispering over icy flatlands or jungle sounds or the black emptiness of space that Obi-Wan needed to trust in the Force.
"I have tried, Master," he now muttered to the empty hall before him. "Is this what the Force truly wants?"
Padme, dead. Her child, dead.
All of the Jedi. Dead.
He calls himself Vader. You must cut him down.
This was not the Force speaking to him, he knew. This was his own voice, the same angry voice that had urged him on since the idea had come to him all those months ago.
He is not himself anymore.
But this wasn't true, either. The Empire's propaganda machine had been quick to plaster his former padawan's face everywhere it could. And for all of the evil he had committed, Anakin was as young and handsome as he'd ever been, his angelic profile fine against the obscene halo of the Imperial logo behind him.
All lost. Everything is lost. I have to stop him.
His eyes closed as he willed himself to commit to those words, to make it a pledge. I cannot fail. I cannot let him walk away from this.
The other Force-wielder on board was closer now, just a few passages away, the taint of corruption a sickly-sweet note inside Obi-Wan's mind.
He drew up to his full height, feeling the weight of his robes on him. They had been carefully packed away during his exile when others had been around, but here, alone, he had returned as much as he could to the training of a temple now overrun with blasphemy and lies.
Perhaps it would throw the thing that had been Anakin to see his master looking just as he had at their last battle.
Obi-Wan hoped so.
He took a deep, cleansing breath and forced the panicked, angry voice shouting for vengeance to the back of his mind. It went with claws out, dragging them along his brain until he ground his teeth in concentration, but it went.
All was silent in the hall. All was silent in his mind.
The com vibrated against his chest. 15 standard minutes to ship readiness.
Silence returned.
When the doors opened at the far end of the hall, he did not move. He took in the billowing lines of black, the arrogant strut of the figure walking toward him.
The yellow eyes, the ones the propaganda engineers were careful to edit down to a more acceptable brown, were too far away to see just yet.
The red lightsaber was much easier to make out, already lit even though they were still too far away from each other to speak.
Qui-Gon's former padawan waited, hand hanging loosely at his side. Let the monster speak first. I have nothing to say to him. The last sentence was shakier in his mind than he wanted, but it would have to do. Conviction was a hard thing to find today, but Obi-Wan tried to put it on just as he had his robes and his saber.
There was only the click of boots and the faintest hiss of the saber from the dragon at the end of the hall.
Like a painful, forgotten memory drifting back up into your mind, Anakin Skywalker drew nearer until every detail was clear. The horrible sulphur-hued eyes, the hateful scowl, the finely worked black leather and robes with the Empire's logo rendered on his right shoulder. "You." He stopped, lifting his chin, still well out of strike range for either of them.
Obi-Wan studied his face, listened to the venom in the word. "You have been hunting me yourself." It was not a question. The thought skipped like a stone across the calm surface of his mind, not touching the anger and grief hastily pinned below.
"They told me you were dead in the base collapse at Mustafar. I knew better."
"Did you? Worried you'd missed one in all the general slaughter?" Sarcasm was safe, as old a habit as breathing. Another stone across the pond.
Anakin spun his saber thoughtlessly at his side, an old tell that meant he felt he was in no danger and had time to assess things. Obi-Wan began to walk to the side, and Anakin followed suit, the two marking a large, lazy circle that kept the other one opposite.
"I owed it to you after you murdered my wife."
The anger swept upward. Obi-Wan drew his saber before he wrestled the emotion under control again, and the weapon flared to life beside him, their path now marked by a slow pirouette of blue and red. "I… I killed your wife? Did Sidious tell you that?"
"You brought her to Mustafar. I wasn't ready, I didn't have control yet. It wasn't my fault! The two of you pushed me to it! If only you had listened to me! None of this would have happened!" The red saber spun now, once beside its wielder before it curved upward to snap into place next to the Sith lord's hate-filled face.
Another habit from younger days. Anakin was deciding what to do. Obi-Wan had a few more steps before the attack would come.
As frightened and angry as he was, Obi-Wan felt a deep sadness trace itself over the anguish he already felt, a line of ice settling over a winter river. This creature, this horrible force of destruction forged by loss and trickery, was still his padawan. Still young and uncertain and eager to blame everyone but himself.
Padme. Yoda. My brother and sister Jedi. Forgive me. I cannot kill this boy.
On the third step Anakin whirled at him, blade slicing through the air toward Obi-Wan's face followed by a quick twist as he aimed a kick at his chest.
The red line of death was answered with a blue one, Obi-Wan grunting as he ducked and used his saber to shove the attack past him overhead, spinning around just enough Anakin's boot sailed past him.
He elbowed Anakin in the face as he slammed a foot down, sending his former padawan sprawling across the smooth tiles of the floor as he tripped over Obi-Wan's boot.
In a tumble and growl, the man was upright once again, charging at him as he slashed his saber down in a block.
Death whirled through the air as they parried and struck, both better than they had been the last time this scene played out, but only one trying desperately to wound while the other sought to end.
It was a silent battle, no words between them save grunts of effort as they kicked and wheeled and spun themselves across the hall.
The com buzzed against Obi-Wan's chest as he slid past Anakin, rolling back onto his feet and racing for the far doors that led into the maze of walls and writing below. He turned and danced as he went, parrying blows made ragged with frustrated rage.
"You can't escape me!" Anakin howled, right on his heels.
5 minutes to ship readiness.
If he could live that long.
