Author's Note: Here is the Death Star scene now. This was a difficult piece to write, so I'm sorry if it didn't turn out too well.

Revenge

Revenge: To exact punishment or expiation for a wrong especially in a resentful or vindictive spirit; to take vengeance; to avenge; retaliation for injuries or wrongs; something done in vengeance; the desire to avenge; vindictiveness; an opportunity to retaliate or gain satisfaction.

Vader's veins hummed like his throbbing crimson lightsaber as Kenobi ignited his own weapon. It was so satisfying to leap out in front of his nemesis and see the frail old man's eyes widen. Vader knew that the broken former Jedi before him hadn't been caught completely off-guard, because he had his lightsaber hilt in hand. That didn't matter, though. Vader hadn't been dumb enough to expect to catch Kenobi entirely unawares.

After all, he recognized that the same Force bond that had alerted Vader to Kenobi's unwelcome, prying presence on the Death Star would also betray him by warning Kenobi that Vader was here and looking for him. There was no way that the Force could not have done so, since the bond that had tied them together first as student and teacher and then as best friends was more powerful than either of them had supposed, for it endured long after both of them wanted it to end, and the Force remembered the knot even if they both wished they could forget it.

"I've been waiting for you, Obi-Wan," Vader sneered, even though he knew that his enemy couldn't see his expression through his mask, as Kenobi shuffled forward like the frail remnant of a Jedi that he was. The words were true. He had been waiting for an opportunity to avenge himself on Kenobi ever since the foul man had chopped off his remaining arm and legs and left him to be devoured by the lava on Mustafar.

Now that the moment to punish Kenobi for the crimes he had committed against Anakin Skywalker had arrived and now that he had a chance to prove once and for all that Skywalker was really better than Kenobi, Vader could feel himself quivering with excitement.

Yet, that wouldn't do. While Skywalker's emotions had spun uncontrollably about like helpless, hapless leaves trapped in a hurricane, Vader kept a tight leash on his. Kenobi had to spot this, so that he would know before he died that Vader possessed the serenity that Skywalker had never had and had stupidly envied Kenobi for possessing. "We meet again at last. The circle is now complete."

Eyeing Kenobi appraisingly as the man's lightsaber slid into a classical offensive pose, Vader felt a flare of disappointment. Although Kenobi had appeared weaker than a linka flower, he had hoped that like the shriveled Emperor Palpatine, Kenobi's unthreatening exterior masked a mighty interior. However, Kenobi seemed to really be as weak as he looked. Fierfek. There wouldn't be much satisfaction in cutting down an unworthy opponent who only possessed merely a fraction of the power Kenobi had during his apex in the Clone Wars. That wouldn't do at all.

This was his revenge, and if his revenge was hollow, then so much of his life since Mustafar had been pointless. He had been dreaming of avenging himself on Kenobi ever since he had awoken in this horrid prison of a suit, so if he admitted that his vengeance didn't fill the emptiness inside him, he would be confessing that all the power he had attained since then was meaningless. In effect, he would be confessing that where Anakin Skywalker had once sought power to protect Padme, Vader, who had nobody to love and who was loved by no one, lusted after power because he had nothing else in his life. If he admitted that, he would have to face the chilling liquid nitrogen fact that all the power in the galaxy could never please him, and the insatiable maw of despair inside him would gobble him up after all.

No, he wouldn't space down that dangerous lane. He would not be the sentimental fool again. He would make everyone in the galaxy suffer as Anakin Skywalker had, and he would make the universe as a whole pay for all the anguish it had caused Anakin.

There was meaning in that, and there was meaning in the fact that while once Kenobi had taught Anakin to fight with a lightsaber, now Vader was going to employ those techniques to destroy Kenobi. There was meaning in the fact that whereas Kenobi had once been the better swordsman of the two, now he was the less skilled one. There was meaning in the fact that the student had outstripped the teacher finally. There was meaning in the fact that the apprentice was going to kill the master. There was meaning in the fact that Kenobi's greatest failure was going to be the death of him. There was meaning to the fact that Kenobi had created a monster that he couldn't control that was now going to dismantle him.

"When I left you, I was but the learner; now I am the master," he observed aloud, as these thoughts spiraled inside his skull. There was no denying that he was the superior duelist now, and Kenboi's desperate attempt to surprise him by opening with an offensive stance rather than a typical defensive one was nothing more than an acknowledgment of that.

"Only a master of evil, Darth," Kenobi countered. His accent was as clipped and cultured as Vader remembered, but the tone was different than any he had ever heard before, as impossible as that sounded, since Anakin Skywalker imagined that he had been familiar with every nuance Kenobi's voice could adopt. Yet, Anakin Skywalker had never encountered this tone before. It was simultaneously defeated and resolute. It was laced with unbearable sorrow, but it contained more than a trace of defiance. It was soft and yet it was contemptuous as it turned the Sith honorific that warned others to bow down or be annihilated into a derisive insult.

Hearing the defeat and misery coating Kenobi's tone, Vader smiled savagely under his helmet. He took a perverse delight in knowing that he was responsible for this battered old man's feelings of failure and sorrow. As for the contempt in Kenobi's words, that didn't impact him at all. Once it might have, but now he didn't care what clever comebacks Kenobi devised, because Vader knew that being a master of evil beat being a pathetic relic of a bygone era any day of the year no matter what Kenobi asserted on the contrary. Vader was stronger than Kenobi and that was all that mattered now.

While Vader was sizing Kenobi up, Kenobi had done the same thing. Now, they both stood perfectly still, each waiting for the right moment to strike. Then, probably in another ridiculous attempt to unsettle Vader, Kenobi lunged forward, but his blade was intercepted by Vader's, who noticed that Kenobi's former lightening reflexes had disappeared.

Angry that the Jedi he had respected more than any other had been transformed into a pygmy while he wasn't watching, Vader viciously slashed at Kenobi, infuriated that he had been guilty of fearing someone who was now no more potent than a monster children across the Empire imagined lurked under their sleep couches. His reflexes still almost comically slow compared too how rapid they had once been, Kenobi deflected the blow.

With much less alacrity than he would have displayed in the Clone Wars, Kenobi flowed into a counterattack, which Vader blocked smoothly. In the course of his assault, Kenobi had moved around Vader and was starting toward the hangar bay. The coward thought that he could escape, Vader snorted inwardly. Well, he wouldn't be able to flee. Vader was going to kill him. His life was the cost of humiliating and maiming Anakin Skywalker.

"Your powers are weak, old man," he scoffed, as their lightsabers locked in midair, and he noted with a thrilling pounding of blood in his ears that even Kenobi realized that he was so much weaker than Vader that his only hope to escape this confrontation with his worthless life was to flee.

"You can't win, Darth." Kenobi's eyes sparkled in the crafty, enigmatic manner that they always did when he believed that he knew something that his foe did not and intended to use that knowledge to vanquish the aforementioned enemy. At this sight, fire scorched through Vader's veins. Kenobi had no business pretending he was wiser and more powerful than Vader when it was as plain as a Neimoidian's greed that Vader was the mightier of the two of them. Besides, it was infuriating that Kenobi was always telling him that he wasn't powerful enough to achieve his dreams. Kenobi would see how foolish he had been to underestimate Anakin Skywalker when Vader's lightsaber hacked him to pieces. Vader got whatever he wanted now that he was the second mightiest man in the galaxy after Darth Sidious, and right now he desired nothing more than to be the death of Kenobi, who had wronged him so much in the past. "If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine."

Under his mask, Vader rolled his eyes. Kenobi had always been concerned with metaphorical and metaphysical mopack, but Vader had never been intrigued but that sort of nonsense. He was only concerned with the here and now, and what he could see and touch. Everything else had no significance to him. It was folly to try to intimidate him with threats about an afterlife that Vader no longer believed in and that Kenobi should have stopped believing in if he was half as intelligent as the Holonet had once claimed he was.

He was about to retort, but then his words were swallowed up in a surge of ire when he saw Kenobi perform a pathetic little twirl, as though he were striving to regain the old glory that had been his when he had fought Maul, Ventress, Grievous, and Dooku. It was a dismal attempt that only highlighted how far Kenobi had plummeted since the Clone Wars had ended. More than that, it emphasized how much of a farce the current duel that he was having with Vader was compared to the one they had engaged in on Mustafar and the countless practice fights that they had waged over the years.

It showed how weak they both were because Kenobi had failed and betrayed Anakin Skywalker, and Kenobi had to have failed and betrayed Skywalker. Otherwise, that would have meant that Skywalker was the one to fail and betray Kenobi, and if there were two things that both Vader and Skywalker couldn't stand they were failure and betrayal. Kenobi had to be the failure, not Skywalker; Kenobi had to be the traitor, not Skywalker. For some reason, that meant a lot to Vader despite the fact that Anakin Skywalker was dead, and Vader had done the deed with quite a bit of help from Kenobi, Sidious, and even Padme.

His rage spurring him on, Vader forced Kenobi to retreat towards the docking bay. As their battle brought them to the hallway that fed onto the hangar bay, a squadron of stormtroopers noticed what was transpiring and raced over to provide Vader with reinforcements. Seeing this, Kenobi seemed to recognize at last that his resistance was futile, for he disengaged from the fight, holding his lightsaber harmlessly straight.

This made Vader more wrathful than ever at the fact that not only was Kenobi denying him any possibility of a sweet victory by essentially laying down his weapon at long last since he knew that there was no way that he could emerge the winner from this confrontation, Kenobi also looked at peace. His eyes were closed, and it seemed like nothing could touch him. His face was wrinkled by the pain he had suffered in the past, and now his expression suggested that death was welcome because it meant the termination of his agony. Worst of all, Kenobi looked content with himself, as though he were not tormented by guilt as Vader was, because Anakin Skywalker refused to stay dead even though Vader had murdered him.

No, Vader wouldn't allow him to have such composure when he died, because Anakin Skywalker hadn't been allowed to keep a strand of dignity on Mustafar. Vader would make Kenobi's death a torment. First, he would chop off Kenobi's arms. Then, he would remove Kenobi's legs. Only then, once Kenobi was begging for a mercy killing, would Vader plunge his lightsaber into the feeble old man's heart.

While he screamed in anguish, Kenobi could recall how Anakin had howled when he was burned in a pool of lava and how Kenobi hadn't shown any mercy. He could reflect on how Kenobi had been the one to teach Vader how to be ruthless, and he could die with the searing truth that Vader was more merciful because he would kill a former friend in agony rather than leave them to suffer a slower and even more painful death.

However, Kenobi cheated him of even this, because, as his lightsaber sliced into Kenobi's robes, Kenobi himself disappeared into thin air as though he had been nothing more than an apparition. A second later, his clothing fell to the ground, and his lightsaber smacked on top of them. Stunned, Vader stared at the pile of robes with the lightsaber upon top. Then, snapping at himself to move, he stepped forward and tried to prove to his mind that his eyes were wrong by stomping on the plain mountain of garments. His boots touched nothing but fabric.

At that point, Vader's optical sensors must have malfunctioned, for suddenly everything he saw appeared scarlet. That Kenobi could just disappear like that when Vader's blade pierced into him meant that he had the power to manipulate even death somehow. Sidious had told Anakin Skywalker that he could never learn how to conquer death from a Jedi, but maybe that had been another lie of Sidious'. Perhaps Jedi Masters did know how to destroy death's hold. Yet, if Kenobi had known such a trick, it had been really cruel of him not to share it with his best friend. After all, if he had, perhaps things would have turned out so differently for them all…

That didn't matter, though. Different wasn't necessarily better, and Vader was happy as he was. In fact, he couldn't be happier than he was at the moment. After all, it had always been his greatest dream to destroy Kenobi, hadn't it? And you were supposed to be overcome with joy when you accomplished your biggest dreams.

Yet, Vader didn't feel elated, he felt hollow. Maybe that was because killing Kenobi had only become Vader's greatest ambition once all of Anakin Skywalker's dreams had all failed to come true. Perhaps that was what left the bitter taste of defeat in Vader's mouth when he should have been celebrating his most important victory. Maybe that was why his revenge wasn't nearly as satisfying as he had convinced himself that it would be, and why instead of the overwhelming thrill he had envisioned would conquer him when he killed Kenobi, he only felt relieved that Kenobi was no longer around to outwit him as he had when he had denied Vader his vengeance.