Part X


No. What had he done? Obi-Wan!

Before Anakin could even start to think through his frantic panic, the Force echoed a loud warning – automatically, without any conscious thought, Anakin rolled and jumped, lightsaber already ignited. A Geonosian's charge towards him ended abruptly as it was cleaved savagely in half; its companion shrieked ear-splittingly in rage. Anakin dashed and slashed at the second Geonosian's wings until it was writhing on the ground. With familiar ease, he finished the creature off.

He breathed deep, every sense alert for a new danger. Although the Force still echoed in muted alarm, Anakin sensed no more enemies anywhere nearby. He was in a rust-red rocky cave, the air breathable but arid. Even without the Geonosian welcoming party, Anakin would have recognized his new surroundings immediately: Geonosis, one of his least favourite desert planets, second only to Tatooine. A quick look around confirmed that Obi-Wan had been transported with him; Anakin ran to his Master, fear contracting his insides into a painful knot.

Thank the Force – albeit again unconscious and deathly pale, Obi-Wan was alive. Anakin squeezed his eyes shut against the onset of stinging tears. It was his fault – if he hadn't panicked and retreated from their shared meditation…but then Obi-Wan would have found out everything he had done…

"I'm sorry, Master, I'm so sorry," Anakin whispered, his hands hovering uselessly over Obi-Wan's motionless body. Again, he felt utterly helpless, unable to fix that which was most important to him. He tried to propel the healing Force into Obi-Wan, but it moved frustratingly sluggishly, struggling to get along their bond. The doors, that just a moment ago had been wide open between them, were now almost completely shut, only a small gap left in their strong fortifications.

With hitching breath, Anakin hit the hard rock floor with his flesh hand, swearing that once they got back to their own time, he was going to smash the kriffing holocron into million, billion pieces; meanwhile, every ugly bug that would dare to attack them, he would cut down and rip to shreds. Everything and everyone trying to take Anakin's Master away from him would get to know his full fury and wrath, just like the Tuskens had! He would make them regret – he would –

Anakin looked at the ashen face of his dear friend and brother, and the heady anger left him in a sudden rush, abandoning him to the mercy of crushing fear and guilt. He knew what he had to do. When all was said and done, his Master might despise or hate him, but at least Obi-Wan would still be alive. Anakin laid his hand gently against Obi-Wan's chest so that he could feel its laborious rise and fall. He stayed that way through the long, endless minutes, hoping and dreading the moment Obi-Wan would wake up.

He was not particularly surprised, when he felt the abrupt arrival of numerous Jedi on the planet; Anakin had already surmised that they had been transported to the middle of the event that had marked the beginning of the Clone Wars. If Anakin concentrated enough, he could hear the roar of fighting somewhere down below.

Obi-Wan stirred, drawing Anakin's whole focus back to him. As if his eyelids were far too heavy, it took his Master several tries to get his eyes fully open.

"Anakin," Obi-Wan croaked, sounding painfully parched. Anakin had no water to give him.

"I'm here." Try as he might, his lips refused to form into a reassuring smile. There was no point in asking if Obi-Wan was alright – the answer to that would have been obvious even to a blind man.

"The battle…" Obi-Wan murmured. No doubt, he too could feel the hundreds of Jedi all around them, fighting and dying.

"Yeah." Anakin swallowed, tasting dust. "At least they'll be hard-pressed to notice us among all the drek that is happening." The forced levity sounded wrong, but Anakin could not put into words how he felt thinking of the Jedi that were breathing the cutting dry air as their last breath, their blood mixing with the red sand of the arena.

"Dooku…" Obi-Wan muttered, eyes roaming the cave wildly, glazed with pain. Finally, his Master's gaze settled on Anakin, voice full of agony. "Anakin, your hand…"

"Kark my hand!" Anakin snapped. That was what Obi-Wan was worried about? He knew that his Master still felt guilty – irrationally and unnecessary – about the arm Dooku had cut off, but at the moment it only frustrated and enraged Anakin.

Frowning, Obi-Wan moved with difficulty, fingers searching until they came to rest upon Anakin's flesh hand. Only then Anakin realized that his hand was bleeding, scraped raw. The cuts he had acquired on Tatooine had opened up and were joined with newer, deeper ones.

"It's nothing." The sting of wounds was a welcome pain, an anchor amongst the furore of conflict inside him. He drew his hand away from Obi-Wan, pressing it tightly against the solidness of the rough rock. Anakin forced his eyes to meet his Master's. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to withdraw from the meditation – let's try it again."

Obi-Wan shook his head. His auburn hair was streaked with reddish dust; Anakin wanted badly to brush the dirt away. "It's alright. I know it can be too much, too invasive. Anyway…it was always a long shot."

"No, it's not that. I don't mind it, I don't. But –" The rest of the words got stuck, refused to come out. Only in his nightmares had he ever imagined this moment; no rehearsals could have prepared him for it.

"What is it?" Obi-Wan asked quietly, the corners of his eyes crinkled with worry.

"There is something – something I have to tell you, but I don't know how." He felt faint and sick. There was no way to explain it so his Master would understand. Padmé had understood, but Obi-Wan, the perfect Jedi, would not.

"Anakin, you can tell me anything." Obi-Wan's increasing alarm rang clearly through his voice, reverberating in the Force.

"You won't understand."

Obi-Wan's gaze narrowed. "Perhaps you should let me be the judge of that."

Anakin nodded; he could feel the minute tremors traveling through his body and pressed his shaking hand harder against the cave floor, drawing fresh blood. It was time to tell. After guarding the secret so long, keeping it away even from his own thoughts, it was finally, truly, the time to tell. Anakin couldn't remember ever being so terrified.

"When…when mom…" He squeezed his eyes shut but could not hide from his mother's dying gaze. "When I found her in the Tuskens' camp, she was still alive. They had…they had tortured her and she was…I could not…I could not help her, I was too late and she was she was she was dying."

Once more, Anakin was there, kneeling on the cold sand, his mother's slight, broken frame in his arms. Life was ebbing away, leaving her empty, and he could not contain it, could not will it back into her. The Force slipped from him, resisted him – he was too weak to save her.

"She said…before she died she said…" But he could not repeat the words her mother had said, for they had been meant only for his heart. Eyes still tightly closed, Anakin felt Obi-Wan's hand come on top of his, a warm weight of reassurance and sympathy. If only his tale had ended there; he shivered and struggled to continue.

"I – I could not let them get away with it – they, they tortured her, murdered her, took her away from me!" Every word he spat out was like poison drawn from a festering wound, a terrible relief mixed with aching hurt. "I killed them. I killed them. Obi-Wan, I killed them all, the men, the women, the…the children. I had to – I had to - they were savages, monsters, they deserved it." Voice hoarse, Anakin stopped to gulp for air. It was done. He had done it.

Obi-Wan's grip on his hand loosened, until it withdrew completely. Anakin opened his eyes; the first thing he saw was the single tear that slowly ran across his Master's face.

"I'm not sorry. I'm not," Anakin admitted harshly, daring Obi-Wan to disagree, to do something to shake the look of utter devastation off his face. But his Master said nothing.

"But I'm sorry that you had to find out about it this way." Anakin gestured at their barren surroundings, meaning the whole impossible situation they had gotten into. "I know you'll want to talk about it – I guess we have to – but later. We don't have much time – we should start to immerse ourselves in the meditation. This time it will work, I know it will. There isn't anymore…there isn't anything I'm trying to hide now."

"No."

"What?"

"No," Obi-Wan repeated evenly, "I'll meditate alone."

Suddenly there was not enough air in the arid cave. The dust was everywhere, covering and suffocating everything; it was in Anakin's mouth and in his ears and eyes, in his heart. He tried to protest, "But…you can't…it's not enough. We have to be one in the Force, we have to do it together!"

"I can't…not now." Obi-Wan closed his eyes and that was that. Anakin recognized the unmovable stubbornness in Obi-Wan's voice, the mulish lines around his stern mouth. There would be nothing he could say or do to change his Master's mind. He could only wait for the blinding white wave and wonder if this was the source of old Ben's pain, the thing that had driven the future Anakin and Obi-Wan so irrecoverably apart.

-o-

Obi-Wan closed his eyes against the sight of his Padawan's distress. He could not bear to look at Anakin's fearful eyes, and he could not bear to let Anakin see everything Obi-Wan was no doubt revealing through his own gaze. He felt unmoored, unravelled, insubstantial.

He knew Anakin would refuse to admit it, but a joint meditation – not to mention the deep joining of spirits they had been attempting to do before – would have been a certain catastrophe. Obi-Wan's conflicting, raw feelings would have been on full display for Anakin to dissect and misunderstand. His Padawan expected an ordered view, a solid position either for or against him.

But Obi-Wan could not even begin to fathom, to parse, to comprehend and handle his Padawan's confession – let alone all its ramifications and meanings. He was a tangled mess of contradictory feelings and howling questions and deep hurt. Such an agony, tearing at his heart, that it eclipsed even the horrid physical pain of the latest jump.

Oh Anakin. Why?

But he knew why. Hadn't there always been a small part of him that had dreaded his Padawan's awful anger and the depth of his fear? Hadn't he been certain that the mastery of those feelings would be Anakin's greatest trial, worried that they would be his undoing?

Obi-Wan had let himself believe that Anakin had passed that trial, had thought that the young man had finally attained control over his volatile feelings – the anger, the passion, the fear. Obi-Wan had been a fool to believe the lie, to let his own wishes and hopes to convince him that Anakin's emotional maturity was something stronger than a mere frail façade, a flimsy pretence. Force, Anakin had slaughtered living beings, children, and had somehow managed to justify it to himself. He had married Padmé and kept it a secret, thinking it was his right. He had deceived the whole Jedi Order, all his friends and even Obi-Wan.

Despite Anakin's flaws, Obi-Wan had always been sure, that no matter what, his friend was a decent, compassionate, good man. That belief was now shaken, the darkness of the horrendous crime cutting painfully deep into everything Obi-Wan had ever held true.

How utterly blind they had all been – or perhaps just wilfully blind. Maybe Anakin's usefulness to the Jedi Order had been deemed more important than the risk he posed; his importance to Obi-Wan certainly had always outweighed any grief Anakin had managed to cause him.

But what about now? Is our bond worth this sorrow?

The startling thought felt like another betrayal; Obi-Wan bit his lip hard to dispel it.

However one looked at it, the responsibility for the awful deed, for the lies, did not rest solely upon Anakin's shoulders. Some might argue that because of his childhood, his rampant attachments, Anakin's betrayal of his Jedi teachings had always been inevitable. But that would absolve the Jedi, and most of all Obi-Wan, wholly undeservingly. For surely Anakin's actions couldn't be anything other than the result of Obi-Wan's utter failure as a teacher and a friend?

He had failed Anakin just as much as Anakin had failed him.

Light.

Only one thought remained. Anakin. Anakin I'm so sor –

Nothingness that bursts into colour, sound and movement so intense it must be what being born is like. Less than a second, more than an eternity. Like a rough ride inside a white wave. Blinding, pulsing, pounding.

Light.

-o-

Obi-Wan woke up on a hard floor, Anakin laying almost opposite to him. It was immediately apparent to him that they were in his cabin, on board the Vigilance. The holocron was between them, but instead of pulsing blinding white light, it sat unopened and inactive. It looked harmless; an inanimate object, a curiosity. Next to it, Anakin's discarded robe lay carelessly.

They had finally been transported back to the beginning: the space and time of their own reality. Obi-Wan could hardly muster any relief. Nothing was the same as it had been – too many truths had come to light. And he had no idea how to handle any of them.

"Master?" Anakin sounded disbelieving, hesitant. It seemed unbelievable that they had found their way back home, together and alive.

Together and alive. Perhaps that is all we can hope for.

"Master? How are you feeling?" Anakin's anxious question made Obi-Wan's lips twist into something that resembled a wry smile. He felt like he had been dragged through hell, like his insides were on fire, like his soul had been shredded apart. In other words, he was fine.

"I'm fine," Obi-Wan said curtly. He would have to find out the whereabouts of the nearest medical frigate with a Jedi healer; he doubted that the Star Destroyer's own medical personnel could aid him. But first he would have to check the status of the current campaign and his troops, then he would have to contact the Jedi Council and give them a report of everything that had transpired.

"What happens now?" Anakin asked quietly, seeking reassurance that Obi-Wan could not give, forgiveness that he wasn't sure he could ever bestow.

Obi-Wan closed his eyes briefly. "I don't know." Then he made himself get up from the floor, not even remotely ready for the difficult tasks ahead.