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Blade-to-blade, they were identical. After thousands of hours of lightsaber sparring, they knew each other better than brothers, more intimately than lovers; they were complementary halves of a single warrior.
In every exchange, Obi-Wan gave ground. It was his way. And he knew that to strike Anakin down; it would burn his own heart to ash.
Exchanges flashed. Leaps were sidestepped or met with flying kicks; ankle sweeps were skidded over and punches parried. The door of the control center fell in pieces, and then they were inside among the bodies. Consoles exploded in fountains of white-hot sparks as they ripped free of their moorings and hurled through the air. Dead hands spasmed on triggers and blaster bolts sizzled through impossibly intricate lattices of ricochet.
Obi-Wan barely caught some and flipped them at Anakin: a desperation move. Anything to distract him, anything to slow him down. Easily, contemptuously, Anakin sent them back, and the bolts flared between their blades until their galvening faded and the particles of the packed beams dispersed into-radioactive fog.
"Don't make me destroy you, Obi-Wan," Anakin's voice had gone deeper than a well and bleak as the obsidian cliffs. "You're no match for the power of the dark side."
"I've heard that before," Obi-Wan said through his teeth, parrying madly. "but I never thought I'd hear it from you."
A roar of the Force blasted Obi-Wan back into the wall, smashing breath from his lungs, leaving him swaying, half stunned. Anakin stepped over bodies and lifted his blade for the kill.
Obi-Wan had only one trick left, one that wouldn't work twice
But it was a very good trick.
It had, after all, worked rather splendidly on Grievous...
He twitched one finger, reaching through the Force to reverse the polarity of the electrodrivers in Anakin's mechanical hand.
Durasteel fingers sprung open, and a lightsaber tumbled free. Obi-Wan reached. Anakin's lightsaber twisted in the air and flipped into his hand. He poised both blades in a cross before him. "The flaw of power is arrogance."
"You hesitate," Anakin said. "The flaw of compassion."
"It's not compassion," Obi-Wan said sadly. "It's reverence for life. Even yours. It's respect for the man you were."
He sighed. "It's regret for the man you should have been."
Anakin roared and flew at him, using both the Force and his body to crash Obi-Wan back into the wall once more. His hands seized Obi-Wan's wrists with impossible strength forcing his arms wide. "I am so sick of your lectures!"
Dark power bore down with his grip.
Obi-Wan felt the bones of his forearms bending, beginning to feather toward the greenstick fractures that would come before the final breaks.
Oh, he thought. Oh, this is bad.
With Anakin's grip on his wrists bending his arms near to breaking, forcing both their lightsabers down in a slow but unstoppable arc, Obi-Wan let go.
Of everything.
His hopes. His fears. His obligation to the Jedi, his promise to Qui-Gon, his failure with Anakin.
And their lightsabers.
Startled, Anakin instinctively shifted his Force grip, releasing one wrist to reach for his blade; in that instant, Obi-Wan twisted free of his other hand and with the Force caught up his own blade, reversing it along his forearm so that his swift parry of Anakin's thunder overhand not only blocked the strike but directed both blades to slice through the wall against which he stood. He slid Anakin's following thrust through the wall on the opposite side, guiding both blades again up and over his head in a circular sweep so that he could use the power of Anakin's next chop to drive himself backward through the wall, outside into the smoke and the falling cinders.
Anakin followed, constantly attacking; Obi-Wan again gave ground, retreating along a narrow balcony high above the black-sand shoreline of a lake of fire.
Mustafar hummed with death behind his back, only a moment away, somewhere out there among the rivers of molten rock. Obi-Wan let Anakin drive him toward it.
It was a place, he decided, they should reach together.
Anakin forced him back and back, slamming his blade down with a strength that seemed to flow from the volcano overhead. He spun and whirled and sliced razor-sharp shards of steel from the wall and shot them at Obi-Wan with the full heat of his fury. He slashed through a control panel along the walkway, and the ray shield that had held back the lave storm vanished.
Fire rained around them.
Obi-Wan backed to the end of the balcony, behind him as the only power conduit thicker than his arm, connecting it to the main collection plant of the old lava mine, over a riverbed that flowed with white-hot molten stone. Obi-Wan stepped backward onto the conduit without hesitation, his balance flawless as he parried chop after chop.
Anakin followed.
Out on the tightrope of power conduit, their blades blurred even faster than before. They chopped and slashed and parried and blocked. Lava bombs thundered to the ground below, shedding drops of burning stone that scorched their robes. Smoke shrouded the planet's star, and now the only light came from the hell-glow of the lava below them and from their blades themselves. Flares of energy crackled and spat.
This was not Sith against Jedi. This was not light against dark or good against evil; it had nothing to do with duty or philosophy; religion or morals.
It was Anakin against Obi-Wan.
Personally.
Just the two of them and the damage they had done to each other.
Obi-Wan backflipped from the conduit to a coupling nexus of the main collection plant; when Anakin flew in pursuit, Obi-Wan leapt again. They spun and whirled throughout its levels, up its stairs, and across its platforms, they battled out onto the collection panels over which the cascades of lava poured.
The lake of fire, no longer held back by the ray shield, chewed away the shore on which the planet stood, and the whole massive structure broke loose, sending both warriors skidding, scrambling desperately for handholds down tilting durasteel slopes that were rapidly becoming cliffs; they hung from scraps of cable as the plant's superstructure floated out into the lava, sinking slowly as its lower levels melted and burned away.
Anakin kicked off from the toppling structure, swinging through a wide arc over the lava's boil. Obi-Wan shoved out and met him there, holding the cable with one hand and the Force, angling his blade high. Anakin slashed at his knees. Obi-Wan yanked his legs high and cut sliced through the cable above Anakin's hand, and Anakin fell.
But Anakin's momentum had already swung him back toward the dissolving wreck of the collection plant, and the Force carried him within reach of another cable. Obi-Wan whipped his legs around his cable, altering its arc to bring him within reach of the one from which Anakin now dangled, but Anakin was on to this game now, and he swung cable-to-cable ahead of Obi-Wan's advance, using the Force to carry himself higher and higher, forcing Obi-Wan to counter by doing the same; on this terrain, altitude was everything.
Simultaneous surges of the Force carried them both spinning up off the cables to the slant of the crumbling superstructure's crane deck. Obi-Wan barely got his feet on the metal before Anakin pounced on him and they stood almost toe-to-toe, blades whirling and crashing on all side, while around them the collection plant's maintenance droids still tinkered mindlessly away at the doomed machinery, as they would continue to do until the lave closed over them and they melted into the flow.
A roar louder than the volcano's came from the river ahead; metal began to shriek and stretch. The river dropped away in a vertical sheet of fire that vanished into boiling clouds of smoke and gases.
The whole collection plant was being carried out over a vast lava fall.
I really don't want to see what is at the bottom of that. Obi-Wan decided.
He turned Anakin's blade aside with a two-handed block and landed a solid kick that knocked the two apart. Before Anakin could recover his balance, Obi-Wan took a running leap that became a graceful dive off the crane deck. He hurtled down past level after level, and only a few meters above the lava itself, the Force called a dangling cable to his hand, turning his dive into a swing that carried him high and far, to the very limit of the cable.
And he let it go.
As though jumping from a swing in the Temple playrooms, his velocity sent him flying high up and over a catenary arc that shot him toward the rivers shore.
Toward. Not quite to.
But the Force had led him here, and again it had not betrayed him: below humming along a few meters above the lava river, came a big, slow old repulsor lift platform, carrying droids and equipment out toward the collection plant that its programming was not sophisticated enough to realize was about to be destroyed.
Obi-Wan flipped in the air and let the Force bring him to a catfooted landing. A quick stab of his lightsaber disable the platform's guidance system, and Obi-Wan was able to direct it back to the shore with a simple shift of his wrist.
He turned to watch as the collection plant shrieked like a damned Corellian hell, crumbling over the brink of the falls until it vanished into inevitable destruction.
Obi-Wan lowered his head. "Good-bye, old friend."
But the Force whispered a warning, and Obi-Wan lifted his head in time to see Anakin hurtling toward him out from the boil of smoke above the falls, perched on a tiny repulsor droid. The little droid was vastly swifter than Obi-Wan's logy old cargo platform, and Anakin was easily able to swing around. Obi-Wan shifted weight one way, then the other, but Anakin's droid was nimble as a sand panther; there was no away around, and this close to the lava, the heat was intense enough to crisp Obi-Wan's hair.
"This is the end for you, Master," Anakin said. "I wish it were otherwise."
"Yes, Anakin, so do I," Obi-Wan said as he sprinted into a leaping dive, making a spear of his blade.
Anakin leaned aside and deflected the thrust almost contemptuously; he missed a cut at Obi-Wan's legs as the Jedi Master flew past him.
Obi-Wan turned his dive into a forward roll that left him barely teetering on the rim of a low cliff, just above the soft black sand of the riverbank.
"It's over, Anakin," He shouted. "I have the high ground."
Anakin stared up at him with hateful yellow eyes. "You underestimate my power," he said.
"Don't try it," Obi-Wan warned.
I don't want to kill you. He pleaded. Please don't try it.
Anakin snarled out a curse, and he leapt off his droid at Obi-Wan's back—
Obi-Wan, up on the edge of the cliff following the arc of this creature of rage that had been his best friend, suddenly comprehended an unexpectedly profound truth.
The man he was about to kill was everything Obi-Wan had devoted his life to destroying. Murderer. Traitor. Fallen Jedi. Lord of the Sith. And here, and now, despite it all...
Obi-Wan still loved him.
Yoda had said it, flat-out: Allow such attachments to pass out of one's life, a Jedi must, but Obi-Wan had never let himself understand. He had argued for Anakin, made excuses, covered for him again and again and again; all the while, this attachment he denied even feeling had blinded him to the dark path his best friend walked.
Obi-Wan knew there was, in the end, only one answer for attachment...
...but he couldn't let go.
While Anakin was still in the air, Obi-Wan brought his lightsaber up, holding the blade just centimeter from the tip of his nose.
He couldn't kill Anakin.
And that meant he was the one who had to die.
I'm sorry, Master...I failed...
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