Obi-Wan woke up abruptly, sitting up in his bed and trying to calm his racing heart.
Another Anakin dream. That was now every night for a whole week. What was going on with him?
Surely the heat and the sand, the wretched horrible sand, was making him go mad. Yes, that had to be it. He nodded to himself, probably looking like a lunatic but not caring because there was nobody there to see it.
Obi-Wan walked to the kitchen, figuring a glass of water might do the trick and calm him down. He needed to get back to sleep. It was the middle of the night, after all.
No such luck. No matter what he did these days, sleeping was not something that came to him easily. Not that it had ever been, considering the life he's always led, but it had never been this impossible either.
It was the thoughts of his former Padawan, his dearest friend, the once object of his affections. These dreams that plagued him were at fault. He could barely achieve sleep, for fear of having yet another one of these dreams. And then once he had managed to finally succumb to the darkness, his imagination decided to run wild and haunt him with memories and fantasies, both of the past and the future.
And as if that wasn't bad enough, he felt a disturbance in the Force. Something was happening. It felt dark, confused, and a bit angry. Yet strangely hopeful, and nervous.
It felt like Anakin. And it was getting stronger and closer every day. Almost as if it was coming for him.
Vader gasped, forced out of sleep before his dream had ended. He remembered it, the whole thing. But it couldn't be a premonition.
It was another Obi-Wan dream, and he had resigned himself to the fact that even if Obi-Wan was alive, as long as he was Vader, he would more than likely never see his former Master again.
He took a deep breath, checking the time and seeing that it was morning. May as well get up and begin his day of training with the dark side and essentially being the personal attack dog of Darth Sidious.
As he went through his day, his mind continuously betrayed him and thought more and more about Obi-Wan. No matter how much he tried to push the man from his mind, he couldn't do it.
Sidious must have noticed something was off because he kept giving Vader strange looks. Like he was prying into his mind, looking for whatever it was that was throwing off his apprentice's training. But Vader knew he wouldn't find anything.
The part of him that still loved Obi-Wan more than anything, more than anyone… he had shoved that part all the way to the back of his mind and built up so many shields that it would be impossible for anyone to know how he had felt. How he continued to feel, even now.
It had been about two years since he last saw Obi-Wan. He still thought about that fateful day on Mustafar. Quite often, actually. He still didn't understand why Obi-Wan didn't just kill him. Why he had fought so fiercely for so long, and then seemingly as a last second decision, knocked Vader out and left. There had to be some sort of reason for it.
A few weeks later, he would get his answer.
It was a last-minute decision made on one of his missions.
His curiosity had led him down worse paths, Vader figured, as he downloaded any and all existing information about Obi-Wan onto his personal and heavily encrypted datapad, erased all files from existence everywhere else, and hopped into an escape pod.