The suns were slowly falling on the planet, but Vader knew they had no time to spare. In that waning light, Kenobi hoisted him back on his back and brought him inside. For a delicate operation such as this one, Kenobi decided to place him on the dining table instead. Hardly clean, far from suited for operations, but it would do much better than Vader's small cot.

Before they began, Kenobi made sure to prop up Vader's head on a small pillow, if only for the sake of comfort. Vader, for his own part, was feeling nervous for once. It felt like his suit was crawling with little ants, all pricking at his skin and the inside of his throat and lungs. Making his breath wheezy and hoarse. In and out, in and out. Automatic. He felt deeply, deeply uncomfortable. His only solace was the little whisper of warmth trailing about inside him like a lonely goldie swimming through the freezing waters of his presence. It flitted here and there, touching to bring him brief instances of warmth and calm.

Kenobi moved with large strides through the room. Gauze and bandages had now been placed just beside Vader, alongside rubbing alcohol and various other primitive methods of healing. Kenobi muttered something about it likely not being needed, though that being prepared usually didn't hurt.

Vader didn't argue.

But with so many things piling up around him, he couldn't help but feel a little boxed in by it all. Knives and ointments and herbs he recognized from his youth laid haphazardly on the cloth Vader was on.

The final thing Kenobi brought was a pair of scissors and a tattered brown cloak. "We'll need a proper view of you during the operation," Kenobi said. "I'll have to remove what little is left of your suit."

Vader silently accepted this, though he did feel just a twinge embarrassed by the prospect. Not that his old master hadn't seen him in his birthday suit before. That was pretty much impossible when the man had suddenly become the sole caretaker of a nine-year-old boy. Little snipping sounds brought Vader out of his mind. He soon noticed that his belt had been removed, with Kenobi now moving up to cut alongside the edge of his suit.

The thing Vader silently dreaded was not this part, where Kenobi peeled off the bloodied and dirty suit to expose the full expanse of torn and half-healed flesh beneath. His charred flesh was no shame to him.

Before he did anything else, Kenobi cast his old brown cloak over Vader's nethers, taking care not to bring attention to that. It wasn't important, after all. What was more important was cutting away the cloth around the main board affixed to Vader's chest. The parts of the board that could be removed were extracted with some help from Vader. The important parts of it, however, were buried in Vader's skin and flesh, affixed to bone with quadanium bolts. This would have to be removed.

All in its time.

So it was that Vader laid almost fully exposed, the lower half of his body covered in a cloak, the rest exposed in its full horror. The scrapes and wounds the crash had caused were healed without a scar, but the damages incurred on Mustafar remained as prominent and clear as ever. Deep grooves like the craters of a scarred moon, webbings of flesh, half-healed bumps and the kind of wounds only severe burns could create. It wasn't visible from that angle, but his back had actually fared better than his front. It had merely burnt, while his chest, pressed against the magma-hot sands, had charred and cooked and blistered and boiled.

It was amazing he hadn't died.

Kenobi could only barely bear to look at it. Vader had seen it too long to be disgusted by it.

But he had to look at it to work on it. He walked to stand on Vader's right side and from there he laid his hands across the younger man's torso, on either side of the mechanical ports protruding from Vader's chest. It was time.

Kenobi took a deep breath and let the Force gather around him. It wasn't forced. It wasn't guided by emotion or will. Just a mild coaxing, a direction for the stream of the Force to head into. Silently, Vader imitated it. No emotional involvement. The Force wouldn't need to be aligned with his desires if he desired what the Force itself wanted.

Together, they became a whirlpool of warmth.

Vader closed his eyes, and together, they began healing him.

They had planned the steps before, but to actually do it was another thing. Had Kenobi not been a Jedi Master, had he been just a little less proficient, the whole operation would have been completely impossible. Furthermore, had Vader not assisted, it would have been equally implausible.

Even then, faced with such absurd chances of success, they fought on.

They began with his heart. 'Irrevocably damaged' was a line often used to describe the damage done to many of Vader's internal organs, but Kenobi proved this wrong. As Kenobi worked on healing the shrunk heart, restoring tissue and revitalizing dead cells, Vader slowly and carefully disconnected the implant that partially replaced his heart. It was a delicate line to thread, especially since Kenobi needed to heal not just the heart alone but the entire system of arteries as well.

Just this operation took hours, with dusk soon turning to night. They worked only by the light of the three Tatooine moons. Though, of course, all they really needed was the Force.

Then, hours in, with the final wire disconnected and the heart regrown from what felt like nothing, Vader could feel a pressure in his chest. A bump. A thump. A heartbeat. Something he hadn't felt in years, pulsing through him. His very own heart pumping his very own blood.

But they had no time to waste, not a moment of rest. They went right on repeating the process with the lungs, Kenobi focusing on healing the organ itself while Vader assisted. This one was harder though, since large parts of the implant were connected to Vader's throat and mask, which still hadn't been removed.

The implant was reluctant to stop working, trying desperately to oxidize Vader's blood on its own, but a single disabling strike with the Force renounced any such attempts.

His throat was healed at the same time, with both Kenobi and Vader now working with equal strength. They had no emotional involvement. Not because they didn't care, but because they both knew that the Force wanted it to work.

All of a sudden, in the middle of the night, Vader stopped breathing.

Kenobi looked at him, looked at Vader's chest in confusion, and only then realized what was happening. "By the stars, you have to breathe! Breathe!"

Actively suppressing his sudden need to have a seizure, Vader tried to focus and remember what it felt like to breathe. His mind blotted in black and white and he felt like on the cusp of unconsciousness, but then Kenobi touched his chest, and all of a sudden he took a breath. A deep, conscious breath that drew in a gust of cold, dry Tatooine night-air. And it didn't hurt. It didn't hurt at all, in fact. His throat didn't hurt, his chest only hurt a little from the implants still stuck in there, but…

He could breathe again.

In and out. In and out. No longer a mechanical process he had no control over. No longer something that happened whether he wished it or not.

If he wanted to, he could hold his breath. If he wanted to, he could stop breathing forever. But he didn't, because the night air tasted sweet like a Coruscant rose's nectar, and he was parched.

That left them with the slightly painful process of actually removing the implants. Kenobi proposed a glass of some brew before getting to it to dull the pain, but Vader outright refused. If he was to be in immense pain getting into the suit, he likewise had to feel that pain getting out. Rejecting pain was the same as rejecting truth. It was what he did with the pain that defined his strength.

So it was that Kenobi gingerly sliced open Vader's chest in the exact places he said, and while Kenobi abated the blood flow and slowly healed the wound, Vader extracted the implants, placing them and the long wires and tubes connecting them on the table. Finally, Kenobi closed the wound fully with Vader's help.

That left only one part left.

Vader breathed deeply, his photoreceptors capturing how Kenobi slowly moved into focus. "Behind, just there," Vader mumbled, his voice deep and garbled from the mechanical voice synthesizer. Once his helmet was removed, it would all be over. He'd be almost fully healed.

This is what he dreaded. Not the prospect of not needing his life-sustaining armour, or of Kenobi being the one to remove it.

No, it was because when Kenobi removed that mask, there would no longer be anything to hide behind. It wouldn't be Sith Lord and Jedi anymore.

Just Anakin and Obi-Wan. Brothers.

Above him, so far above him that it might as well have been in another world, Kenobi reached down and removed Vader's helmet.

First, the back part. With it removed and placed to the side, Vader's bare head fell down on the soft pillow below. It felt nice. His hair had all burnt off in the fire that took the rest of him, though it didn't bother him too much. For now, he was just enjoying the sensation of softness on his bare head.

Kenobi took another breath, the Force surging through him. Then, he took off the mask.

A mechanical hiss escaped, and all of a sudden the world was very, very bright.

His damaged retinas burned even in the dim darkness of the room and he hastily squinted them shut. Likewise, the removal of his auditory systems caused an empty white whine to overtake his almost completely destroyed eardrums. Pain seized his face and body and for just a moment he forgot to breathe, and the pain was everywhere, his throat and chest burning with deathly hidden infection, but then, then…

A pair of hands cupped either side of his burnt face.

They were warm. From them, a wave of calm and warmth resonated. The deaf ringing in his ears slowly trickled out, becoming only the calm, whistling winds of the night. He breathed slowly, softly. His breath made no mechanical sound, only soft, human noises. His throat didn't hurt. His vocal cords were no longer destroyed.

Slowly, Anakin Skywalker opened his eyes.

The face of his brother came into focus, and using a voice that hadn't been his for many years, he choked out a word that hadn't left his lips for too long:

"Obi-Wan…"

His brother smiled.