Ass Cover: They belong to Lucasfilm, and the Bearded One. I'm just borrowing them for a spell. Cuz I just finished one of these lovely little works, and I wonder why it's always Anakin lusting after Obi-Wan and never the other way around. So… yeah. Here I go. Be wary. Put this after A Master's Soul.

A Master's Secret

The last conversation I had with him as echoed through my mind for years. When he killed my wife, I remembered him saying I would have caused her death myself.

I understand now why he did it.

My master after him, the one that saw me to my knighthood, the one he killed, told me that he screamed when I severed the training bond between us. That it was truly part of what pushed him over the edge.

Master Windu was never one to spare my feelings with his words.

But even as my former master took lives and became a Sith, I turned from the Dark Side. I became the Jedi Master that he could have been, had he not given up his path.

For me. Because he loved me.

It hurts to think it, to know the pain that I must have caused him, because I feel the same pain every time I remember Padme being taken from me. I loved her so much…

The least I can do is see my children to their knighthood and then to their mastery.

He is ripping apart the Republic, along with Count Dooku and their master, Lord Sidious. It took us so long to discover who the leader was… and it was a shock. Then-Chancellor Palpatine had been a mentor to me throughout the beginning of the Clone War. I couldn't believe that he was the one tearing apart the peace that he, along with Padme, had worked to have.

I remember every word, every syllable of the conversation that we had the night he turned, and the last one, the one we had the day he killed Padme. He forced me to watch her die.

And now he has my daughter.

My Padawan races along beside me as we hurry through the corridors of the ship, searching him out, trying to stop my former master before he takes the life of my daughter as he did the life of my love. I can sense him, feel him as we draw nearer and nearer. I understand what he meant when he said he knew the Dark Side and could feel it within me. I feel it much more acutely now that I have turned from it.

Luke is out of breath already. We have set quite a pace racing through this ship. "Father," he says, "do we HAVE to go so fast?"

"Would you rather stop and rest and have your sister die or would you like to run and get to her before he takes her life?" I ask him. He pales noticeably.

"Sorry, Father," he says. I hear Leia yelling not so far down the corridor. I can feel her in the Force.

"Daddy!" She cries as Luke and I skid to a stop and turn into the room. It startles me to see my former master standing there with my daughter, red lightsabre in his hand. He looks no different, despite fifteen years.

"Ahh, my lovely Padawan," the man that was once Obi-Wan Kenobi says, a roguish smile crossing his lips. "I wondered when you would arrive."

Leia's mouth drops open and she stares at me, flicks her eyes to her twin, then back.

"Padawan?" Luke blurts.

"Oh, I suppose they don't teach that in the temple now, do they Padawan?" He says the word in a way that is so far from the endearment that it once was. "No, they teach about the lost Jedi, but they would never speak anything but the name. They would never admit that Obi-Wan Kenobi was once the master of Anakin Skywalker."

It was a secret that I had never meant to tell. After he killed Padme, I vowed never to allow Luke and Leia to know that he was once my master. His murder of Master Windu finalized this decision, and it was a rule throughout the temple and the Order that his name would never be spoken in connection with my own.

And now my children knew that their father's master had killed their mother.