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 Secret.

A Master's Strength

"He's lying," Luke says. He's a stubborn child, I've noticed. I think he may have gotten it from his mother.

"No," I say, and it hurts me to tell him this, to tell Leia this, "he's telling the truth. When I was nine, he took me as his Padawan. He turned to the Dark Side to keep me from it."

And this, too, is shocking to them. Anakin Skywalker, a master on the council of Jedi, and their father, as well as Luke's Jedi master, was on the path to the Dark Side once?

"When his mother died," Obi-Wan says. "But enough of this talk. Which of them would you rather I kill first, dearest Ani? Pretty little Leia here, knowing that there's no way she's been trained enough to take me on, or Luke? He probably cant' do it either, though. They're only fifteen, after all, and barely that. I'm proud of you, love, they're beautiful."

"Their mother was beautiful," I try to keep my voice neutral. "And you took her life too."

"Yes, I did," Obi-Wan says, more or less off-handedly. "It would be nothing to take theirs as well."

I take a deep breath, and I know that I have to do what he once did—on a different level.

"Take mine instead," I tell him. I do not know what the outcome of this battle will be—I am stronger in the Force, true, but he is on the side of the Dark.

"Oh, how sweet," Obi-Wan says. "If only I could have had children… on second thought, you only do because you had the rules in the order changed because your new" he sneered the word out, the most hateful sound I'd heard in my lifetime, and I'd been a slave, "master was the head of the council. Aren't you special?"

"This is between you and I, not my children, and not my Master." I say.

Obi-Wan—I have to remember that he isn't really the man that he once was—shoves Leia away from him and she puts her hands out to stop her descent to the floor. Luke runs to help her to her feet, and I draw my lightsabre.

The battle is furious, lightsabre clashing with lightsabre in a flurry of blue and red, much the way it was when Master Yoda fought against Count Dooku. Except then, when I was lying on the ground, one arm lost to the Sith Lord, my head on Obi-Wan's legs, I thought myself better than Master Yoda.

Since then I have learned that I could never compare with him, even though I am far stronger in the force, I do not have the years that he has had to learn the patience and calm that he has.

But I am stronger than Obi-Wan, in ways that I never was as his Padawan.

Obi-Wan's lightsabre flies from his hand and he stares at me. "Well done, Padawan mine," he says. "But you will have to kill me. I will never return to the Jedi Order."

"Murder is the path of the dark side." I say.

"They will not have me even if you could change me," he tells me.

"I will not take your life," I cry.

"You have to!" Obi-Wan screams. The man who had been my master shines through so brightly at this moment, I realize he had been there all along, just taking a back seat to the Sith Lord he had become.

I raise my lightsabre. He is sacrificing himself once again.

"I'm sorry, Master," I say, and I bring my 'sabre down.