You're kneeling on the warm, white stone of your little hut. There's an old wooden chest in front of you, one you have not looked at in over a standard year, afraid that if your eyes set on the locking mechanism there would be nothing stopping you from waving it open.
You're looking at your hands, folded in your lap, and they're trembling ever so slightly. Your skin is no longer that pale shade of pink that you remember from before, but the thin white scars (one for every battle you fought) are still there and nothing will ever be able to take that last reminder away from you, no amount of bacta can heal the invisible wounds that fester just beneath your skin. You wouldn't want it to, though, because in some wicked way the pain grounds you, and if it hurts it means that - despite everything - you're still alive. You have survived another endless, scorching-hot, boring day on this thrice damned planet.
Oh, you had hoped never to see it again, for its mere existence reminds you of a suffering that isn't your own but feels like it is. It reminds you of a time when everything was simpler, happier, when you hadn't yet tasted the bitter tears and guilt that would keep you company for more than a decade. A guilt that still plagues you.
But you're meant for infinite sadness after all, aren't you? That's why you don't try to move on, because you know you can't, no matter how hard you try. And you have tried, for so long, but hate is something that doesn't belong with you, is it? That was never your thing, although you realize that being able to banish his memory would make everything so much easier.
Too bad that there's regret instead of anger, because you know it was your fault.
You find it ironic that they believed you to be an example of patience, steadfastness, wisdom, balance and justice, when in reality there was nothing but rot under your deceitful smiles, cowardice and selfishness. But you hid it well, your incompetence, which still flows through your veins and has now frozen your heart in place.
That's why it hurts when you breathe, why your bones feel brittle - Death is simply hiding behind the corner of the street.
Nonetheless, you endure it, and push everything down as deep as you can inside yourself. Because you have something to do, someone to protect, a promise you made to a ghost that you have to keep, otherwise it will all have been for nothing. And there's no way you can fathom being in pain for so many years if, in the end, watching over the boy is just another thing you failed to do.
It's why you keep telling yourself that you do this because it's easier this way, that falling apart when the suns rise and stitching yourself back together when Ghomrassen, Guermessa and Chenini appear is better than losing your sanity every day of the year. You're sure that if it happens all at once, you can gather the shards of your heart in a neat little pile without missing any of them, for they are big enough not to mix with coarse dust that covers your house and the inside of your very soul.
You can't call it home, and you never will. Your home is long gone, burned down to ashes in front of your very eyes.
There's a presence in the Force that looks down on you and is sad, so sad to see what you have become, but you don't leave him any room to speak. Not today.
You take a shaky breath and lift one bony hand (when is the last time you ate? Or slept? Have your robes always been so loose-fitting on you? You don't remember, or pretend not to, because it would hurt to acknowledge what love has done to you) and wave it in front of the metal padlock that prevents you from opening the chest when you have one of your nightmares. It clicks open and falls on the stone with a loud clattering that sends a brief jolt of pain through your head, but you clench your teeth harder, not allowing it to send you over the edge just yet.
You have grown so used to the quiet brought by your exile that every noise startles you - the gentle sweep of the wind is so much different from the rain of blaster fire that punctuated the worst years of your life, its sound one that keeps haunting your sleep and wakefulness alike and slowly drives you mad. That's why you meditate so much, because it's the only escape you have left (but it's not without pain either, you have to dive deep, beyond the pained screams of thousand beings all over the galaxy, beyond the oily darkness boiling where your bond used to be).
At last, you feel strong enough - another lie, but a necessary one - to bend forward and lift the heavy wooden lid, which you guide up to rest against the wall with some difficulty, revealing the cursed contents of the chest.
Shaking, you grip the sides of the box and keep your eyes averted for as long as you possibly can, for you know there will be no going back after you'll catch sight of what you have stuffed inside. Around you, the Force thrums quietly and seems to be urging you to be done with it, whispering to your ears that the more you wait, the more it will hurt.
And you know it's right, the Force always is, even if for a time you tried to convince yourself that it wasn't. How could have that been its will? How could it be a neutral entity if it had allowed that to happen? You had wanted to scream at it that night, that it was cruel, heartless, for sealing his destiny that way, but you couldn't find the strength to do it back then. You had been huddled on the floor, hidden from sight, trying to hold back the burning tears that had threatened to spill from your eyes and suppress the whimpers you desperately wanted to let out.
Unfortunately, crying isn't the Jedi way. That much you know, and after years of solitude spent thinking about your mistakes you have come to terms with it: if that was how history was supposed to play out, you would go along with it, playing your role just as you are meant to do.
Still, you selfishly hope that when you'll die, at last, you'll be by his side again. That's the only kindness you ask of the Force, to make it possible for you to be reunited with the one you loved so much it broke you.
It's only after a couple of heartbeats that you notice how your knuckles have gone white, that the wood is digging in your palms, splintering under your iron grip. Ashamed of yourself for getting lost like that, you take one last, deep breath and move your eyes to rest on the old clothes neatly folded inside the chest.
It's the middle of the day and outside the twin suns shine unforgiving over a land of death and desolation, yet inside your hut everything seems to be shrouded in darkness. The shadows lengthen from where you kneel and you almost convince yourself that it would be easy to miss it, the red symbol painted on the old, scratched shoulder pauldron. Unfortunately, it shines with its own dreadful light in the Force, burning a smouldering pattern you know by heart on your retinas.
Two wings curve on the dark plastoid, gentle sweeps drawn by a skilled hand. Yours, actually, but you immediately shove the thought aside because the pain associated with that memory it's still too raw and you can't break down already, your self-inflicted misery it's only in its earliest stages.
It will get so much worse: you haven't touched the armour yet, nor seen the brown robe that still carries a distinct smell of sulphur and death, and tears.
You take an unsteady breath and reach down with a shaky hand, allowing your fingers to trace the contour of the symbol, images flashing in your mind every time you trail over a groove and a scratch. The Force echoes are something relatively new to you, an ability you didn't know you had until you started performing this damned ritual.
Maybe it's because you need a connection of some kind with the object and its previous owner, or maybe they're not echoes at all but merely vivid memories that don't wait for the darkness to manifest. You have so many questions, so many things you want to ask your former Masters, but straightforwardness was never the Jedi way, was it? Hasn't that always been the problem, what caused you to be kneeling in front of a chest of relics from a bygone era?
Probably, you think as you sweep dust and sand away from a grooved chest plate, tapping gently on the right side. It's an unconscious gesture, one so well-rehearsed that it takes a while for you to realize what exactly you're doing, where you imagine to be.
You lift your head and, for a brief moment, you're not on Tatooine anymore, old and tired and sad. Instead, you can feel your younger heart thumping wildly inside your chest and the Force is as bright as it should always be (not the murky mess it has become, almost poisonous), alight with life and peace and - him. And he burns so bright you wish these years would have been enough to forget what he felt like in the Force, only to be able to experience it all over again as if it was the first time.
But you could never forget, and it makes it even harder, because you know that it will only last a couple of seconds and then you'll have to let go, ripping yourself apart in the process. Nevertheless you soak it all in, as it is the closest thing to having him back.
Your right hand is resting on the chest plate, which lifts under your touch every time he breathes, whereas the other gently cups his cheek while you mouth two words.
Well done.
She is there too, and you try your best not to react to her sudden burst of emotions when she sees the look on his face, how his eyes widen and light up when the words register. You desperately want to say more, tell him just how proud you are of the man he's become, everything he's ever needed to hear but was denied because of millennia-old rules - but it's useless and his eyes simply fade away, his golden curls only an overlay over the stony wall in front of you.
Once the Force stops howling around you, your body lets out a quiet whimper, the only real noise in the oppressive silence of the hut, and you cross your arms over your chest. There's a familiar pain spreading from your heart, so intense that in any other situation you would mistake it for an upcoming heart attack - and oh, for a foul moment you even think it would be a blessing dying like this, here and now.
But no, you can't, not yet. There's a blonde boy with his father's eyes and his mother's kindness that will one day don the armour you fought to retrieve from the smouldering remains of your old quarters, and you need to be alive to be the one to give it to him. Along with -
And that's when your breath hitches, because after having removed the black plastoid armour from the box and set it on the floor (how poetic that his was dark while yours was as white as the clones', a matching set that somehow foretold how your story would end) a stray ray of sunshine catches on the hilt of the lightsaber you personally picked up from black sand, which rests over a dark brown robe that was discarded in front of a Nubian ship, on a planet of fire.
Suddenly, there are unshed tears threatening to spill from your eyes but you keep it together, again, even if they blurry your sight. After all, there needs to be some fabric to dry them, and your own clothes just won't do, for you already soak them daily when you try to sleep at night, huddled in a pathetic pile on a mattress filled with straw and sand.
However dreadful it is, this remains a special day and it is only right to dry your tears on the soft Jedi robe belonging to the man for whom you're crying in the first place. And it's true, you're not crying because of him: no matter how much he hurt you, he was always unable to bring you to tears, no amount of hate and harsh words coming from his mouth were able to undo you. But crying for him, that's different, for you mourn the person he was and could have gone on to become, you cry for the future he could have had with his family. With you.
You cry because if the Force had allowed it, you would have sacrificed yourself to bring him back to the light, taking his place in whatever hell he now burned in. If giving your life meant that he could come back and live in peace, you would have made a deal with no matter what entity to make it real. He had always deserved happiness and you know - hope - that somewhere, in the Force, there's at least an impression left by the person he'd been before the dragon in his heart laid waste to his soul.
No amount of hate, anger, pain and suffering could erase his memory completely, could it?
You bend forwards and pick up the two objects, only to immediately clutch them close to your heart, the cold of the hilt seeping through your light tunic somehow balancing out the fire that burns beneath your skin. Or is it burning your skin altogether? Is that how he felt, while you stood there motionless, watching him die?
You don't know, don't want to know, but the memories staining the Force are so overwhelming that you don't really have the time to wonder. Distantly, you hope that the boy will be blind to impressions left by people on the objects they touch, for those woven in the crystal that is calling out to yours would be enough to scar his soul forever.
Nevertheless you cry and cry, because he built that one to make it similar to the one swinging from your own waist, as a way to show you that he would always look up to you even after being knighted. Only, you were too blind to notice and let the two of you drift apart one mistake at a time, one deception after the other, by angry glares dismissed by impatient shrugs and silent cries for help that, hadn't your shields been so tight, would have lit your bond afire.
And at this point you don't know what's real anymore because as you slide down to the floor, hiding your face between the folds of impossibly soft fabric (how is it that soft, still? how is it possible that Mustafar's ash hasn't blended in the fibres, stiffening them?), he emerges from a cloud of smoke, head lowered. His figure is shrouded in darkness while you're surrounded by light and the Force meets in the middle, fading to a gloomy grey that is neither too white nor too black.
The balance that you were never able to achieve, perhaps, and it's definitely a trick of the shadows (or is it the light?) but for an instant there's a familiar phantom standing between the two of you. Her eyes are sad and she touches your shoulder (and his, at the same time) with such care, such gentleness, that your heart breaks further while you wonder what would have happened if she had stayed.
Unfortunately, she disappears again as he lifts his head and whatever you were going to say dies before reaching your lips, for you notice that he too is crying silently. His eyebrows are drawn together in an angry line over his eyes, so blue and bright that you can feel them pierce your soul apart piece by piece. It's an accusing glare and you know, deep down, that it's what you deserve for failing him like that.
You can never forgive yourself for being too late.
As if prompted by you thinking about it, his eyes start changing colour with agonizing slowness, the blue bleeding out of them and rolling down his cheeks only to be replaced by that terrible red that has plagued your dreams every night since you turned away from him. And you do it again, you shudder from the ice spreading through your veins and turn your back to the man whose clothes are now burning, because that's not him anymore. Not with that dreadful hell where there should be only the brightest sky.
You curl on yourself and scream, for the first time today, your despair to the galaxy herself. There are no more restraints, no more reasons to be ashamed of your Force signature quivering under the pain you free from the depth of your being, and why would you?
Nobody can hear you over the wind sweeping over the dunes and the Krayt roaring in the distance, nobody's here to judge you (even if, selfishly, you wish every being could sense what is like to be scorched from inside out by the remnants of a kind of love that could have torn the universe apart. You were the Team, two halves of the same warrior, two halves of the same being), nobody can tell you that it's not the Jedi way to lose oneself to sorrow, that there is no emotion, only peace. That there is no death, only the Force, for nobody is ever really gone.
They would tell you, and any other day you would listen, because it's true. But not today.
Because it's two days after Empire Day, the only time of the year Obi-Wan Kenobi allows himself the right to mourn the loss of Anakin Skywalker.