Morning Will Come
Tatooine is a harsh world, a world of extremes.
By day, the twin suns scorch and burn, and anything that falls beneath them will be marked with the scars, but after the suns set in the evening, darkness falls and a chill seeps into the very core of this desert world.
It was no mere chance that brought us to this world.
Even now, when I am one with all, I do not know why the Force chose this place, what it was about this planet that stood out enough for it to become the epicenter, the focal point where it all began, where so many paths were forged and irrevocably intertwined.
Tatooine is your prison, Obi-Wan.
When I think back to your youth, watching you grow from a boy into a man, I think that I could never have dreamed what the future would hold in store for you. I wanted peace and contentment for you, friends and health, perhaps even a seat on the Council one day, if that was your dream.
But dreams are a fickle thing, and they rarely turn out the way we hoped.
You know this all too well, don't you?
Once you held a thousand precious dreams within your heart, not for yourself, but for the boy that was bequeathed to your care. You yearned to see him succeed, to see him smile, to watch as he achieved his goals and his own dreams unfolded before him.
But his dreams have all turned to ash now, the same as yours.
The weight of all those broken dreams press down upon your shoulders, upon your chest, and it is a wonder that you can stand at all, Padawan, with the pain that is slowly devouring you from within. You wear your grief as a cloak, it has become your mantle as surely as the tattered robe you still clutch around your aging, weary frame.
Time has aged you, but not nearly as greatly as you have aged yourself.
If I had not been watching you, watching you both, all along, I do not know if I would recognize you. You are not old in the linear sense, at least not by Jedi standards, and I myself was older than you are now when I fell before the red blade, but you are as ancient as Master Yoda now, Obi-Wan.
And you carry the past around your neck like a hololocket.
I watch you, Padawan, as you wither and die a moment, a dream, a memory at a time.
He will kill you, just as you once so glibly predicted during the trying days of his youth. He is killing you now, and has been since the day he betrayed all that you had instilled in him, all that he once held dear.
Your life belongs to him, Obi-Wan.
It has always belonged to him.
And the time is growing nearer when he will come to collect.
The past is a monstrous thing in your hands, alive and ravenous, and it taints everything around you, from the sand beneath your feet to the humid air you breathe. There is beauty on Tatooine, harsh and primal, but it is lost to you when the ghosts of another life linger always at your shoulder.
You wonder if perhaps anyone could have changed things, or if it was inevitable from the start.
At night you lay awake and remember Yoda's words that day, about clouded futures and dark dreams, and you think that perhaps he was right, that it was a mistake and that you, and I in my own fault, have brought about the end of the great Order simply by loving a boy who we ought to have feared.
No one could blame you for thinking such things, Obi-Wan.
There are times, as I watch the thing moving within the broken remains of his body, that I myself wonder the same.
But I know things that you do not, Padawan.
I know what is coming.
Someday you will understand, Padawan. Not today, and not for a very long time, but someday you will understand why there had to be so much pain in order to bring about the light.
For there is light ahead, Obi-Wan, even if you cannot see it.
Every day, the nexus point grows nearer, the moment when all will hang in the balance, the future of the galaxy and of the Force itself. A long-buried soul will begin stirring beneath the fathomless depths of a black ocean, the distant whispers will become a song that will only grow in strength and volume as time passes.
The light is coming, Obi-Wan.
The light for which I gave my life, for which you have wasted away all these years in the forsaken lands of a desert world where ghosts haunt your every step.
He will deny the light, of course, he always has.
But he will not forsake it.
He has never forsaken it entirely, Obi-Wan.
It is a spark, deep within him and dimmed as night presses in close around it, smothering and choking, but that spark could become a fire if it was given the right breath.
It will be a fire again one day, Padawan, you must have faith.
But faith is something that you cannot grasp during these long, wretched days, you think it has abandoned you, that you have lost its favor, and I wish I could tell you to hold fast.
In the past when all others lost faith, you alone believed.
You alone fought for him.
Can you not believe now, one last time, if only in the most secret depths of your heart?
You speak to me sometimes, but you do not hear my reply.
I do not know if you can feel my presence, if you can sense that I am with you, as I have always been with you, but you speak to me as if you know that I am listening.
You wonder if I wouldn't have done better.
You think I was a fool on my deathbed, that in my final moments the hysteria and desperation of death's grasp led me to ask you to take him as yours.
But you do not know what I knew then, Obi-Wan.
What I saw as my life drained away into the waiting embrace of the Force.
I was never meant to train him, Padawan.
My destiny was simply to find him.
To find him, and deliver him into the right hands.
Your hands.
I know you cannot see it, perhaps you never will. You both are so alike that way, you carry what you perceive as your failures, when in fact they are nothing but twists of fate and follies of mortal men, deep in your heart and let them take root until they have grown so thick and tall that you cannot escape them.
You did not fail, Obi-Wan.
Yes, there are many things that you could have done differently, many mistakes that you could have corrected, but you did not fail.
You taught him everything you knew, all that he needed to become a great Jedi Knight.
And he was a great Jedi, for a time.
Deep down, you know this, you know that he was once strong and brave and good, but the darkness has crept into your mind, it has spilled across the canvas of memory, and it has led you to reexamine every moment since the day the Force, through my dying words, threaded your fates together.
How I grieve for you, my Obi-Wan, as you unknowingly deepen the cracks etched into the walls of your own heart.
You sit and stare at the sand, not truly seeing it, but seeing instead rivers of flame and storms of fire raining down upon you. That memory is your shelter, Obi-Wan, even as it bleeds you.
The thorns pierce your skin, the vines choke your breath, the pain is overwhelming.
And yet it is in this memory that you hide.
It was the last time you saw him.
You will see him again one day, and that day is not far off as the son grows under the twin suns that once burned his father's skin, but you will not recognize him.
There will be a faceless mask, black as night and just as cold, and the very breath he draws will be the breath of the dead, but beneath that fearsome demon's face there will still be a pair of blue eyes looking out at you from behind shadowy depths.
You will not see them, though.
Instead, you will see the nightmare that you think you have created.
The broken corpse of your boy, now possessed by something infinitely evil and dark and twisted, no more that child I delivered unto you than the one who calls himself Emperor, the one who stole his soul.
But I tell you, Padawan, that boy is still in there.
I wish that I could help you see him, that I could give you the sight that I now possess, so that you might know even a moment's peace. So that you would understand that he has not become lost to you forever, that these years of darkness are but a footnote within the great vastness that awaits you.
It is not your fate to see through black stone to the crystal within, though.
That task is meant for another, for the one that brought you to this wasteland desert, the one you keep a constant vigil over from a distance.
The boy with his father's eyes.
I watch you watch him, Obi-Wan, and I weep for you.
How many times must you remind yourself that he is not his father, no matter how desperately you wish him to be? You stare at him, and you do not see him, but your boy, and even after you shake your head to dispel the image and clear your mind, it lingers.
You love his son, because he is his.
The boy will never understand entirely the depth of agony that it took for you to look upon him from afar, forever seeing a shade of what might have been, what was so cruelly wrenched away from you.
Sometimes I think you do it to yourself on purpose, Obi-Wan.
It hurts you to look upon his son, to see a boy with his eyes and his chin- his nose and mouth belong to his mother, as I am certain you are all too aware- but to know that it can never be him. It cuts you, every time that you lose your grip on reality and time, for just a fleeting moment, and when it is over and you are yourself again and the boy you watch scurrying down the dusty streets of Mos Espa is himself instead of the ghost you wish him to be, the wound bleeds you dry, Obi-Wan.
Do you do it to yourself?
Do you seek him out purposefully, to feel a single moment of joy followed by an endless night of torment?
I think you do.
I think that you do it as penance, Obi-Wan.
But you have nothing for which to make amends, my Padawan.
You did not fail him, nor me.
You did not doom the Jedi, nor the galaxy.
You did not hold him down in the rivers of lava while fire melted away flesh and muscle from blackened bone.
You did not drive him into the darkness.
All that has come to pass has been the making of the one who now enslaves him. It was born from ill-bred choices and many slips along the way, from conflict and misunderstanding, from ignorance, but the slave master has always been the one controlling the strings from behind the curtain.
Could things have happened differently?
Could choices have been changed?
Could steps have been taken to ease the chains dragging him down?
Of course.
But that is the nature of life, Obi-Wan.
It never happens the way one expects it to, because life itself is a living thing.
Always changing, always maturing, always evolving.
The sun always dims, it grows cold and pale by the moonlight and slips into shadow as night comes to call.
But it always rises again in the morning.
The night has been long, Padawan.
It has become a tangible thing, and it weighs heavily upon your shoulders, full of guilt and despair, constricting around your heart, full of grief and longing.
Even now, the sun is still there, hidden behind the dark shroud of night's veil.
You cannot see it, Obi-Wan, but it is there, I promise you.
The night is not over, it will not be over for some time, but it will one day pass into the realm of yesterday, like the legends and myths of those who came a millennia before.
The night is long, Obi-Wan, and I fear you will not outlive it.
You will not live to see the sunrise.
Night will try to swallow you, to steal you away upon wisps of dark cloud and icy void, but it will not catch you. You will sit and watch, as you have all these years, and wait.
But you will not know what you are waiting for, even as you wait for it now without knowing.
The sun will rise, Obi-Wan, and dispel the darkness.
Night will fall and morning will come.
And when that day finally comes to pass, we shall be there together, standing in the sun, waiting to welcome him home.