Mel's groggy eyes did not appreciate the blinking clock numbers. Six o'clock? Already? She felt like she had been run over by something overly heavy, a morning sensation she'd just begun to get used to. The nightmares kept her from any restful sleep, or waking refreshed. Instead she had to make do with more awake than she'd been that night, and deal with it. But there was something wrong with this scene, something that she hadn't caught right away that was still horribly, horribly wrong…

Then she saw it, the empty bed across from hers, blankets frozen in the same positions as the last time she'd seen them. So Katie hadn't come back, not this time.

- - -

Obi-wan looked, if possible, as tired as she was, as if he hadn't gotten any sleep at all. Instead of his usual semi-sarcastic 'good morning' he just sent her a weary smile, and gestured to the empty seat across from him at the table. The training room was entirely deserted except for them, as always, and was the perfect place for a private conversation.

There was a silence, more contemplative than awkward, as they both tried to sift through their own conflicted thoughts. He broke the silence, as he felt was his duty, eyes looking her over sympathetically. "She never came back last night, did she?"

"No." Mel replied, and that single syllable carried more weight than it would have thought possible. It spoke of the last stages of the descent to the Dark Side, of an impending madness.

"I'm so sorry." His voice was deceptively calm, devoid of any real emotion but pity. "If its any consolation, it was under her own free will."

"You saw her?" Mel turned to him, not quite on him, eyes accusatory. "Why didn't you… try to stop her or something?"

He looked down and away, his conscience at odds with itself. "I did try! She'd made up her mind, and there wasn't anything I could do about it." Her eyes did not leave his face, and he sighed in frustration. "Its not like I could have tied her up or forced her not to go. She had decided, rightly or wrongly, that that was what she wanted to do. It is not the Jedi way to force someone to do something so against his or her own will, and she only would have done it at another time, when there wasn't anyone to watch her. And pushing her so, trying to force her to see reason, would only send her faster to the Dark Side."

Mel looked away, as what he had said made far too much sense for her taste. "Do you think he really loves her?"

"No." Obi-wan answered a tad too quickly. There was always the possibility… but he did not believe it, nor want to believe it. "I do not think he is capable of love, not the way we would define it." His tone, he realized a tad too late, had been rather more bitter than she would understand.

"Do you think she really loves him?" Mel pressed on, ignoring his perplexing attitude. That could come later.

"Yes, I think she either really does love him, or has herself convinced that she does." He looked away from her, not liking the heavy weights of guilt that had settled into his stomach. In a way this had been his fault, entirely, but she did not know that yet. In fact, she knew very little about how the situation had started in the first place.

There was a short silence, as Mel steeled herself to ask the question she had been meaning too for some time, but had never had to the courage too. "Why do you work for him, if you dislike him so much?"

Obi-wan sighed, biting his lip as he searched for a way to condense his story. "Would you like the whole story? It's a long one… but it explains more than it doesn't."

Mel shrugged, curiosity piqued. "I have time."

"Well, we might as well start at the very beginning. I'm (originally, I haven't been back in ages) from Naboo. It's a medium sized planet, all pretty meadows and forests. 'Course, it was discovered by down-and-out travel salesman, who ended up turning it into the summer home planet for the galaxy's wealthy or famous.

"In this business boom, a few native families managed to strike it rich and form themselves into a sort of aristocracy. One of these families was mine. So anyway, on Naboo, it's considered a major status symbol to have a Jedi in the family. But before I was shipped off, I'd been rather good friends with a noblewoman from one of the neighboring families. She was about my age, a little older, and so we were always running about, climbing trees together and other kid things. Her name was Padmé Ambidala, remember that, she'll be important later." Obi-wan did not add that he'd developed a bit of a childhood crush on the girl. It wasn't terribly important, at least not now.

"Anyway, the first stop for any potential Jedi (not all of them make to Master, some either die or find it too hard) is Corsucant, where the Temple is. This is entirely off the record, but I ended up making quite a favorite of myself. I was cute, talented and willing to listen, so I suppose it was natural. But anyway, it was there I met a Master by the name of Qui-Gon. He later took me on as his padawan, and we got along famously. By the time I was about ten (ish, I have to add. Birthdays weren't terribly important) Qui-Gon got into a bit of a disagreement with one of the other Masters who ran the Temple Academy. (He never did tell me what it was about, so I'll have to let that rest there). So he took off traveling, and took me with him." Obi-wan took a brief pause here, letting 'chapter one' in his life history close.

Mel nodded along with his telling, though she didn't understand how any of this could possibly add up. "Whatever happened to Qui-Gon? I've never heard you mention him before."

Obi-wan gave her an altogether too school-master-ly look. "Shh. I'll get to that later." He scolded, before continuing. "Anyway, one of our first stops was Tatooine. It's a rather unpleasant place, a giant ball of burning sand and desert. I don't see why anyone bothers living there, but they do, so it's a moot point. So we were wandering the main city, Mos Eisely, when Qui-Gon stopped to barter with one of the shop owners." Obi-wan sighed inside, reliving the moment as he had done many times.

I was looking about, filled with a childish wide-eyed wonder at this world that was so different from my own. Qui-Gon had seemed so very tall then, and immensely wise and powerful. (It was impossible to think the scene through anything but his own happy, childish thoughts). I ducked behind one of the rolled up carpets, wanting to play, and stumbled upon a strange boy around my own age. The stranger had streaky-brown hair, and was rather dirty. In one hand he held a rag, and was busy polishing one of the rusty driods for sale. Only, he wasn't actually touching the rag. Rather, he was using the force, which was something I recognized at once as a good sign. People who did cool things like I could were always nice and fun to play with. "Hello!" I chirped, ever glad to meet a new friend.

The stranger looked at me, startled, and sent a hasty, scared-looking glance towards where the owner was still bargaining with Qui-Gon. He grabbed onto the rag, pretending that he'd never levitated it in the first place.

"What's wrong?" I had pressed, confused. Why should this kid be afraid of me? Or was he afraid of the man over there? I could see how he might be afraid of the man, who had a pretty scary-looking face. (Ritual disfigurement, though I did not know this (nor care) at the time

"Nothing." The stranger blurted, before trying to duck behind one of the driods he had already worked on.

"Hey-" I would have said more, had Qui-Gon not appeared and placed a hand on my shoulder.

"Come on, we have to go." My Master's voice was light and even, and as kind as always. He never yelled at me, ever, only got more serious. This was even worse than yelling, in my opinion, as I hated the sad, disappointed look that came to his face whenever I did something wrong.

"But… that kid over there! Did you see him?" I squeaked eyes wide. "He could do stuff like me." Outside of the Academy, I'd never encountered another 'gifted' child.

"Really? What did he look like?" Qui-Gon sounded interested, which was good. That (probably) meant that I'd done something right and would be rewarded later.

"It was there I first met Anakin Skywalker. I'd been exploring, and come across him cleaning driods that were for sale. He was a slave then, the trade still being legal on Tatooine. No one wants to work there, usually, so they need slaves to get any work done at all. But I digress. Qui-Gon probably would have left it at there, not wanting to get into any messy situations, but I pushed him for it. I'd felt sorry for the poor kid, naïve thing I was, and I though the idea of having a friend to study with me sounded fabulous. So we bought him off of his owner, and freed him."

"So you're saying he started out as a slave?" Mel interrupted, incredulous.

"Yes, I am. His mother had sold him when they'd run out of money for food when he was few years old. She got sick that winter and died, so he would have ended up on the block either way. Obviously, slaves weren't considered important enough to screen for The Force, so he'd had to hide it. It explains a lot about him now, when I think about it. Why he's so materialistic, so possessive, and why he's so power-oriented. In a way, you can't blame him for it. But again, I digress.

"Those were some of the best years of my life, I have to say. We'd become best friends, and it was fun zooming around the galaxy, thinking we were somehow saving the world. But eventually Qui-Gon had to return to the Temple, and it was there things began to fall apart. We were probably fifteen, maybe a little older. Thing was, I wasn't the favorite any more, not by a long shot. He was, and there were even rumors going around about him being this 'chosen one' from a prophecy. Do you think I cared about some stupid prediction made by a man four hundred years ago? No. I cared that we were friends, and that we were supposed to be treated like equals.

"To cap it all off, Qui-Gon died about year after we'd returned to the Temple. In battle, it was, against the latest apprentice to the Sith Lord. Darth Maul was his name, and he wasn't particularly skilled, but he still managed to cut him down. We blamed it on each other, afterwards. We'd both been there, you see, and neither of us had been able to stop it.

"Thing was, by now we were too old for the Academy, still too young to be on our own, and there weren't any free Masters to take us on. We spent about a year and a half getting shunted from one to another, a few weeks here and there. Finally, not long after we turned seventeen, they gave us a choice of two solo missions (partly to 'teach us responsibility', and partly just to get us out from underfoot). I got first choice, and too this day I wish… But that doesn't matter. Anyway, the choices were either helping in the crusade against the Separatists (I'll explain that later) or guarding Senator Padmé (I told you to remember her!).

"Of course, I picked helping in the army. That was what a Jedi was supposed to do, help the helpless and defend the Republic. So Anakin was stuck with (what I thought) would be a boring soft job. He never did complain, but I didn't notice at the time (or if I did, take any notice of it).

"There we parted ways for about a year. I had an absolutely thrilling time, working myself up to the rank of General. I was traveling, fighting, and I loved it, every minute of it. See this was before the Empire was created, and it was still a Republic. It was run by the Senate, two senators per planet, and headed by Councilor Palpatine. A group of planets, outer rim ones mostly, had recently broken off and tried to create their own Republic. These were the Separatists, and that was what I had been doing, putting down their rebellion. But soon it took me back to Corsucant, and I took the chance to find out how Anakin was doing.

"Here I'll have to back track a little, and tell you some things that I didn't learn until afterwards, but are vitally important. See, before we'd gone our separate ways, we'd actually seen a rather lot of Padmé. She was in town as a Senator, and so we hung out some. It was around then that Anakin had decided he was in love with her. Of course this broke the cardinal law of The Force, but by then he didn't care. He'd always been rather ambivalent towards the Code, and he'd also- There I go again, jumping ahead of myself.

"Anyway, so that was why he hadn't protested his particular job. During that year, he'd gotten her to fall in love with him as well. At least, that was what he though. I think it was more she was tired of following the rules, tired of being the 'good girl' she'd always had to be. If she was looking for excitement, what more could she ask for then to sleep with a Jedi? Of course, this is all speculation on my part. She could have loved him… But either way, she ended up marrying him, some three months before I came to visit. Not long after, she told him that she was pregnant. Again, this is only speculation, but I think that she found out she was carrying his child before she married him and that was why she said yes. But I'll never know for sure, so it's a moot point.

"Not long after, Anakin started having dreams of her dying in childbirth. He'd had premonitions in dreams before this, and they'd always been right before, so he assumed these were. But instead of accepting this, and preparing to move on (as is the Jedi way) he sought a way to keep her from dying. You can guess where this lead to."

"The Dark Side." Mel breathed, wrapped up in the moment but still sparing a sympathetic thought to the poor, unfortunate Obi-wan.

"Yes. The Dark Side. As it turns out, the Separatists were headed by Darth Sidious, who'd always managed to stay one step ahead of us. We had thought that he'd simply had good informants… when in reality, the reason was that he was in the Senate himself! In fact, it was Councilor Palpatine who had moonlighted as the Sith Lord. He approached Anakin, promising him a way to keep Padmé from dying. And he took it." Obi-wan bit his lip, biting back the emotion that had nearly managed to swamp him. "I had been there for this, though I obviously had no idea… Even if I had known what was going on, what was about to happen, what could I have done?" he swallowed, then continued anew, though his voice was not as steady as it had started out. "So one night I had been over at Padmé's, when the news came. There had been a massive rebellion, everywhere, with the troops turning on their commanders. Sidious was behind it, as it had been him who had had the clones (wait, you didn't know that was what the storm troopers were? Well, they're all clones. Now you do know) made in the first place." Again Obi-wan was forced to pause, to gain control of himself. There was no need for Mel to see him break down, for her he had to be strong. "Almost every Jedi in the galaxy was killed that night, shot in the back, victims of their own patrols. And do you know who led the troops on the Temple itself? Who had, not hours before, murdered the head of the Order? Who personally made sure that none of the children, some as young as four, in the Academy made it out alive? Anakin Skywalker, former Jedi. It was that night he'd gone over, so blinded by his good intentions that he thought he'd single-handedly brought peace to the Republic! Who thought he was making it safer.

"It was the most heartbreaking thing I have ever seen, to have seen Padmé's face when they brought her the news. That's when I understood whom the father of her child was. It would be impossible to describe my actual feelings at this moment, so I won't try. Anger, disappointment, betrayal, and even a heavy dose of guilt. (Again, I digress). Of course, by the time it reached us, the news was some few hours old. I knew that Padmé knew where Anakin was, as he would have stopped by for a kiss before leaving. (The idea of him holding her, and their unborn child, after murdering at least a score of children at the Temple, sickens me). Yet, even after knowing what he had done, what he was probably out to do, she refused to tell me. She defended him, stubbornly, to the end. Of course, she knew why I wanted to know… why I had to know. And it was so very simple. I had to find my former best friend, whom I had loved, and kill him.

"I ended up having to stowaway in her own personal craft to find out where she was going. It was Mustafar, which was rather fitting. Mustafar is as close to hell as you can go and live to tell the tale. Entirely volcanic, it's a volatile place where the only rain is that of lava and ash. It was also a Separatist center, where Anakin had been sent by the Emperor (as he was by then, as the Senate had voted him extra power) to eliminate the leaders." It was here that Obi-wan trailed off, eyes glazed. It was such a strong, potent memory that there was nothing he could do about it.

I was standing there, not quite in the doorway, listening to them. Padmé, oh beautiful Padmé, had gone running out to meet him. But he was not happy with her, nor she with him. And how could she be?

"What do you mean you can't take this? I did it all for you! I did this all to save you!" He was angry, it was obvious. And his eye color had changed now; I could see it clearly from where I stood. Gone was the blue, replaced by a freakish, unnatural swirl. Can't Padmé see that it's pointless? That he's gone mad?

"Anakin, what you've done is wrong! How could you have done that?" She still sounded in disbelief that he could have changed so very fast. She was holding her hands out to him, pleading, as he pushed her away.

I moved to the doorway, wanting to keep her from being hurt. But my appearance made things worse.

"You brought him with you?" Anakin snarled, furious. "You brought him here to kill me?"

"No, I-" She tried to protest, but he had shoved her to the side and advanced upon me.

"She had nothing to do with bringing me here." I asserted, drawing my saber. There was no need to get her into more trouble.

"But you are here to kill me, aren't you, Obi-wan?" He replied, tone vicious and so strikingly alien with how he had addressed me at breakfast that very morning.

"Yes I am, and it's more than you deserve!" I wish I had not been so very dramatic, but it is the way I am.

The fight that ensued was amazing. We were so very evenly matched that it seemed to go on forever. Through rooms, on stairways, over platforms that spanned dizzying stretches of molten rock we fought, neither gaining any advantage over the other. Until we ended where we had begun, an exhaustingly pointless loop of fear and anger.

It was here that I very nearly succeeded (if it was success was what it could have been called) in getting him. But he was fast, and instead I left that scar through his eyebrow. He reciprocated, and I lost my balance.

This looked as though it could have been the end for me. I was down, actually lying on the ground, and he was laughing as he dropped that lethal laser lower…

In the chaos we had both entirely forgotten about Padmé. But she had not forgotten us… Screaming my name, sounding so utterly doomed, she threw herself in front of me.

And took what would have been a mortal blow. Anakin drew back, horrified. He still loved her, he thought, and would not have harmed her…At least, until she tried to give her life for me. For me, the last Jedi alive, and his (now) sworn enemy. With a harsh cry that was half a yell of rage and half a sob, he ran her through again.

"Padmé had obviously gotten to him first, and they were arguing. She did not like what he had become, and he felt betrayed. After all, he had done it for her. I showed myself, trying to keep him from hurting her…

"And so we fought. It would have lasted something of a lifetime had I not tripped. He could have killed me then and there, and was about to. But Padmé threw herself in front, and took the blow. He had tried to draw back, at the last second when he saw who it was, so she could have lived. But she'd given her life, not for him, but for the one come to kill him, and so he ran her through." There was a silence, as Obi-wan tried to ignore that his voice had cracked. "Twice."

"Twice?" Mel gasped, sounding utterly incredulous. "But I thought he loved her."

"So did I." Obi-wan sighed, looking for once utterly defeated. "I honestly had thought that he'd loved her. But then…" He bit at his lip again, turning his head away, fighting back the slew of emotions that always flooded him when he thought of that day. "He never was particularly stable. She just… broke him." There was another breath of a pause. "You should have seen it. Blood everywhere… we were both beyond angry, tears in our eyes… We would have ended up just tearing each other apart, if he hadn't shown up…" For the first time, Obi-wan's voice held clear hatred.

"Who?" Why won't he just get on with it?

"The Emperor himself. With an entire contingent of troopers, armed to the teeth." The momentary hate had left his voice, leaving something more listlessly resigned. "And before we knew it, we were surrounded and commanded to surrender."

They had come out of nowhere, it had seemed to me. More likely, I was too distraught and wrapped in my own thoughts to notice anything else.

Anakin (but he was not! Anakin had been my friend, my brother, and this was not he. Anakin was dead. But as of yet, I had no other name) did not look happy either. His face was streaked with blood and sweat and (tears? No) his weird eyes unreadable. But he glared at the white plastic clones ringing him, even sending a look of intense resentment towards the Emperor himself (making sure the back was turned first). He did yield, eventually, though when his eyes met mine they spoke murder. I knew what he was thinking- that I had turned his Padmé against him, and that he hated me. But I hated him also, in that moment, more than I have ever hated another before.

"Apparently there had been a few Jedi, two or three perhaps, that had managed to escape and seek refuge with the Separatists (the Resistance, now). Had they not needed an informant of sorts, someone who knew how a Jedi thought, I would simply have been handed back to Anakin. But instead I was offered a choice (that wasn't any choice at all). Aid the Empire in subduing the rebellions, or die." He paused again, unsure of how to phrase what he was about to say. "For a moment there, I nearly chose death. It seemed preferable to living my life without any of my friends, dealing daily with him? But it was the blood on his face that convinced me. I would be no use to anyone, unable to help save my Republic dead. So I agreed, and here I am."

Mel blinked at him, still processing all that he had said, his life history as a tormented monologue. "That's horrible." Was all she could think of to say. It was true, certainly. Would she have been strong enough to choose the life of hell over death? Was it stronger to choose life?

He nodded at her, feeling the effects of this catharsis. He'd never had anyone to tell, as who (who was not there) would have cared? But she'd listened, sympathized, and looked as though she had understood… and for that, he was eternally grateful. This silence, unlike the frequent others that had been full of meaningful, churning thought, was simple, comfortable, comradely.