The end comes in a dizzying blur: the screech of blasterfire, the voices of his men rising, taut with panic, with fear. The blinding glare of lightsabers clashing together. The stench of burning flesh. A ringing chorus of pleading, crying, screaming, and then—
Silence.
Perhaps this is the worst part. The worst of many worst parts. For as long as Obi-Wan can remember, the Force hummed with life, each living thing a note in a grand melody, ablaze and shining with light. And no one shone brighter than Anakin.
But Anakin Skywalker is dead.
Obi-Wan is alive. Obi-Wan survived. When the dust settles, he wakes to an empty cloudless sky, looks out onto an empty lifeless desert. Thinks of the absence of color, the intolerable dryness of it all.
As Tatooine's sweltering suns burn on the horizon, Obi-Wan thinks of how the world has shrunk down, and listens to the deafening quiet.
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.
(For a long time after Qui-Gon's death, Obi-Wan remembers only the void he left behind, the searing numbness after their bond was abruptly ripped away. It's a pit in Obi-Wan's stomach, a yawning feeling that threatens to swallow him whole. Most days, he's sure it's a loss he'll ache with for the rest of his life.
But every once in a while, Obi-Wan can imagine a future where the memories don't sting like an open wound—in moments like this, out in the Temple gardens with Anakin, the Force singing with his wonder and excitement. They're supposed to be meditating, enjoying the stillness and the quiet among the plants, basking in the sunlight, but the clouds have turned grey, and now Anakin is catching raindrops in his cupped hands.
"Rain," Anakin says, and it sounds like a prayer.
"Come back inside, Padawan," Obi-Wan says. "You'll catch your death out here."
Anakin shakes his head, his gaze still fixed on the overcast sky. "No one's ever died of a cold before, have they?"
"You could be the first."
Anakin turns to Obi-Wan then, brows furrowed. The Force seems to wilt, curling in on itself as though—not afraid, but timid, uncertain, and it makes something in Obi-Wan's chest stir.
"I'm joking, of course," Obi-Wan says, injecting the appropriate amount of sternness in his voice. "You'll live to make my hair greyer for another day."
Anakin blinks. Considers.
"I don't know, Master," he says, after a beat. His smile returns, widens, brightens the hollow pit inside Obi-Wan. "They look pretty white already."
Anakin sprints away before Obi-Wan can retort, jumping and splashing and stomping in the puddles. Obi-Wan lift his hands in a vain attempt to protect himself from the spray of water. He can already feel his clothes sticking to his skin, and he sighs at the sight of Anakin's mud speckled robes and soiled boots.
Blast his Padawan's cheek. Blast his Padawan, while they were at it. The impertinence was astounding.
"This is undignified," Obi-Wan calls after Anakin, but Anakin only laughs. The sound rings sharp and clear over the drizzling rain.
That something in Obi-Wan's chest keeps stirring.
Obi-Wan wonders, not for the first time and not for the last, if this is what Qui-Gon felt, what Qui-Gon saw, when he met Anakin out on Tatooine's desert sands: like he'd found a star, slowly spinning. A little sun.
Obi-Wan feels at the edges of the space where Qui-Gon is meant to be, and it's a little less empty, a little less dark.
Anakin is still beaming, his eyes closed, his face lifted skyward.)
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.
Anakin Skywalker is dead, but he lingers—always in the corner of Obi-Wan's eye, in the shadows that dog Obi-Wan's steps.
Obi-Wan sees him among the laughing children that run the streets of Anchorhead. Sees him in the crowded plaza of the merchants' district, blending into the throng. Sees him walking over the shifting sand dunes, his hands hidden in folds of his cloak. Sees him in the petrified faces on the auction block in Mos Eisley, men and women and children, with their hands and feet bound in chains, their bare skin burning under the heat of the suns—and each time, Obi-Wan cuts his eyes away. Swallows the bile rising in his throat, turns his back, and keeps walking.
Obi-Wan sees Anakin when he grips his butcher's knife, when his fingers are stained red with blood that isn't his own—a Jedi turned butcher, and when he brings down his blade, he sees Anakin sliding down the lava bank, metal arm clawing at the black sands.
Obi-Wan sees Anakin, even from a distance, in his son's face.
Obi-Wan hears him, too. Hears his screams in the raging sandstorms, in the howling night winds. Hears him, sometimes, even in the silence: low moans of pain, whimpers, weak cries for help. Obi-Wan tries to tune them out, tries to call out to Qui-Gon—but Qui-Gon never answers. There's only Anakin's voice—his screams, his pleas, his laughter—and they bleed into Obi-Wan's dreams.
"Dreams pass in time," Anakin snarls, bares his teeth. He's crawling in the shadows, his burnt body still smoldering and laced with smoke.
It's easier to ignore when Obi-Wan drinks his way into unconsciousness. Hardly a behavior befitting a Jedi, he knows, but then there are hardly any Jedi left. Is he even a Jedi still? No Republic to serve, no Order to guide him, just the weight of his failures on his back.
And then, of course, there is Anakin. A persisting reminder. A bleeding tear in the Force. Even in death, demanding to be seen, demanding to be heard.
"Look at me, Master," he says, as he burns. His eyes are sharp, waiting, like a vulture watching a dying animal. "Look at what you've created."
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.
The world is too quiet, too small, but Luke shines as brightly in the Force as his father. As brightly as his sister, half a galaxy away.
Obi-Wan wonders if Luke looks anything like Anakin did, if Luke will grow up to look anything like Anakin had, if Luke will grow up to look anything like Anakin would have, and Obi-Wan longs to see it for himself—longs for it so desperately his throat burns with the ache of it. Obi-Wan understands, now, with sudden clarity, that this must be what Anakin felt, perhaps always, perhaps all his life—caught in the tangled knot of his longing for his mother, his love for Padmé, his duties as a Jedi—and Obi-Wan understands, too, why the Jedi forbade such things.
How cruel, to want for something you are bound to lose. To cradle in your arms what you cannot keep. Perhaps it's a mercy, then, to not cradle them at all.
"Why are you here?" Owen Lars asks one evening, after ushering Luke away and out of sight.
Penance, Obi-Wan thinks.
"To keep him safe," is what Obi-Wan says. A half-truth, and it feels as though he's speaking through broken glass, lodged in his throat.
"We can take care of our own," Owen says gruffly. "Meaning no disrespect, Ben, but he'll be safer with you away."
"He has to know eventually. What he is, who his father—"
"Not now. Not yet."
For a strange, heavy moment, Obi-Wan tastes ash in his mouth, and he remembers holding Qui-Gon in his arms, feeling achingly cold as the light of their training bond sputtered and died. Remembers the little boy who chased away the cold, who shuffled by his side, as constant as the sun. Remembers that same sun, drifting a little further away, insisting he can do this alone, he doesn't need help, he's ready for his Trials—
Not now, Obi-Wan had said to him, over and over, until the war meant he no longer could. Not yet.
Owen shakes his head.
"He's not just yours," he says, his expression tight and still.
There are thousands of ways to lie, and at least twice as many reasons. Obi-Wan knows them all. He says nothing and inclines his head as Owen trudges away, back to his homestead and his family.
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.
Sometimes, Obi-Wan jolts awake to find Anakin on the floor next to his bed.
It's not an unfamiliar sight. During the first year of his apprenticeship, Obi-Wan often found Anakin curled asleep on the floor of Obi-Wan's room or tinkering with little mouse droids—pilfered, no doubt, from all over the Temple—at his bedside. It was a habit that never quite left Anakin, even through his Knighthood. Obi-Wan remembers countless nights recuperating in the Halls of Healing and the medbay of his flagship, and seeing Anakin, cross-legged on the floor, toying with his metal arm, heedless of how uncouth he looked.
The Anakin that Obi-Wan sees, more often than not, is the boy he had been on Tatooine. Anakin, as Qui-Gon saw him, as Obi-Wan first met him, all those years ago. Small and disheveled, in ragged clothes thick with grime. A mop of sandy, blond hair. Bright eyes on a sun-browned face. Faint freckles dotting his nose like constellations.
Maybe it means something, that Obi-Wan sees Anakin as this, when Obi-Wan had been too blinded, then, by his own bitter resentment to see much of Anakin at all. And Anakin had known it, hadn't he? He had felt the wobble in their foundation from the start.
Or maybe it means nothing, and Obi-Wan truly has gone half-mad from the blistering heat. It isn't the first time he has dreamed with his eyes open.
"You're dead," he says, and the words catch in his throat. They always do.
Anakin looks up, frowning—he's tinkering again, because of course he is. Anakin and his blessed machines.
"I don't think I am," he says. "Why would I be?"
"I killed you," Obi-Wan murmurs. Confesses it, quietly, as though this will make it less true.
Anakin's frown deepens. "Are you sure, Master? That doesn't sound like you."
Obi-Wan wants to look away. He wants to stand up and march out of this damned cave, to walk away from the shadows, but his legs won't move. He stays rooted to the spot, his heart thudding against his sternum. "I had to. You were—it was too dangerous."
Anakin stares and stares, his gaze flat and level.
"Oh," he says, finally, and his voice is feather-soft. He sets aside his little droid and his tools. "You left me there, didn't you, Master? I was burning and you walked away. You abandoned me."
Anakin stands, a small silhouette against the dim moonlight. His voice stays even as he speaks, unbearably calm and matter-of-fact, and Obi-Wan almost doesn't hear him over the ringing in his ears.
"You said you wouldn't. You promised me, before, whenever I got scared. Don't you remember? You used to say you wouldn't leave me—never, ever. But you were lying, weren't you? I guess you didn't love me, after all."
Anakin is still. Anakin was never still. Anakin was always moving, like there was a supernova living under his skin, simmering close to the surface. But his face is now blank, inscrutable, as devoid of life as Tatooine's desolate landscape, and Obi-Wan might as well be looking at a corpse. A ghost.
Perhaps he is. Perhaps Obi-Wan is one himself.
"How can you say that?" Obi-Wan says tightly. "Surely you knew, Anakin—you had to have known—"
"Loved," Anakin says, an edge creeping into his voice. "That's what you said, before you left me to burn. Past tense. Is it still love, Master, if it's conditional?"
"I loved you," Obi-Wan says, and it should be easier to say—here, now, in the silence, without the Council's prying eyes and the weight of the Code bearing down on him. But he feels them still, as real as the thick smoke clogging his throat and the red flames stinging his eyes. "I did. I do. But you're dead—you're dead, and I failed you—"
"Maybe I failed you first." Anakin crosses his arms. His eyes sharpen. "Maybe I was always meant to. I'm too dangerous—you said it yourself. I heard you, you know, when you told Master Qui-Gon."
The words settle heavily in Obi-Wan's chest.
"I'm sorry," Obi-Wan says, though he knows it will do nothing. Doesn't know what else to do.
Anakin lifts his chin, defiant. "Maybe you shouldn't be. Maybe I deserved it. Maybe I deserve to die."
"Don't—don't say that—"
"Why not? You think so. You must have. You should. I Fell, didn't I? I killed all the younglings. I slaughtered them all."
Obi-Wan flinches. His world had been upended, had crumbled around him, and here it was: distilled down to cold, hard facts. Said so easily, so dispassionately, with such utter blankness, that Obi-Wan knows this can't possibly be Anakin. Not his Anakin, who was always so passionate, whose heart put down roots and clung—who felt everything too deeply and never learned how to stop.
Obi-Wan stares at the shadow wearing his boy's skin and tries to see it—his Padawan as he once had been, with his bright eyes and sideways grin, his freckles like constellations—tries to see Anakin as he once was, in the man Anakin became—the man who was nothing but anger and hate and yellow eyes, a dead star, the remnants of a sun—and Obi-Wan can't. He can't.
Obi-Wan stares, and looks, but all he sees are a boy and a corpse, and the corpse isn't the boy, can't be his boy, he can't be the same as that rotten, burning husk—and maybe, perhaps, Obi-Wan never left Mustafar after all.
"Maybe Qui-Gon should have left me in Watto's junk shop," Anakin says dully.
Obi-Wan feels his heart twist, so sharply he thinks it might be bleeding.
"No—no, Anakin," Obi-Wan tries to say. Desperation splits his voice. "It wasn't—it wasn't you who did those things. It couldn't have been you. If I had known—if I had thought that there was any part of you that was still there, I wouldn't—I wouldn't have. I couldn't have. It wasn't you, Anakin. It couldn't have been."
Anakin holds his gaze, still inscrutable. After a long moment that feels like an age, something in his expression shifts—something like recognition, almost. The look the settlers on Mos Eisley wore when they knew a sandstorm was coming. The way Anakin looked at the sky, waiting for the rain.
Anakin bobs his head, as if reaching a decision, and unfolds his arms.
"You're like my father, you know," he says. "Or like my brother, I'm not sure. But I know I love you, and I don't want to cause you pain. So maybe you're right. Maybe it wasn't me who did those things—because you're in so much pain."
Slowly, slowly, he lowers his chin and considers his hands.
"So I'm really gone, then? I have to be, don't I? You can't love me if I'm not dead."
Obi-Wan tries to think of something to say, but the words keep failing. What else is there to say? What good will it do? The language he had spouted for years, all those rote platitudes and allusions to the Jedi Code, had done nothing but damn them both.
A lifetime of memories spills out across his mind—thirteen years of teaching Anakin and loving Anakin and fighting at his side. His stupid jokes. His laughter after pulling off a reckless stunt. His infuriating obstinacy. The awe in his eyes, almost on the verge of tears, when he first saw a pool of water. The way he littered the floor of their quarters with bolts and scraps and dismantled droid parts. His smug, gloating grin when he grew an inch taller than his Master. The wonder on his face the first time he entered the Temple gardens, how at peace he looked among the greenery, how he tried to touch every flower, every leaf, every blade of grass.
But there are no gardens here, only the barren dunes. Without color, without life. When Obi-Wan reaches out to grasp onto these memories, they melt away like shadows in the sun, and he finds himself holding nothing but empty air.
No! Obi-Wan thinks, wildly. Come back!
But Anakin doesn't hear him. Anakin is dead.
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.
Obi-Wan has a memory in the back of his head, from a time when Anakin was still small enough to hold—of Anakin's hands clutching his own as Obi-Wan, convalescing from an injury, floated along the vague border between sleep and awake.
"You're the closest thing I have to a father," Anakin had said, his voice unbridledly earnest. "I know it's not allowed, but you still are and I can't help it. So you have to be all right, Obi-Wan, you have to be. Please don't leave me here. I can't lose you too."
Obi-Wan doesn't like to unpack the memory too often. It feels too light, too delicate, like gossamer wings, and he thinks if he cradles it too long, it will crumble in his hands.
But on the rare nights when there are no dreams or lingering shadows, the image feels almost safe enough to hold. On these nights, he sits and stares at Anakin's lightsaber, feels the crystal hum through the casing, and listens to its low, mournful hymn.
Later, Obi-Wan will put Anakin's lightsaber away with his, will hide them in a trunk and try to forget. He will go out to the dunes and dig a grave, will bury them in the sand and lay these memories to rest.
But he still hears it, that hymn, carried like wind through the dark, and maybe this, not the silence, is the worst part after all. Worse than the screams, worse than the burning fires, worse than the taste of ash on his tongue.
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(The years fall away like sand through a sieve.
Obi-Wan blinks, and then there is a war, the Jedi leading the charge. The Council makes compromise after compromise, and one battle becomes another, becomes one battle too many.
But the war rages on, unforgiving, a perpetually changing scenery of carnage. He loses count of the soldiers who fall under his command, allies and friends he's seen die. His arms are full of corpses, and at night, in his dreams, Anakin numbers among them.
Somehow, somewhen, while Obi-Wan wasn't looking, the slowly spinning star became a hurricane, with Anakin at its center, like the eye of some great, raging storm. Obi-Wan misses the days when Anakin's smiles weren't so sharp, when Anakin's eyes weren't so guarded, misses them with such urgent longing that it runs Obi-Wan ragged. He wonders when their banter became a standoff, when the silences between them turned thick with secrets and unsaid things.
Obi-Wan blinks, and when he looks over at Anakin, he finds a gaping distance between them, feels it widen inch by little inch.
I don't know how to reach you, he thinks. I don't know how to try.
Qui-Gon would have known. Qui-Gon would have found the words. Obi-Wan doesn't even know where to begin.
"You have become a far greater Jedi than I could ever hope to be," he starts. It's not enough.
Another day, perhaps. He'll try again, but not now. Not yet.
There's still time.)
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.
The end comes in a dizzying blur, and the world shrinks down to these simple truths:
Anakin Skywalker is dead.
Obi-Wan Kenobi died with him.
