spooktober prompt: out of focus [ Dedicated to MamouthRose, who asked for more ]
This is you on a battlefield. Disorientation takes you first. Wide open plains dotted with towering flora, colorful stacks of flowers casting intricate shadows on the stony path from the cheerfully blazing sun that warms the field and the droves of droids marching toward the line you're supposed to be holding. Defensive measures. It's an easy mission. Doesn't require much. Just standing firm in the face of blasterfire, proton cannons, and three or four tanks.
Under your gloves, your palms are sweating. Between your palms, you're clenching a saber that molds to your hands: custom fit. It vibrates. Or, you feel a vibration. Emanating from it? And not exactly. More like a persistent resonance, as if the weapon is tuned to the frequency of your capillaries.
l
Anakin insists on calling you Obi-Wan. He is still powerful and stubborn. And angry. Always.
Commander Cody acknowledges you by rank only. You're still getting used to that. The title, not his distant manner.
l
The air has a tang of agitated nervousness to it. You don't have to be Trandoshan to know that. It's barely dawn. The clones reflect the rosy, honeyed sky in their armor. Bumbling your way though, you trip past crates of grenades and shipments of bacta. At the back of the hub of activity that doesn't even qualify as a camp, you make eye contact with a batch of shines, fresh from the cruiser. It's their first time off Kamino. It shows. They look bewildered, lost, and just dumb enough to imagine their bravado is fooling anyone. (You look like that too.)
You're alive, after. Somehow you're alive. Maybe it's luck. Maybe it's instinct. Maybe Anakin is right and you've done this before.
l
Should you report to the Jedi council? Hop a flight back to Coruscant and let them stick their fingers down your throat and poke around inside your thoracic cavity to see what's there left missing maybe never was? (What did the capsules wash away?) Anakin doesn't think so. He says there's a war to be fought /can't waste any time on something as trivial as ensuring there's actually substantial filling inside your human mold\, you couldn't possibly leave the battlefield now.
He's acting cagey. Ahsoka assures you this is normal. She tells you this, says Anakin is normally cagey these days. She says this without meeting your eyes. There's no one to tell you if that is normal too.
So you don't. Don't go to Coruscant. Don't report to the Council. Don't scrap away your fascia and inspect it on the molecular level. Microscopes and test tubes can't help you now. You're you. You are Obi-Wan Kenobi.
l
"General. We're approaching the drop zone, General. All troops are ready for action, General. We attack on your command, General."
Maybe this time you will die.
l
War is an incredible substitute for self-reflection. You can't remember who this Obi-Wan is but you think you can be him, judging from the hollow spaces you encounter. That must be the positive outcome to being a malleable blankness. The Negotiator. Master Jedi. General Kenobi. A rotating column of faces for your unending supply of masks.
l
Tucked into the economically sized space between the floor and the bunk above you, you dream. You dream of a garden full of scuttles and sunshine, with a bench in the middle made just for you. And then you fall asleep.
l
Anakin keeps you busy. Keeps you out in the field. Keeps you isolated and away and out of reach. From the Council, the other Jedi, sometimes Ahsoka when her curiosity burns like a branding iron. You hold onto threads of tales, whispers you hear from soldiers from pirates from politicians, grasp them in trembling fingers, keep them and learn them and become them. Obi-Wan has a reputation. So these tales. You can use them. Stack them like blocks until they resemble a man. Just until you remember. Until it all comes back. Until whatever they put inside of you washes away and you're fixed you misshapen lump of clay.
There's something missing. You're supposed to be connected to the Force. Or the Force should fill you. Vessel. Messenger. Blood vessels drenched in Light. Guide to the Chosen One. Hope of the Galaxy. And so on.
You don't feel - doesn't matter. You will. Or won't. (Does that matter?)
Anchorless. You're drifting further. No, just floating. Head above water. That's equilibrium at its finest. Sufficiency and survival. Those meet the requirements for position in the Grand Army of the Republic. Let sleeping krayt dragons lie.
The shinies lose their bewilderment. They find answers: death. Themselves or their enemies. In war, it is that simple. Nothing in war is simple.
l
You're cornered. A demon, red and black, pins you to the wall and sneers with yellow eyes. Something stirs in your solar plexus, an ignition of nerves and membranes. You claw out from under his power and he hates you it's a palpable shadow of writhing oozing festering weight like a wound infected animal gone rabid gnashing terrible constant -
Maybe this time you will actually die.
Ahsoka fills in the holes with bacta. It sits inside of you, drawing out cells and fusing torn skin. She sits with you in the aftermath. Once your cries have diminished to humiliation. The droid gives you capsules. You swallow them with water.
"Why didn't he kill you?"
You have an answer. One she won't like. One you're not sure is correct. One that you don't know if it's the right answer. (Does it matter?) After she leaves, you activate the ship's on board medical droid. Upon request, it dispenses more capsules.
l
This is you, disassembled. Separate and other. Tortured and mangled before the Sith even got to you. This is the threads unraveling.
Anakin can't-won't let you go. Not now not ever.
Maybe this is when you finally die.