Obi-Wan woke up an indeterminable length of time later back in his cell with a pounding headache. He had, to his surprise, been laid out rather carefully, with no pressure on the worst of his injuries. The Clones, he supposed. Just because they followed orders to a fault did not mean that they were incapable of feeling compassion. He wondered briefly if the stories of Vader just grabbing the nearest Clone trooper and drinking from them were not so far from the mark as he had believed; they had certainly been more affected than he would have thought they, bred and conditioned for the battlefield and all the horrors that came with it, would be.
Whatever the reason, he was thankful.
His heart beat thrummed in time with the pounding in his head, and he lay there attempting to shut out the sound for some time before he realised that it was faster than normal.
A spike of alarm sent his heartbeat racing, hammering on the inside of his head, and he groaned, making the supreme effort of moving one leaden arm up to cover his eyes and block out the light.
Calm. Panic would not help him. He knew that. He was just having some difficulty putting it into practice; that was all. It was perfectly reasonable.
The blood loss. That was it. Headache, dizziness, fatigue, a chill. He knew the symptoms. He'd seen them before, made prominent once the wounds were patched up and the bleeding stopped – he shouldn't think about that. He had had enough nightmares recently without adding buried post-traumatic stress left over from the Clone Wars into the mix.
He hadn't had a nightmare last night. He had been too exhausted.
He laid there, eyes closed and listening to the silence, until he fell asleep again.
When he next woke, the headache had receded enough that he felt able to move, to sit up and open his eyes. The cell seemed brighter, the lights harsher than before, buzzing softly in a grating hum that was just barely audible. Clearly, they had not bothered to spend much on the lighting, or anything down here that was not designed to aid in keeping the prisoners in. Including the food, the most he could say for it being that it was nutritious. That was better than nothing at all, or some of the disgusting slop he had been served over the years, and he wondered what Vader and Sidious would say to being told that, minus the Vampire mind control and blood drinking, their holding facility was actually far from the worst he had visited.
Actually, they would probably go out of their way to change his mind, so mentioning that would not be the wisest idea.
Looking around, there was no food tray with nutrient bars and a cup of Coruscanti tap water – but there was a bottle of water, tucked right in the corner of his ledge, where it would be partially concealed from the camera by his body as he slept.
Stunned, he just stared at it for a moment, even as he automatically shifted so that he was once more blocking it from the observers view. They had to know, and it was probably not quite a breach of protocol given that, but plausible deniability was a good thing to have should some higher-up drop by. Whoever it was, he did not want to bring trouble down on their heads if they had tried to help him.
He inspected it. Bottled extra-filtered, the type that could be bought on the streets of the city planet for some small amount of credits but was freely given to the military. If Clone food regulations had not changed in that regard, then they would have had access to such bottles, free and with no one able to trace it the way bought items could be.
It was more likely to be them than one of the surveillance operators he had seen. Not only had they made a choice to work for the Empire, either by staying on when the takeover took place, or by joining since, unlike the Clone's, they would have had to go and buy it. He doubted any of them would go to such trouble.
The water soothed his parched throat. It was slightly warm, from sitting next to him, but it was fluid that he had needed, having missed – or possibly just not been given, due to his unconsciousness – the last however many meals.
"Thank you," he whispered in a voice that may or may not have been loud enough to be picked up. He was not sure, and would leave it to chance, or rather the Force, to decide.
After his next meal of the omnipresent nutrition bars, after which he had placed the empty bottle on the tray to be taken out with the empty plastic cup, he had barely sat down on the ledge, legs crossed in a meditative position and intending to centre himself and ponder how he was going to get out of here when the door burst open.
His first thought was Vader – though he had not been out for an entire week, surely – but the figure that came striding in, anger clouding his features, was not the Sith Lord. Neither was it the other Sith Lord. It was Ferus, and his eyes flashed as he took in Obi-Wan sitting there calmly looking at him with something akin to exasperation.
"Oh, is this the accommodations you've booked yourself? I would've thought that you'd go for something cosier, but then you were always such a good Jedi when it came to the no possessions rule, and any other rules there were." Vitriol spilled out, aimed at the Jedi sitting on the bench with his shoulders slightly slumped, the bruise-like purple bags under his eyes matching the actual bruises on his neck, both contrasting vividly with the pallor that dominated the rest of his appearance.
The dark-haired young man did not seem to notice any of this. Obi-Wan wondered what had happened to him since they last met; then, Ferus had been suspicious but had trusted Garen's judgement of him, and had not been overly hostile. A far cry from this, "Then again, that was about the only thing you were good at. That, and apparently letting yourself by used as a blood bag. Couldn't raise a Padawan without him turning to the Dark side, couldn't stop him once he did, couldn't kill Dooku and stop the war as it started – just how many died because of you Kenobi? How many died because you were a pathetic excuse for a Jedi – you didn't even take the trials of Knighthood, did you? You were knighted for killing Darth Maul, and didn't he turn up later and start killing people? You couldn't even do that right!"
He was pacing up and down the cell, apparently venting. At least he did not seem inclined to physical violence, for now. Obi-Wan flinched back at some of the accusations, because some of them…some of them were the thoughts that crept into his mind when people blamed him for the downfall of the Republic, because he had been well known and part of The Team and they had trusted him to save them. Some of them were thoughts that had turned up when he slept no matter how many time he banished them. They were thoughts that he had faced, and accepted that maybe they had a point, but while it was possible he could have done better, he could have done far worse, and Sidious had been planning this for a long, long time. Yoda had also been quite insistent that the Council as a whole held as much of the blame as he did, if not more. Obi-Wan was not sure what he thought of that – the memory of it still puzzled him when he thought on it, and how Yoda had blamed himself for not seeing – but he had accepted that maybe, just maybe, the blame was not all his to carry.
A lot of it was, and it hurt when it was flung in his face like this – but not all of it.
He had enough bruises without adding the ones on his shins he would get from Yoda's gimmer stick, after all.
"I bet you wouldn't have passed if you had taken them, the council just knighted you to get you out of the way," and he knew that was not true, if for some reason the Council had wanted him out of the way then they could have just sent him off the one of the corps, not kept him around where they would have to deal with him. "Or maybe it was to keep an eye on you, make sure you hadn't gone Darkside on them. I heard the stories, how you felt it and rejected it, but those stories came from you, and who else would know? Master Jinn died, and you were the only Jedi witness – how do I know that you didn't team up on him with the Sith, and spy on us during the war!"
It was so utterly nonsensical a thought that for a moment Obi-Wan could only gape. Just what would it have gained the Sith to have him raising Anakin as a Jedi when, in the scenario Olin was suggesting, they could have just taken him and disappeared well before any other Force users arrived? And for him to think…
Qui-Gon Jinn's death on Darth Maul's blade was an old, scarred over wound for Obi-Wan. He would always carry it with him, but he had healed as much as he ever would long ago. Obi-Wan had plenty of old wounds he could use for comparison, though most of them had occurred after his Master's death, and he knew that they healed, they scarred, they took a backseat to more recent injuries, and in bad weather they ached like no-one's business unless he used the Force to sooth them.
He did not have access to the Force now, as he stood up, slightly stiffly, and cut Olin off with a deadly quiet murmur of, "The security cameras in the Theed Palace generator core, for starters."
Olin blinked at him in a startled manner, as though he had expected Obi-Wan to just sit there and take all the verbal abuse that was being heaped onto him, before he snarled and started towards the imprisoned Jedi – and the same squad of Clone troopers – or part of them, there were only four that squeezed themselves into the cell – burst in, the leader shouting, "Orders to take the prisoner to the Emperor, so get your hands off of him, civilian."
Well, Obi-Wan supposed wearily, so much for meditating.
A.N. My knowledge of Ferus Olin comes from Wookieepedia and other fanfiction, so I imagine I didn't get him quite right. According to Wookieepedia, he does spend some time in the Emperor's service sometime after the rise of the Empire, though he is still loyal to the rebels despite being influenced by a Sith holocron Sidious gave him – which would be why some of his rant make less than complete sense. As observed from Anakin in RotS, the Dark side can make you think some things that are very, very strange from a normal person's viewpoint. I'm sure it makes complete sense to him. Anyway Olin is here to represent what the rebels think of Obi-Wan, in a fashion slightly amplified by the holocron influencing him, since otherwise it would not be visible in anything other than Obi-Wan's ruminations.
Till next time. Grey out.
