Hey, everyone! I know, I know what you must be thinking--she hadn't updated this fic for months, then she gave us a short update with another evil cliffie, and then the author had the decency to disappear again. Burn her... or better, cook her alive. :(

I'm so very sorry! I really am.

Anyways, here is the next update--it's quite long, but I hope you don't mind much. Many thanks to my amazing beta for proof-reading it!

Thank you so much for reading, and enjoy!

Who should he help? The man who had left him for a terrible and humiliating death, showing no mercy, or the man who would enslave him for the rest of his life?

Making up his mind, Anakin ignited his weapon and rushed to help his friend—the only friend he had ever had.

Chapter Eight

Right and Wrong

A strong Force push sent Obi-Wan flying across the entire room. He crashed into the wall, which shattered from the impact, and slid to the floor in a broken heap. Palpatine was too strong, too skilled and too powerful even for Anakin's body… Obi-Wan didn't stand the chance alone; he needed Anakin's help.

There was a slight shift in the Force—the glowing waters rippled and seethed—but everything became quiet again before Obi-Wan could determine the origin of the disturbance.

Palpatine was already there, his crimson blade sizzling only inches from Obi-Wan's neck, and Obi-Wan rolled across the floor and leapt up. From the corner of his eye, he caught a glimpse of Anakin collapsing onto the floor, shivers rippling through his body. Was it shock or was it something else that affected him so badly?

Anakin's shell gave Obi-Wan many advantages in the fight—his height, superior physical strength, and a much, much stronger connection to the Force… Yet Anakin's body seemed to move on its own, uncontrollable and wild like its owner, disregarding Obi-Wan's will. This body didn't have the muscle memory of many of Obi-Wan's favourite battle moves, and the mechanical appendage was like a hostile intruder, making the attacks awkward and unskilled.

A tight, nearly claustrophobic feeling stirred in Obi-Wan's chest. He felt trapped in Anakin's body, and suddenly Palpatine's gleaming eyes were laughing at him behind a thick veil of grey smoke. It was hard to breathe, though Anakin's youth kept him going on, his arms growing even stronger, his legs moving even faster… Yet Obi-Wan felt that he was losing.

What was happening to Anakin? Why wasn't he coming to help him?

Palpatine laughed triumphantly. "Either way you lose, Master Kenobi. Order 66 is being executed now—and soon, the Jedi are no more."

The Galaxy turned into a turbulent blur around Obi-Wan, and for a tiny moment he forgot what he was there for.

Order 66… Five letters and two numbers, yet they harboured so much pain, so much suffering. So much death.

He couldn't let it happen. He wouldn't.

A yellow gleam illuminated Palpatine's cold, calm face as his scintillating red blade swung in a graceful arch to Obi-Wan's neck… only to be blocked by a turquoise one.

"So confident are you," a voice said by his left ear—Obi-Wan's own voice. A patch of beige robe framed his vision. "Lead to inevitable fall, too much confidence does."

Palpatine's eyes flared yellow. "Anakin, he is-"

"My friend," Anakin interrupted him, his voice firm.

Palpatine smiled—it was a cold, taut leer, holding more malice than anything else Obi-Wan had ever seen. "So be it."

Once again, Obi-Wan felt himself being lifted off his feet and slammed into the wall. For a moment he was dizzy; his vision was riddled with sneering black circles. The edge of his consciousness perceived Anakin groan next to him.

Palpatine was nowhere in the room.

"Where is he?" Anakin asked. Obi-Wan shrugged, getting up and lending Anakin a helping hand.

"I don't know… He just disappeared."

They came to the window. The Jedi Temple was still as peaceful and magnificent as ever, obscured behind a curtain of traffic and bathed in the golden sunlight. Yet Obi-Wan could sense darkness streaming to it through the Force to devour millenniums of serenity and peace.

"The clones are marching to the Temple now," Anakin said quietly. "The entrance is shut, but it won't hold them off for long. They'll find a way to get in."

Obi-Wan nodded, seeing throngs of faceless troopers march towards the Temple in his mind's eye. Thud thud thud thud. Their gait was as monotonous and emotionless, as rhythmic and merciless, as soulless as they were.

Obi-Wan balled his mechanical hand into a tight fist. "We have to get in there, to help somehow."

"They will kill children," Anakin said so softly that Obi-Wan strained to hear him. "Children… "

Obi-Wan cast a surreptitious glance at his brother. Anakin's face was a hard, stone mask, yet the emotions he sent through the Force were raw and unadulterated, of such overwhelming intensity that it was a miracle that he could stand still at all.

Obi-Wan put his hand on his brother's shoulder. "But you'll be there to protect them."

A powerful shudder rippled through Anakin's body, making Obi-Wan's arm shake violently. The Force exploded from the power of his emotion.

"Obi-Wan, I think you should go alone in there."

Obi-Wan struggled to maintain calmness in his voice as he asked, "Why?"

"As much as I hate to admit it, the Jedi can't handle it alone. We need our friends' help to evacuate as many as we can—and I'm going to ask for that help."

The words sounded sincere, but a dark glint in Anakin's grey eyes told Obi-Wan that there was more to his tale. There was something that Anakin was hiding from him, yet Obi-Wan didn't feel angry or betrayed. When the time was right, Anakin would tell him.

"All right. But please, do hurry up."

Anakin feigned a cocky smile. "Oh, Master, I don't think that I'll be much of assistance to you in that fossil body of yours. Besides, I still have so much to learn."

Obi-Wan frowned. "Yours won't be as good in sixteen years."

Anakin raised his eyebrows, heading towards the exit. "No, it won't. It will be better."

Obi-Wan grumbled inwardly, coming to the elevator and pushing the call button. The silvery doors opened before him.

Anakin lingered in the hall, a slight smile on his lips. "May the Force be with you, Master."

Obi-Wan smiled back. "And with you, too. I'll be waiting for you."

And then the doors slid shut between them.

Yet the last glimpse of Anakin he caught wasn't the smile-lit face of only seconds ago—it was a bitter mask of pain and anguish. Something was very wrong with Anakin… and the horrible feeling at the pit of his stomach told Obi-Wan that it was his fault.

The speeder landed on the landing platform of Padmé's apartment with a familiar, soothing purring of engines. Anakin pulled back the lid, and a gentle gust of wind fluttered into the cockpit. Somehow, it seemed that the very air on Padmé's veranda was different, better than in any other place he had ever been to. It was as if her mere presence was merged into it, making it so much more than a complex mixture of gas molecules. It was cleaner, warmer, comforting…

Comforting the man who would kill her.

A loud shriek pulled him back into the present.

"Ani!" Padmé ran to him with a huge smile on her face, her skirts fluttering behind her. He climbed out the cockpit to embrace her, and she rested her head against his chest.

Anakin inhaled the flowery scent of her hair, hugging her tightly so as to never let her go again. Their last meeting was only yesterday, yet it seemed like a lifetime ago.

Memories, bitter and burning, swirled on the inside of his head, one more horrible than another. Things he would do, lives he would take—everything turned into a sneering, spinning blur, accompanied by a horrifying sound of a mechanical breathing that would be his. It was hard to believe that those memories would come to life only in a matter of days had the switch not occurred, had the rift through time not happened…

All of this would happen only because he had been blinded by love, by passion, by his own ambitions.

"Ani, what's wrong?" Padmé asked anxiously, rubbing his back.

Anakin couldn't respond. She didn't know of the possible future—he would make sure she didn't find out about it—so she had no idea what this moment meant to him, and it did so much more to him than it did to her. His last memory was cold bitterness of the Man in the Mask, the man who had lost everything and everyone… because he had listened to the sweet talks of a snake, because he had let himself be twisted and seduced by it. Oh, how very foolish he had been…

"Nothing is wrong," he breathed into her hair, holding her even tighter. He wanted to stay like that forever.

"You're alive, our children are still alive. Nothing has happened yet," he wanted to say, but he didn't. He wouldn't. Would she still love him if she found out what he were capable of? What horrible fate both of them had narrowly escaped?

"I can sense it. Something's bothering you." Very gently, Padmé pulled apart and stared into his face, concern burning within her brown eyes.

Anakin wished that it had been his own face his wife would look upon, not the face of his brother, mentor and… killer. It was painful to think about Obi-Wan, of the vicious duel midst the rivers of lava and blazing heat. As disgusted as he was by the creature he would become, a part of him longed to seek vengeance at Obi-Wan for crippling him and leaving him to die a terrible death… That thought was like an icy knife cutting through his stomach.

"There is something," he said slowly, tracing the contours of her cheek with his finger. "The Jedi need your help."

Padmé arched her perfect brow in confusion. "I… don't understand."

Anakin pursed his lips. "The Sith Lord I've told you about has executed Order 66 that should eliminate the entire Jedi Order. Battalions of the clone troopers are heading to the Temple now." He sighed. "As much as I hate to pull you into this, we need help to evacuate as many as we can. Especially… especially children." His voice sounded as if something was choking him.

Padmé's face was one of those political masks he hated—calm, composed and emotionless. Perhaps, she was in too much of shock to take the news properly.

"Of… of course," she said, glancing at the Temple in the distance. It looked quiet and untouched, yet Anakin could already hear the mourning of the Force and believed to see a faceless Jedi fall gracefully to the ground, struck by the blaster fire.

"Do you know who that Sith Lord is?"

Anakin felt his lips curl up in a hard, bitter sneer. "Palpatine," he nearly spat through his teeth.

Padmé's eyes widened for a fraction of second, and she paled. "Well, that makes sense," she nearly whispered.

He leaned down and gave her a brief kiss. "Be careful," he whispered. Her mask broke, and her eyes were reeling with myriads of emotions again—fear, concern, love and many others he couldn't name.

"You be careful too," her words lingered in the air as Anakin had already ran to his speeder.

He could feel her eyes on him until his vehicle was swallowed by the tight traffic.

Witnessing the dying echo of the Jedi massacre had been bad enough. Running through the smoke-covered halls, feeling the cold touch of death seething through the air was much, much worse than Obi-Wan had ever imagined it would be, and Anakin's strong connection to the Force made everything even more vivid, more real.

The lament of the Force was a soft music of terrible beauty, flowing through the Temple—every dust particle, every shattered stone, every pillar. It channelled through Anakin's body—its offspring in flesh and blood—pleading him to do something, to prevent that evil from happening.

A faceless clone, blurry in the smoke, fired at him. Without thinking, Obi-Wan deflected the green bolts with a couple of swift movements, and the clone fell gracelessly, stumbling over a young girl's body. Her glassy eyes were wide open, surprise forever burned into her blank stare. A painful lump clambering up his throat, Obi-Wan closed her eyes and brushed a loose tendril of light hair off her still warm face.

Smoke, fire, blaster crackling, mute screams of the dying ones… It was like a scene from a nightmare, only that the Jedi didn't have nightmares. Jedi were never wallowing in what ifs, the Jedi never escaped from the harshness of the reality, they never tried to imagine that everything was just a bad dream—nothing more. But as he was running through the once beautiful halls, striking countless troopers without thinking, without looking, Obi-Wan was trying to do exactly that—to find a single evidence that nothing happening here was real.

He arrived at the door before the Council's chamber. There were no clones here yet. The massacre was just a strident, sickening noise in the background, and the distant beams of blaster fire looked even beautiful through the screen of smoke.

The door slid aside before him, and Obi-Wan entered the room. He could still feel the now faint traces of wisdom and serenity that had dwelled in those chambers for hundreds of years… but the thick, suffocating darkness was a dominating presence, clouding everything else. Except for the blind, naked terror of dozens of innocent children.

A little boy stepped forward, trembling with fear.

"Master Skywalker, what are we going to do? There are too many of them."

Obi-Wan clenched his right fist—a complex set of wires and devices, the fist he had seen killing that young boy on a security holo.

Feigning a smile, he squatted down before the child. "Don't worry, everything is going to be all right. I'll lead you out of here."

Another girl emerged from her hiding place, her face pale with consternation. "But… they are everywhere."

Obi-Wan stifled a sigh. "We can't stay here," he said simply. "Trust me—help is coming."

The sickening stench of death was everywhere. With the nauseating squelching of blood under his feet and a heavy drumming in his ears, Anakin streaked through the once magnificent halls of the Temple. He tried not to look, but he could still see an elder Twile'ek Jedi being struck in the back by a faceless clone. He tried not to listen, yet the quiet moans of a Padawan boy writhing on the floor in agony seemed to penetrate into his very soul. And there were clones everywhere… He didn't remember them being so many.

He had been on their side in the other… reality. What was worse—being the hunter or the hunted? Mercilessly eliminating the whole Order or witnessing it being erased?

A young Padawan girl was surrounded by three clones. She turned and leapt, dodging and deflecting the fire, but her technique had yet too many flaws, she was too slow, too clumsy. And she would never improve herself.

With a couple of quick slashes, Anakin cut through the clones and they fell, their white masks—almost exact replicas of Vader's black helmet—staring at him in opaque surprise. Without looking at the saved girl, Anakin hurried on, because there was another one… and another Padawan boy twirling gracefully behind the wall of fire.

There were so many beings that needed his help, but the cold void in his chest whispered to him that he couldn't save them all.

Obi-Wan's voice echoed in the back of his mind with a blinding flash. His Master needed him…

Following the call of the Force, Anakin run to Obi-Wan, dodging and deflecting the fire, taking as many clones as he could on the way. It was hot, and he thought he would choke from the nauseating stench of blood and smoke… there was too much smoke and fire. His vision was getting blurry; the flames looked like beautiful orange flowers, and the clones were just white smears in the grey background. He cursed Obi-Wan's old eyes.

Obi-Wan.

If Obi-Wan had shown better his love for him, would Anakin have befriended Palpatine? Would he have been seduced by that old snake had he been sure of his Master's love for him? He would have never become the Man in the Mask—a pitiful broken creature, full of hatred.

The wave of blazing heat hit his face painfully as Anakin run up the staircase leading up the Council's chamber. There was fire everywhere—the Temple was burning, but stone alone wasn't enough for the tongues of flames. There was a heavy, sickening stench of burning flesh in the air. Squinting from the heat, Anakin believed to distinguish an alien Jedi charring slowly, his still activated lightsaber humming mournfully in his hand.

Anakin hated fire.

It reminded him of Mustafar, of the duel, of his injuries. However… had Obi-Wan not shown up on Mustafar, there would have been no duel. Vader wouldn't have been a powerless cripple… Perhaps, he would have kept more of Anakin in him had he not been imprisoned into the suit. Perhaps, he would have been less dark and more human.

Or it could be that Padmé would have brought him back there. She had still loved him, he could see it in her eyes. Maybe, only maybe, her love would have made him realise his mistakes, his wrongs. Because before the duel, Vader hadn't been born wholly. Not yet.

But there was no way of knowing how the things would have gone… Ever.

Obi-Wan had taken care of that. He had done the right thing, he had fulfilled his Jedi duty… but he hadn't thought that not everything could be neatly divided into black and white. He hadn't thought that maybe deep down, Vader had wanted to be Anakin again.

Obi-Wan hadn't thought about that because it would have made things more complicated for him.

Anakin raced past the now empty Council chambers and further, to the Room of the Thousand Fountains. Obi-Wan and the children were close now—he could sense them in the Force.

Conflicted emotions battled within him. Horror at what he would become, love for Padmé and Obi-Wan… and there was also a part of him that lusted for revenge. That unadulterated, almost animal need couldn't be obliterated, couldn't be drowned. It gnawed at his heart like a worm, disgusting yet incredibly appealing at the same time. His entire being was ashamed at it, yet Anakin secretly craved for retribution.

How would it feel like to show Obi-Wan how wrong the old man had been… To teach him a lesson he would never forget. Anakin was sure that Obi-Wan didn't search for blame, that what he had done to on Mustafar didn't haunt him in the night.

Just one revenge—justified revenge—wouldn't make him to Vader, would it?

Those clones were fast, deadly and stubborn. Obi-Wan was afraid that he couldn't last against them for much longer. If only he was in his own body… Anakin's body, out of its own accord, tried to perform his kinetic and insane Djem So while Obi-Wan futilely attempted to make it use the serene and much more rational Soreso style. It seemed that Anakin's body was as stubborn and unbearable as its owner.

A familiar turquoise blade sizzled by his side as if from thin air, and Obi-Wan caught a glimpse of familiar grey eyes smiling at him.

Anakin came to help him.

The team was reunited again, and together, Kenobi and Skywalker always won.

"Always in trouble without me, Master?" Anakin grinned at him when the last trooper fell.

Obi-Wan shrugged. "I coped just fine, Padawan."

There was a cough on his left. Turning around, Obi-Wan saw the children coming from behind a pile of ruins where they had been hiding while he had been battling the clones. Some of them had their eyebrows raised quizzically; the others sniggered at them in a nearly pitying way. Obi-Wan cursed inwardly. From the corner of his eye he saw Anakin blush slightly.

"Do you know a way out …Master?" Obi-Wan asked. His mouth refused to form the last word.

Anakin stroked his beard, and Obi-Wan couldn't help but cringe as he saw dirt on his former Padawan's hands coming in contact with his beard…

"There is a passageway that I believe isn't blocked yet, and help will wait for us there."

Obi-Wan wanted to wipe that smug grin from his face.

"Let's go then."

They halted before a closed door in a dark, narrow corridor. Anakin had been right so far—the clones hadn't discovered that passage yet. It was safe, although the sickening stench of blood and smoke accompanied them even there. Obi-Wan doubted that it would ever pass even with years coming.

Anakin typed in the code, and the door slid open before them.

They stepped outside… only to discover dozens of troopers waiting for them, blasters at the ready.

Horrified gasps of children making his stomach twist into a tight, painful knot, Obi-Wan glanced at his left. Anakin was looking at him, his features stretched into a cold, dark smile that was not his own.

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