XXI. Duel Of The Masters

They stood. They approached each other. An unseen litany of mental and physical Force defenses sprang between them.

Vader gripped his saber like a weapon. Obi-Wan held his like a wand.

Defense. Insight. Patience.

Obi-Wan Kenobi, the brash young Jedi master, had thought of Soresu once as a fighting style, not a state of being. He adopted its signature stances, practiced the precision spins and whirling arcs that tore attackers apart with their own hostile energy. But he was past that now. Soresu was a credo, a paradigm of the mind. The grip on his lightsaber did not matter. The lightsaber itself did not matter. Only in the light of the Force was there true strength, and that is where the old man now stood.

Kenobi's arms and shoulders shifted not into the iconic, two - finger ready stance of his signature form, but into the ungainly two - handed grip of Shii-Cho, the most basic of lightsaber combat styles. It was rudimentary in the extreme, a child's form, reserved in the late period by masters for teaching petulant children. The insult was not lost on Vader.

The Lord of the Sith advanced, Kenobi's weapon angled loosely to the side, its tip slowly arcing to eye level. "Drawing the circle," entering the ready stance of Shii-Cho, was the first movement taught to the younglings. The ready stance was the first posture Obi-Wan had shown him—no, shown Anakin.

"The circle is now complete," Vader warned his would-be instructor. "When I left you, I was but the learner. Now I am the master."

"Only a master of evil, 'Darth'," Obi-Wan taunted, as he opened the duel.

There was no power in the strike. It was a lazy, backhanded brush of the weapon toward Vader's blade. He tapped high, then low, then high, with nothing but the natural strength of his arms. Vader parried the clumsy blows easily. His own saber descended in a murderous chopping arc, and Obi-Wan met each with the flimsiest of parries. The blades squeaked and rippled in protest, but never met with a satisfying crash. Vader's attacks landed only weakly against Obi-Wan's deceptively slow-moving blade. The old man nearly met Vader head-on, once, but let his wrist go slack at the last second. He slipped out of the blade's path as it carved through his soft defenses—not with great agility, but with the slowest possible movement. It was a dance of precision, of half-inches. But Vader, seeing his enemy nearly struck, committed to the blow with his full strength, and his heavy armour betrayed him, pulling him slightly off-balance.

In that moment, if he called on the power of the Dark Side, Obi-Wan could have tried to end the fight with a powerful riposte. Even now the thirst for revenge railed in his blood. But instead of chancing the quick attack, he turned a whole useless circle with the blade. It was a spin he had made a thousand times before—but it was graceless, slow, and left a massive opening. Vader thrust in mid-spin; as if in slow motion, Obi-Wan's blade barely got in front of it. Vader pressed the attack; again the old man was a half-inch out of place as the red saber cut through a maintenance panel. Obi-Wan's counter, a direct mockery of Vader's wild, clumsy swing, was more of a taunt than a serious attack.

"Your powers are weak, old man," Vader taunted. But beneath the cool outward confidence, a growing frustration began to simmer. Beneath the black helm, beneath the armour plating, Vader's breathing and heartbeat fluctuated wildly, trying to settle into an organic rhythm. He was made for Jedi-killing, for deadly fights at full speed and strength. And yet the old man moved slower than expected, in fits and starts, and the artificial intelligence of the armour struggled to find the rhythm of the fight. He lumbered where he should have charged, second-guessed the movement of his immense body weight, and tried to focus his anger at the clumsiness of his attacks into greater speed. Kenobi was moving as if waist-deep in water, raising last-minute blocks and counters with his feeble strength of arms. Every strike against this slow, ungainly old man felt as if it would be the killing blow—yet every blow was blocked in the instant before it landed. Vader's frustration boiled in him. Even this victory would bring him no satisfaction. This was no duel. This was a mockery of his power. But try as he might, Vader could not break the fight of its plodding, graceless rhythm.

In a sudden burst of rage, Vader spun the blade forward; a gentle tap from Kenobi's weapon broke its dizzying spin before it could begin. He thrust low, bringing both weapons down, and prepared to leap over the weapons, but Obi-Wan had maneuvered them into a cramped, low-ceilinged hallway whose supports and doorways hung just above Vader's head. There was nowhere to move, no way to evade Obi-Wan's slow but surgical precision, except to match him stance for stance, keep the blade in front of his vulnerable life-support controls, and wait out the old man's stamina. Vader pressed attack after attack, but each time Kenobi just caught the edge of it with a limp, halfhearted parry. Like an animal caged by technique, Vader focused all his concentration on this mockery of a true duel and waited for the inevitable mistake.

Fumbling over their swords—one with deliberate design, the other with furious impotence—the two masters had come back down the low-ceilinged hall toward the hangar, and fought now in full view of the stormtroopers awaiting reinforcements at the Falcon's side. Obi-Wan nudged his attacks forward in half-swings and weak thrusts, making no ground but forcing Vader's sword back to centre position. All around him, he felt the stormtroopers rushing toward the spectacle, felt the glowing children of Padmé arrive at the hangar, felt the distant troop movements as the underbelly of the station launched its own defenses to deal with him. The full squad of stormtroopers on their way—fifty or a hundred, perhaps—were heavily armed enough to destroy the ship at anchor, if need be.

Vader sensed none of these things. The whole of his mind was bent to the stupidity of this duel, the stupidity of his old master, the appalling farce of beating an old man to death with a lightsaber in the ugliest manner possible. If this was what had become of Obi-Wan, he would never again face a worthy adversary.

The troopers burst from the turbolifts and scrambled into the hangar corridor. Obi-Wan's mystical senses were confirmed by the sound of rushing footsteps. The others had broken away from the ship to watch, for they had never seen Darth Vader ignite his legendary laser weapon. To the untrained eye, their duel was sluggish, featureless—like nothing they had heard of his true power. Was he in some sort of trouble? What was the protocol for interfering with the Emperor's Supreme Commander in a fight against a Jedi Knight? There was none, as far as they knew.

Obi-Wan felt more than saw the stormtroopers surround him. They blocked off the front exit to the hangar. The full squadron rushed into the corridor behind him. Between the barriers of their skeletal armour, Darth Vader was fully preoccupied—so preoccupied that he could not feel with the Force, nor even perceive with his human senses, when his own son rushed past him, past the stormtroopers, toward the unguarded ship.

And behind him—behind them all…

Leia.

That was the name Padmé had given her. It was a name without precedent in her family, a name whose meaning the heralds of Alderaan had never fully understood. There was much, now, that would never be known.

Leia. He had held her in his arms, once. He did not think he would live to see her. But there she was, behind Luke, behind the smugglers, a grown woman. The future of the galaxy.

She was alive, and free, and he had seen her with his own eyes. He was happy.

Obi-Wan surrendered himself to the Force with a smile on his face. There was no more conflict after that—only a new hope that he had never dared to covet for himself. If Luke was destined, as Yoda had once said, to grow strong with the Force, to atone for his father's failures…perhaps Leia would one day live to heal the failures of her father, too.

Another galaxy. Another time.

There never was a record of where Jedi went, of what happened to them, when they joined the Living Force. Even to the old consulars it was something of a mystery. But when Obi-Wan gave himself over to the death he had cheated for too many years, he was suddenly in a place no lightsaber could reach him. It was not a place of unimaginable power; that was the narrow understanding of living men. It was a place where power no longer had meaning.

Vader's opportunity came as the old man surrendered himself…to something. He did not hesitate. Hungry for a single brutal impact, exhausted and thwarted by the most unsatisfying duel of his life, Vader lunged with all his strength and clove into Obi-Wan's robe with hateful satisfaction. But the saber caught only cloth; there was no one there, as if there never had been—as if Vader had been nothing more than a fool or a madman tilting at the ghosts of his haunted past.

It was no victory. That lifeless duel, capped by Obi-Wan's disappearance, stole all hope of triumph and was a slap in the face of what little dignity Vader had left. He stepped onto the empty robe as if searching for the trick, as if the old man had somehow put a smuggling compartment in the Death Star itself. He was there, kicking at the ground helplessly, when the whole squad of stormtroopers reached him, desperate for orders. He looked up to the hangar, feeling the heartbroken twinge of an oddly familiar presence aboard the impounded ship, just as the heavy blast doors slammed shut.