Hello there! Yes, I know this has been awhile. Truthfully, the ending has long been written and I have only just recently remembered to finish it.
Blond hair fell messily over the brows, shielding eyes that were old beyond their years. The hair was dingy with the dust of Tatooine and lank from the sweat on its owner's forehead.
The human had spent the day under the heat of the twin suns, and all he wanted was to rest.
There was no time to dwell on the brutality of existence on Tatooine. The world spun on, heedless and uncaring. All that mattered was that the work was done.
That night, when, at last, his exhausted body fell into a slumber, his mind was tormented by visions of a rotted humanoid corpse spread on a mortician's table. Wait. No. Not a corpse. A man. Dismembered and misshapen, but a man, all the same.
In the strangeness of the dreamscape, he could not even remember his own name, much less the identity of the horrifying figure. He panicked for a moment, reaching for an identity that seemed beyond his grasp. Memories spun around him like a hurricane, with his vision of the wraith remaining at the center. But he could never focus long enough to touch the shape or the memories. All that he knew were vague impressions of the feelings those memories created. Feelings of love, of pain, of loss. And grief. Grief so deep he might as well have been born with it.
Even as the feelings assaulted him, the undead man remained the focus of his attention. The scene drew him in with perverse fascination as metallic beings flitted around, picking at his spoiled body like vultures. Though the spectator grew sick at the horrifying sight, he felt profound sympathy and sorrow for the state of the man in his vision. The man struck him like the broken beasts of burden abandoned and gasping out their last in the Dune Sea.
Without quite realizing what came over him, he found his hand reaching out to touch the mottled shoulder of the misty vision. Although the vaporous image seemed no more solid than a cloud, the flesh that met his fingers felt real and soft beneath his touch. Dark waves of pain, pain, pain flowed through his fingertips, and to his horror, he found that no matter how he pulled away, his hand adhered to the man as though it were covered in the sap of the desert cactus.
Suddenly, the figure jerked, sending a wash of something bitter and oily flowing harmlessly over his incorporeal body. As the strange feeling assaulted him, the transmission of pain that seemed to scream inside his mind grew louder. The poor unfortunate creature was in agony, and that agony was spilling over into his own body, filling it with such pain that he could barely think.
He tried to speak words of comfort to it if only to quiet the pain filling his own mind, but when he opened his mouth, his words fell mute and not a sound issued from his lips.
In vain, he pressed the creature's shoulder and held fast. It seemed as though hours passed, and at long last, he felt the roiling sea of its emotions calm into a still and murky blackness. In his dream, he sagged against the table and, to his relief, finally found himself able to withdraw his hand.
It was only then that his eyes shot open, and he realized it was morning on Tatooine.
Though he felt his heart racing, when he tried to remember the source of his nightmares, his mind suddenly went blank.
~0~
The human male normally slept a dreamless sleep. Night after night. The oblivion of exhaustion consumed him. If he did dream, it was often marked by a profound sense of loss that he couldn't quite remember once he'd awakened.
But tonight was not such a night.
When dreams roused him from the depths of his slumber, he found himself once more inhabiting a kind of super-consciousness, and though he tried in vain to reach for something, anything, his own name, he found that it simply was beyond his grasp.
Here, in this dreamscape, he was nobody, merely a vessel of consciousness floating in a hazy sea.
Against his own protesting thoughts, once more, the misty form of the living dead man began to take shape to fill his vision.
The pale figure was still attached to wires and tubes. Only this time, he seemed to be floating in an oversized jar, like those beakers of formaldehyde used by scientists to display their grotesque trophies.
A hideous vacuuming sound assaulted his disembodied senses as he became aware of the exaggerated wrongness filling up the pitiful creature. Even from a distance, the dreamwalker felt sickening heat smoldering inside the man's body.
He could not say what possessed him, but, without thinking, he found himself reaching out to touch the glass…Only to find his hand pressed, as if by sheer magnetic pull, to the stump of the man's shoulder.
The dreamer's eyes widened.
To his shock, his palm, which appeared as real and solid as anything, had passed through the glass and the fluid it contained as though it were merely a shroud of muslin.
After a moment, the dismembered creature suddenly seemed to register his touch. Yellow eyes flew open, and he braced himself as a sudden rush of intangible darkness burst and broke against his body like waves on a cliffside.
The milky yellow irises were looking right at him, and yet they did not seem to focus. Instead, they roamed the room with frenetic efficiency but never seemed to find their mark. Despite being apparently unable to see him, the creature seemed to be looking for something. He could feel it, looking for something.
Hideous though it was, he found he did not fear the creature, nor did he pity it. It was like the old and ancient spires of a civilization that had crumbled under its own arrogance. The vestiges of its old glory hollowed and burnt away.
As before, when he pulled experimentally in an attempt to withdraw his fingertips, he found himself held fast by powers unseen. Strangely enough, he did not find this discovery nearly so distressing as he had the first time he'd found himself unwillingly attached to the dismembered creature.
He blinked, and, in an instant, the apparition disappeared. When his eyes opened, they were flooded with true sight, once more burned by the light of the sand-riddled desert.
Once again, memory fled. And he was left to wonder at the source of the mysterious sadness that seemed to fill and dog his waking day.
~0~
As a familiar dream came into focus, the human's sunburnt face pinched into an expression of sorrow. Though he knew he would not remember them when he walked among the living, his mind readily supplied memories of his past dreams, the impressions rushing back to him as if they had never left.
The wretched man that stalked his nightmares remained suspended like a specimen in a test tube, the stench of wrongness stronger than ever. His eyes were closed; the machines and their horrible sucking sounds roared loudly in the dreamer's ears.
Whereas before, the pale man had been motionless; now, he writhed in seeming delirious agony, his eyes squeezed shut as he clawed futilely at his chest. Waves of sickening fever, rage, and pain flowed from him. Unlike the directed, intentional waves of power he had sent crashing toward the dream walker, these waters seemed to pour ceaselessly into the universe, threatening to drown the galaxy.
As the dreamer approached, a heaviness seemed to fill his chest, his lungs burning as phantom fluid threatened to drown them. With a start, he suddenly understood the purpose of the horrible roaring machines and found himself drawn forward, his heart thrumming in sympathy.
By now, he knew well that to touch the man was to be effectively tethered to him. But he could not help himself. He was past the point of initial fear and now found himself filled with compassion for the creature who thrashed blindly like a worm burning under the sun.
He did not know the name or the face of the horrid revenant. For that matter, in this dreamworld, he could not even recall his own name. All he knew was that the man was in pain and the man was alone. That was all it took to draw the desert-dweller closer.
Though he could not quite recall why, something buried deep in the back of his mind conjured a vague impression that he could somehow push the infection from the man's lungs.
Untethered by the inhibitions of the waking world, he closed the distance on instinct, slowly circling around the tank of fluid in which the man remained suspended. By now familiar with the apparent laws of this dreamscape, the dreamer was unbothered as his hands passed through the solid glass to find a resting place on the base of the man's back.
At his touch, fear began emanating from the ghoulish body, overpowering all the other sensations rippling around him. The dreamwalker shook his head as if clearing his sight, the image of a cloaked figure flashed through his mind.
Ignoring the hideous visage projected into his mind, he pressed his fingers deeper into the mottled flesh and pushed, willing the fetid fluid to bend to his will.
His hands slid up the tattered, sloughing skin, sinking deep into the muscles and pressing the tissues within. This time, he did not try to draw them away and found that his fingers moved with ease so long as they stayed true to tending the excoriated body.
He somehow felt the wrongness that had settled deep into the lungs, and could sense it rising ever so slightly under his pressure. Bit by bit, he pushed as the strength of his hands moved it up and out of the lungs, toward the noisy machine laboring to draw the infection from the man's body.
The man thrashed and writhed, but he carried on heedlessly as if in a trance. The waves of fear and pain gradually lessened, as did the echo of oppressive heaviness that afflicted his own lungs. There, he stayed and worked for what seemed to be an eternity.
When the dreamer eventually woke, he had no memory of the vision, only a strange weariness in his hands and a warmth in his heart like he'd done something right that his mind could not quite remember.
~0~
The sunburnt skin was dripping with sweat as the human tossed and moaned in his sleep. Behind his lids, he saw a hideous death's head, the black edges of its contours dented and dusty. The scene before him was chaos; broken bits of steel and concrete mingled with dust.
And pain. It shot through his neck, down his spine…wait, no, not his spine. It was an echo of pain, tangible yet somehow removed.
With sightless sight, he somehow saw the corpse-like face of the pale man that haunted his nightmares, wincing beneath the black death's head. Agony rolled off of him, making the dreamer's breath hitch in his throat.
A lone tear of pain slid down one of the pale cheeks encased within the black metal. In sympathy, the dreamer reached out to cup the cheek, his thumb brushing the pitiful drop from the white cheekbones.
It seemed the pale creature had come to accept his touches. Unlike their previous encounters, he was not met with resistance, and, much to his surprise, he even felt a trickle of responding relief from the injured being before him.
He stayed there for a moment, his own breaths easing as the agony receded ever-so-slightly.
The stricken man always radiated pain, but now, especially, that pain was hot and sharp in his neck, which was wrenched at a lopsided angle by the horrid black helm that the dreamer saw with double sight overlaid on the grimacing face. With practiced gentleness, his hands braced the fragile neck, silent murmurs of comfort slipping from his lips as the specter moaned and whimpered.
He stayed there as if floating outside of time itself, merely existencing, bracing, comforting the strange monster...until he faded back into the waking world, and forgot the deeds his mind had done in the dark of the night.
~0~
The dream walker did not know why the ghostly visage visited his dreams, nor why he could not seem to recall any memories except those made in the dreamworld itself, but it seemed a higher power had a purpose for him being there. Over the years, the corpse became something of a companion, a being he saw only in the depths of his night-times. It had come to welcome him.
In the waters of his unconscious dream state, the sunburned man often thought the pallid phantasm seemed to call for him. Crying out in the dead of night in words without sound, touches without feeling, begging, entreating for humanity.
And somehow….
Somehow…
He always found it in his heart to provide it. No matter how weary. Nor dead in slumber. Always and forever, he dredged kindness from his broken heart. Such compassion was both penance and sacrament for wrongs and rites his sleeping mind scarce remembered.
And when he was at long last wrenched and freed of this mortal coil, he thought his duty at an end. Until the spirit that had haunted his dreams reached out at last to join him. It was only then, with one final kindly touch, that Obi-Wan Kenobi carried Anakin Skywalker into the light. Waking together from their shared nightmare.
Yes, I know this isn't a surprising ending, as I have thought a lot about the Obi-Wan/Anakin dynamic lately. I thought about making it into Owen Lars for a moment but then thought better of it since the fandom doesn't really care about that character. That said, you could plausibly read it that way until the ending...? Anyway, please throw up a review if you like. Thanks!