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Everyone he loves is dead. Everyone he loves is dead. Everyone he loves is dead, and he is still alive, and it is all his fault.
(Kit Fisto. Aaylas'ecura. Mace. Depa Billaba. Plo Koon. Shaak Ti. Ahsoka. Anakin. Anakin. Anakin is—)
Anakin is dead.
Anakin is dead.
Anakin is dead, and Obi-Wan Kenobi killed him.
(You were my brother it was said you would destroy the Sith not join them I hate you I loved you I hate you I HATE YOU Anakin I loved you you underestimate my power said you would destroy the Sith not join them I HATE YOU I HATE YOU—)
He is on the floor. He does not remember sitting down. (You were my brother—) Obi-Wan stares across the room, seeing nothing. One of the children is crying. Screaming. Screaming. (I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YOU—) He cannot move. He is frozen. He is burning. Anakin is dead. Padmé is nearly dead. One of their children is screaming, like father, like mother, and Anakin is dead and everyone is dead and it is all his fault.
It is too hot. Maybe he is burning, like Anakin—oh Force, he left Anakin to be burnt alive—(I HATE YOU). He looks down at his arms. His sleeves are torn. There are burn-spots from the lava. Sand clings to the fabric. Black sand. Mustafar sand. (He left Anakin to die in the sand. Anakin hates sand.) His hands. Scarred. Whole. Unburned. There is no fire. One of the children is crying. He cannot move.
His hands.
His hands.
His hands. Scarred. Whole. Unburned. Dripping with the metaphorical blood of the ten thousand dead. Irreversibly stained for his failure. His hands. His hands. His hands that had held Anakin's, once so small and sun-brown and with too-many-calluses-too-many-cuts for a ten-year-old. His hands that had killed him. His hands that had held the beating heart of the Jedi and let his best-friend-brother spear it through. His hands that lay idle when they could've been soothing, comforting, drawing the pain away. His hands that wielded the saber that ensured Anakin would spend his last moments in agony. His hands. His hands. His hands that have done things that have never, ever been quite good enough.
His hands.
(His hands that should have broken the bomb collar on Bandomeer when they had the chance. How much would be different, he wonders, if he had simply died, then and there? How much more peace and less suffering would the galaxy know, if only Obi-Wan Kenobi and his damnable, useless hands that only ever ruined things, had not been there to be the flag-bearer of pain and hurt and chaos? So much less, he thinks. So much less. Anakin would've had a—a better upbringing under Qui-Gon than he did under Obi-Wan, because Obi-Wan was never enough for Qui-Gon, never had been, and never enough for Anakin either, barely a dying candle next to his hypernova of power, beautiful and blinding and brilliant. Anakin would've been a match for Qui-Gon. Obi-Wan never fitted with either of them.
Really, Obi-Wan never fitted with anyone.)
Both of the children are crying now, wailing, wailing, wailing, and Obi-Wan never spent enough time with babies to know how to comfort him. Or perhaps he did. He does not remember. He should—get up. He needs to get up. What kind of person is he, if he cannot even calm a child when it is crying, hungry, missing its mother, cold, alone?
(Perhaps he is jealous, that the infants should be allowed to cry out against the horrors of the universe, to shriek in protest, and he cannot. He is High General Obi-Wan Kenobi of the Seventh Systems Army, Sith-killer and Master of the Jedi Council besides (although this begs the age-old question of trees and forests and the philosophical implications of the physics of sound: if there are no more Jedi, how can he sit on their Council?) and he cannot cry. Qui-Gon wouldn't have wanted him to cry. Qui-Gon said—Qui-Gon said—
He does not remember what Qui-Gon said now. But perhaps if it had been him on the end of Maul's blade, not his master, if Obi-Wan had died and Qui-Gon had lived and trained The Chosen One as perhaps he was meant to, if it all went so wrong when he had died, perhaps none of this would have happened. Perhaps—
Obi-Wan wonders if, retroactively, his death would change anything at all.)
The children are crying, and crying, and crying, and he is doing nothing, he can do nothing because he is stuck here, frozen, and he can do nothing for he is nothing and he is less than nothing and the children will not stop crying and he wants—he wants to cry too, for all that he has lost, except how is that fair, why would he he get to sit and weep when so many are dead and gone, and the Force is dead and gone or he would be able to feel it, and he cannot, and they are crying, they are crying, and if he cannot help them, if he cannot do this one small thing, then—what good is he? What good is he at all?
Somebody says his name. Obi-Wan is still, still like a statue, still like a corpse. That is all he deserves to be. Someone says his name, louder. Obi-Wan. Obi-Wan. (When he was fifteen, after four years of looking, he found an incomplete Stewjoni-to-Basic dictionary, and learnt the exact meaning of his name. Obi—nothing, no one. Wan—a sentient regarded as an individual. Ken—of a house, prefix related to Basic 'clan'. A similar root is suggested. He is No One of No Clan, and even that feels like too much a name to call his own. He is not—merely the absence of something, he is nothing. He is removed from anything good, anything decent, that it is almost as though—as though—
—He does not know, but he knows: he is nothing.)
"Obi-Wan!"
Footsteps. A sucked-in breath, sharp. Obi-Wan shudders, and the breath is let out slowly with something like relief. Someone kneels beside him. Is kneeling beside him. Speaking. He cannot hear. Understand. Everything is cold, and grey, or perhaps he is, perhaps Anakin's death (Anakin is dead Anakin is dead I HATE YOU you killed Anakin Anakin is dead Anakin is I HATE YOU I HATE YOU) sucked all the light and the colour from the world. Even the Force has left him, and that hurts almost as much as the gaping absence inside him, hurts almost as much as each death exploded into the Force, running into a miasma of putrid agony before it disappeared entirely after—after—after Mustafar, hurts almost as much as turning around and leaving Anakin to die had.
Someone is speaking to him. The children are crying. How many are left? he wonders. How many did Anakin kill? How many younglings escaped one of the most brilliant solo tacticians in history? He thinks of the holovideo, of the fallen children lying like harvested grain, and knows. None. Nothing. (He is Nothing.)
Someone is speaking to him, and then a hand—warm, in a galaxy filled with a pain colder than space—lays gently on his shoulder, thumb skirting gently up his throat. Obi-Wan blinks. Focuses.
Cody.
"That's it," Cody says softly, dark brown eyes staring straight into his. He looks—tired. Exhausted. Dark bags lurk under his eyes. "That's it, Obi-Wan. Come back. You're alright. You're safe."
"The younglings—" Obi-Wan chokes out. An expression of beautiful, terrible sadness crosses Cody's face, then vanishes, smoothed over again. Obi-Wan wants to reach and touch him, to know that he is there, he is real, he is alive when so many are dead, but he cannot. He cannot. He will not. He will not—infect Cody with his—his—
"They are here," Cody promises, and the corners of his eyes crease softly, just for a moment. "You hear them? I certainly do." Obi-Wan shakes his head. The infants—Anakin's and Padmé's—they are here, they are alive, squalling, crying, crying, but it is not of them he speaks, but of the fallen children on the holo, fallen like harvested grain in a circle around Anakin, Anakin, Anakin is—
"Not them. Not them." He is shaking his head. He may be shaking his head too fast. He does not know. He does not know. "The younglings, in the—the—in the Temple. Anakin. He—"
It hurts, to watch the realisation dawn, then the brief sputter of outrage, drowned in an instant by grief, playing out on Cody's face like it's a battlefield. It hurts, to know it was Obi-Wan that put it there.
"No," Cody says, vehement. "He couldn't have. He couldn't have. Surely he wouldn't—"
"Master Yoda showed me," Obi-Wan whispers. "Not even the younglings, Cody. He did not even spare the younglings. He nearly killed Padmé, and he's—he loved her the entire time he knew her, I think. I should've known, I should've seen—and he. He killed. He killed them all, Cody. He cut them right down where they stood, every single one of them. He—he murdered them, and I—" he swallows, looks away. He thinks he may be crying. "I should've known, and I didn't, if I'd just been better—"
"Obi-Wan," says Cody, so full of authority and yet still so impossibly gentle. "Obi-Wan, no. Skywalker—he's an adult, he made his choice. He chose to do all that, he chose to side with the Chancellor and kill children. He could've stopped at any point, and he didn't. You can't blame yourself for this."
"No," says Obi-Wan, and he's shaking his head again, because he can, because there are so many things he could've done. "I let the Chancellor—I let him talk to Anakin alone, I—Force, I let him have access to a child, I should've—I should've—"
"Obi-Wan," says Cody, and although his voice is still so kind, there is a hardness to it now, and flinty gleam in his eye. "The Chancellor is a fucking Sith. I don't know how your Force osik works, but I think that probably had something to do with it. If no one figured out he was a Sith in however many years he was active—"
"Fifty," says Obi-Wan distantly, automatically.
"—Fifty years, then no one could've expected you to."
It is a—valid point, Obi-Wan will admit, but there are still so many ways he failed, so many ways he fucked up, not least of which is being alive. Perhaps Cody sees some of this on his face, or perhaps he just knows Obi-Wan too well by now, and so, wordlessly, he gathers Obi-Wan into a careful embrace, one arm around his waist, which hurts for some inexplicable reason, and one hand cupping the back of his neck so impossibly tenderly.
And Obi-Wan Kenobi, No One of No Clan, he who is nothing and Nothing and less than nothing, gives in and cries.