Chapter Text
Who is this coming out of the desert like a cloud of smoke?
Who is this coming out of the desert, leaning on her beloved?
Song of Songs 3:6-8:5
Luke is 15 years old and Ben Kenobi has lost all his hair color.
Luke doesn't see him often. Here and there. Two or three times a year. Like a strange apparition, a reflection among the dunes or a seasonal phenomenon; the man who lives in the canyon and the one everyone in town says is crazy, who talks to the wind, and who sometimes runs out into the wasteland, as if chasing something, as if pursued by someone.
But to Obi-Wan, Luke is something perpetual, perennial: the blue sky above his head, the burn of sand on his skin. Time passes him by because Luke went from a blush-cheeked baby to a teenager with straw-colored hair and a smile that is more familiar than the pain in his heart.
He's standing next to him, waiting for the Jawas to arrive with the week's merchandise. He waved hello and stood there, looking out at the horizon, wiggling his feet in the sand, telling his droid that he shouldn't tell Uncle Owen he wanted to buy a pilot's hat. Luke is like that. If he can't find someone to chat with, he makes up conversations all by himself. If he's left alone on the farm, he makes up games so he doesn't get bored. It is as if inside him a canyon full of water opens up, of impossible and constant fantasy, from which he can innocently collect a life that is not his own. He is never satisfied with what he has in front of him, but plays with the possibilities, he thinks about how things would be if everyone stopped being so boring and so serious all the time and dared to think differently.
Obi-Wan folds his arms as he watches, trying to appear calm.
He knows everything about Luke. His birthday, what day he first entered school, the names of all his friends. He knows he likes Beru's sesame seed cookies and he knows he doesn't like having to clean up after the droids after a trip to the city. He knows what color his hair is and he knows that under his collarbone he has a small, almost imperceptible mole. Or at least Obi-Wan thinks he still has it. He first saw it when Padmé held him in her arms and told him that the name of that child, her firstborn, would be Luke. He knew his mother, but Luke didn't. He knew his sister, her small voice and the uncompromising look on her face when things didn't go her way, and Luke did not. Obi-Wan knows that she and Luke are Force sensitive and he doesn't even know what’s a jedi.
Luke knows nothing about him. Except for his face and the fake name everyone knows him by. The difference between what he knows about Luke and what Luke knows about him never ceases to frighten him. Because it's unfair and because it doesn't make sense and because no one should know that much about one person without the other being aware. But that's the way it is and for all those years, that terrifying imbalance has kept Luke alive. That's what matters and not the morality of the act. There is no morality in the desert, after all. Its shifting ground is not made for the foundation of truth.
"Hey, Ben," he asks him after a while, when more neighbors have gathered around them and the sound of whispering fills his head like a hole filling with sand. "Uncle Owen told me you know Coruscant, is that true?"
Obi-Wan doesn’t look him in the face. He finds it impossible to do so.
"Your uncle is very much in the habit of saying things that are not always true."
Luke walks up to him and looks into his face. He can feel his blue eyes boring into his cheek, like two suns burning the surface of a planet. Obi-Wan looks at the fake water on the horizon.
"I remember you disappeared for a while, do you remember? Years ago. We didn't see you for months and Uncle said you went to Coruscant. Biggs told me the biggest Imperial Academy is on Coruscant, is that true, what's it like?"
Obi-Wan turns from the false water on the horizon to the clear water in Luke's eyes. He is golden and blue and radiant, like the sky above the dunes. He looks just like his father, and Obi-Wan thinks that he should have let himself be killed on Mustafar, but like a fool without a chance, he just lived and lived, despite his wishes. When he looks at Luke, he thinks that his whole life has been just that: an endless collection of unfulfilled wishes.
He shakes his head. One more lie, what's the difference? There are so many that he's already lost count. The common thread has gotten out of hand. One lie on top of another, building an obsidian castle in a lake of fire.
"I went to Mos Anta. To the north. For health."
It's not true, but Luke, who thinks he's a cave-dwelling, bug-eating hermit, must never know the truth. He doesn't need to know it to survive another day.
Moreover, Obi-Wan doesn’t know who he is to distinguish between truth and lies. Even his name has not stood the test of time. Everything he believed to be true has disappeared, like the footsteps you leave behind after walking in the sand. Obi-Wan is no longer Obi-Wan. He is now Ben.
He became Ben since he arrived on Tatooine and someone, on the way from the port to Anchorhead asked him his name and he, still holding Luke to his chest, had to make up a new identity in a second. The name "Ben" popped up as if it were his own and he had no choice but to say no, he didn't come from Coruscant, he came from Chandrila, and oh, he was thankful for the Emperor's life, of course, who would think the Jedi were the bad guys in the story? Don't worry, don't worry, please rent me your best eopie, and be so kind and show me the way to Anchorhead.
It was like a game in which he won by increasingly losing his sense of self.
He was Obi-Wan in the cave, lying on the cold floor, avoiding falling asleep to avoid dreaming again of Anakin and his big-toothed smile and his eyes like kyber crystals, and in the city, under the hood of his cloak, he was Ben. The strange man from Chandrila, or Bothawui, or Felucia, no one could quite decide where he was from, who came to buy a pound of dried meat and two liters of cheap alcohol and who spoke to no one unless he was very drunk and someone asked him what he thought about the good people of Tatooine.
He was one and the other, intermittently. A light that flickered on and off. Like the trembling glow of the stars in the sky. And Obi-Wan knew that he couldn’t keep the balance, that one moment the two things would blur and the indistinct sands of their two lives would pour into the same empty vessel.
"Oh, come on, Ben. You must know something about the academy," Luke insists, making the face into a pout he recognizes so well he feels it like an ache in his body. His father's face begging for another ride on the hovercraft. The wind brings his voice: Come on, Master, one short ride and we'll be back.
"Mmm. I know a thing or two, it's true."
"Really? Tell me all about it, Ben."
"I know the emperor is very picky about who can be his pilots, oh yes," he tells him, looking at him seriously. "That's why Imperials walk around like they've got a stick up their ass, because that's the most important subject at the Academy. It's true, Luke, I'm not lying to you: there's Piloting, Intergalactic Politics, and Stick Up Your Ass. That's the curriculum, ask anyone."
Luke tries to laugh, but doesn't. Now he's irritated with Ben.
"Ha, ha, that's funny, Ben..." and he turns away, grimacing in disappointment, with him and with himself, as if wondering why on earth he asked such a thing to the town's madman.
And Ben smiles, for the first time all day.
Yes, he's good at that.
At disappointing people.
It hadn't been so bad to begin with.
He assumes that because he sees it in retrospect. He doesn't do it to delude himself and pretend it was never bad to live on Tatooine. Because he knows all too well: how horrible it was, how tiring it seemed, every second in that damned cave, every day searching for a halfway decent job, every night begging Owen and Beru to let him see the boy. But he also knows that pain is a thing that is easily forgotten after it passes.
It’s a biological advantage of human beings. That of suffering terrible pain and forgetting the sensation with the passage of time. It is what allows mothers to become mothers again after the trauma of conception. If they remembered exactly the martyrdom of feeling half of their body torn apart, no one would ever have a child again.
So he feels like a mother. He knows the pain was horrible. He knows he spent months and months driven mad by the memories, drowning in alcohol, living on instant food, looking for jobs among Mos Espa's most miserable foremen and accepting any pay.
But the thing is, there is a major divide between the Obi-Wan (or Ben, yes, that's more correct to say, Ben) of twenty years ago, than the Ben Kenobi of ten years ago.
His life in the desert is divided into two: the before, when he still knew who he was, and the after, when he was no longer sure he knew himself. After the shattered ship, after the trip to Mustafar, after everything that happened there. The days and nights he spent subjected to the worst pain imaginable.
Ben raises his right hand to see the ravages of that event and even though he sees the scars so clearly in the light of Tatooine's two suns, he can't remember exactly what he felt.
Half of his body is burned. He cannot close his left hand completely. His knees give out if you stand too long. He can't eat many things without his stomach rejecting them. Doesn't know if it's age or if it's the other thing. Doesn't know if it's that he's already an old man beaten by the sun or if he's a man who was scrapped and remade by the hands of someone who had known him better than he knew himself. It could have been a dream. It could have been a bad meditation session, a fantasy taken to the extreme.
Staring into the canyon, watching the sand flow by as if it were water, Ben thinks he has no basis for interpreting what is truth and what is illusion.
But here's the thing: it hadn't been that bad to begin with.
"Look," Owen had told him, nudging him lightly with his elbow, when Ben saw him walking near the market and approached him. In his hand he carried an empty sack and a pair of pilot's glasses. He knew he had gone to the market to exchange the glasses for a few grams of seed. He knew the glasses were Luke's. He knew Owen had forbidden him to play with anything to do with ships and pilots and the Imperial Academy. "Luke is doing well. He eats well every day, gets good grades in school. He doesn't get in trouble with anyone. He helps me on the farm and helps Beru with things around the house. He's just an ordinary boy. Leave him alone. Leave us alone. You being around only puts him at risk."
"You know he's Force sensitive. And he senses it, even if he doesn't know it. He needs guidance about it... You've heard what's happened to kids like him all over the galaxy," Ben replied, feeling like a fool to resort to something as low as that: let me see the kid or the Imperial evil guys are going to take him away. Owen glared at him furiously, not falling for provocations. The two of them had been doing the same thing for over seven years now. Ben asking and asking and him refusing every time. No, no, no.
"Nobody cares about Tatooine. No one cared when the blessed Jedi still existed and no one cares now that we have a glorious emperor. So leave it as it is, Ben. Leave us alone. I mean it," Owen replied, quietly, pointing a finger at him.
"I will... but don't sell the boy's glasses. He loves them."
Owen looked down at his hand and squeezed his glasses and empty bag tightly.
"That's why I'm selling them. You wouldn't understand, Ben. You're not a father. You don't know what it takes to do the right thing for your child, even if it hurts them both."
And with that he turned and was lost in the crowd and Obi-Wan stood with the bridle of his eopie in his hand thinking to himself that he was not a father in any way worthwhile. He had no blood family, he had never married anyone, he had never seen his wife bear the child that between the two of them they had fathered.
No, in any case, the occasions when it had been his turn to be a father had been simulations.
He had pretended to be a father, he had pretended to commit to someone. When he'd carried Luke and Leia's little bodies he'd done it because Anakin had left a gaping hole that no one could fill and that he'd had to usurp for a second. And he had felt so helpless, as Padmé had closed her eyes for the last time and he had stood, Leia in his arms, not knowing what to do, who to look to, what to ask the Force for.
The shock of having learned that, of all people, Padmé Amidala was pregnant with Anakin's children still lingered in his body. And after what Anakin had done to him, Padmé had been the surrogate mother of the children that rightfully belonged to Obi-Wan.
Would they have looked like that? His children? The children of his blood, begotten in his body?
No, in those years the pain had only been emotional.
He thought of the Jedi and had to stop what he was doing, overcome by a feeling so real it stopped him from breathing. He lay awake at night in his stone bed, replaying the days of his past life as if searching for a window and an escape—he did not sleep, he did not eat.
In any case, what he did was drink.
"Heyyyy, Ben Kenobi!" a Rhodian shouted from the bar, raising his glass full of blue liquid. "It's been a long time since we've seen you around."
A few more frequent drunks greeted him. Some were already more asleep than awake and only grunted when he sat down and asked the bartender to serve him his usual.
"Working hard or hardly working, eh?" the Rhodian asked him, hiccuping. Obi-Wan couldn't remember his name—Meedo? Gary?
"Enough for my drink of the week," he replied, downing in one gulp the cheap liquor they served in Mos Espa's bars and which fulfilled precisely what people were looking for in a bar as small as that one: quick intoxication for a couple of credits.
"Jabba's men are looking for people for a job," the man whispered to him, sloshing his drink around in his glass as if he didn't care. He had lost count of the times they had wanted to recruit him as a bounty hunter. Not because they had seen in him the nearly 40 years of jedi training, but because he was a more or less strong man with all his limbs attached to his body. That was more than many had to offer.
"I'm not interested, friend."
"Come on. You'd make more money than cleaning up junk with the homeless. You're in the bones, Ben. You could help us out there. There are a lot of debtors out there who owe poor Jabba a fortune."
Obi-Wan laughed at the phrase 'poor Jabba’. The bartender had already refilled his glass and he felt the familiar sensation of drunkenness in his body. He drank the liquor neat, without water or ice. He liked to feel the sting on his tongue and the tingling in his fingers. Ironically, drinking made him feel less himself. The more he lost himself in drink, the more he could endure the lies he lived with.
"Pay me for the other drink and I'll consider it," he said to the Rhodian, who just shook his head and with one finger asked the bartender for another drink.
"Well, it's either that or go cut whale meat in the salt flats. Yesterday I heard they found an old specimen among the dunes. The sand people found it first, actually. And they took their share. But the governor's men are going to start looking for people to collect it. Man, even if they paid me a thousand credits I wouldn't go."
Obi-Wan had never heard of sand whales. He had heard of wump rats, of Krayt dragons, but never of whales.
"When you say 'they found a whale' what do you mean?"
The Rhodian shrugged.
"You know. They're critters that hang around in the sand and when they're really old they come up to the surface and let themselves die. Or they let themselves be killed, depending on what they find first. I guess if you want to end your miserable life, it's easier to just jump into the dragon's mouth and let it annihilate you, right? What I'm getting at is that it's going to be cutting up carrion. A miserable job, if you ask me. And if you go to the square you'll find people hiring."
He kept drinking until he lost himself.
It was easy in those days. It was almost like falling.
He stumbled out of the cantina, late into the night, and picked up his eopie and laughed to himself as they began to walk toward Anchorhead at a slow pace and Obi-Wan whispered to the poor animal: Come on, Akkani, take me wherever you want me to go.
Akkani. That was his name. He had not given him the name. They gave him the animal already baptized and when Obi-Wan pronounced the name back it seemed to him that someone, somewhere in the vast universe, was making fun of him. And yes, of course, especially those early years, Akkani became Anakin with breathtaking ease and every time Obi-Wan spoke it aloud he felt the name turn to blood in his mouth, as if he had bitten his tongue.
"Come on, boy," he would say to the eopie, who did nothing but obey his owner's orders, and who walked with a man in tow, as he had been bred to do. He had no choice. He was completely subjected to the circumstances of his life. "Take me to where that damned whale is. Let's see it with our own eyes."
They walked for nearly two hours until Akkani refused to walk any further and sat down near the canyon wall where some grass was growing and began to chew casually. Obi-Wan, with no self-preservation or fear or anything left in him, walked toward the small flames that shone into the open desert.
He remembers that day because he thought that the Tusken were going to kill him and he, in a fit of total empathy with the body of the whale in front of them, thought that it would not be a bad idea if the ones who ended his life were the same ones who killed Shmi Skywalker, so many years ago.
Dying like Anakin's mother. Poetic justice.
The Tusken took him by the arms and made him kneel down while two men, or women, he could not distinguish, made noises and waved their hands in front of him.
"I have no weapons," he said aloud, trying not to slur his words. His mouth was so dry it looked like he had shoved a handful of sand in it. "I have no intention of attacking. I just... I just wanted to see the whale."
A man waved his hand and Obi-Wan knew he was asking him if he was Jabba's man.
"No, I don't work for Jabba."
Another hand movement.
"I also don't work for Tour Aryon. I don’t work for the government."
A grunt and two hands to the sky. Who the hell are you then?
"I'm just a man," Obi-Wan said, Ben, just a man, burst out laughing, felt tears welling up in his eyes, unable to hold them back, accumulated for who knew how long. Ever since he saw Owen give the pilot's glasses to the merchant. Maybe even before that, when he saw Beru taking Luke to his first day of school, and Luke crying and hugging his mother's leg, looking so scared and small, and he couldn't do anything to comfort him. From before, when Bail and Master Yoda were deciding what to do with the kids, and he couldn't stop looking at his burnt boots and feeling like he was being flooded with water and there was nothing that could save him from drowning. Years and years before, when he programmed a medical droid on a Republic destroyer to pull out from between his intestines the only thing he would have had left of Anakin if he hadn't been a coward, and a bad jedi, and a bad father. "I just want to see the whale. I'm nobody. I'm nobody."
They didn’t kill him, of course. You can't kill someone who is not.
Someone hit him in the back with a metal rod and the Tusken laughed at him and he laughed with them. Someone pulled out a drum and someone began to clap and a few more began to dance mercilessly around the campfire in their midst and Obi-Wan, who was not himself but a man, a wraith, a ghost, danced with them. The drum echoed through the desert, and the air smelled of charred flesh, and the Tusken laughed every time he stumbled in the sand and fell to his knees, and laughed again when he got up and continued to dance among them, making noise with his mouth, letting his tears dry in the dry wind and the heat of the fire.
The next morning, he woke up in a ball next to the ashes of the fire. Someone had peed beside him to extinguish the last embers. He shifted a little to lie on his back and look up at the indigo-blue sky of the early morning. He was alone.
He and the whale, in the middle of the dunes. A madman.
He remembers that at that moment he had felt so miserable, so small and insignificant that it seemed to him that the feeling would kill him at that very moment, as if struck by lightning.
For even there, in the trampled sand, amidst the ashes and the smell of rotting flesh, even there he loved Anakin. He loved him so much and the love he felt for him poured out of his chest like still water that had nowhere to go but back to himself, staining him with something that was dead, something that no longer had to grow, but grew and grew and grew. And he couldn't think of anything but Anakin. His brain repeated his name like a mantra, like a prayer: Anakin, Anakin, Anakin. Because it was love, despite everything. It was the love he had for Anakin that kept him there, taking care of Luke, who was not his son, but felt like his own. It was the love he had for Anakin that kept him drinking, that kept him alive, that kept him sleeping and waking every night, thinking of him, loving him in spite of everything.
But no. That was nothing compared to what would happen next. And in a way, he is grateful that 13 years ago, he could not even sense the shadow of his own future.
*
Then, one day, he sees a jedi hanging in Mos Espa square.
Everything unfolds very quickly after that. It seems to him that someone opened a door and the water began to rush in like a wave, dragging him down to the bottom of the sea.
He returns to the valley of sand where he buried his and Anakin's saber. He boards a cruise ship en route to Daiyu and there he finds Leia, in a dark room and surrounded by men who have asked for millions of credit for her pretty little head. And Leia is just like Anakin, much to his surprise.
She doesn't listen to him and says things that sound like they were said by an adult and not a 10-year-old girl and looks him in the eyes without fear. It’s like Anakin has been born again and now he has him by his side, taking careful little steps, looking around and learning, despite the horrible circumstances she finds herself in.
And then, as if it was always meant to happen, the Inquisitor chasing them tells him that Darth Vader is looking for him.
"Anakin Skywalker is alive," she tells him. The sound of his name slips through the shipping containers and sticks like arrows throughout his body. And though he runs and runs, he doesn't feel like he can run from the truth.
That's what happens then. The worst thing that can happen to a liar: the truth.
"Obi-Wan?" says Leia, behind him and Obi-Wan, because today he is Obi-Wan; he is Obi-Wan to Leia, who knows nothing about him but his name. "Are you alright?"
He is kneeling on the cold floor of the cargo ship and trying to meditate. He hasn't done it for years. He doesn't know how to do it anymore. He needs to close himself off from the Force again, before it's too late.
But he feels it, there, in that moment. Anakin. He's alive and he's awake and he's thinking about him.
It feels like what it would feel like to stick your hand in the snow: at first you don't think it's that cold, but a second later you feel the bite of the ice and when you pull your hand out, the damage is done. You're frozen to the bone.
At first, Obi-Wan feels his old connection open to him and is not afraid of it until the hand on the other side presses itself to his heart with a metal hand.
Anakin.
It is him. There is no doubt that it’s him.
Anakin is alive and looking for him.
He opens his eyes, Leia is looking at him with concern, and Obi-Wan knows there are no words to describe what he feels at that moment. Perhaps he can only use that one word he always had to describe what he felt for Anakin: terror.
*
As the soldiers get out of the van in Mapuso, Obi-Wan exhales a sigh.
Saying that Leia was his daughter had been a mistake. It mattered to no one, not to the soldiers, not to the driver, not to anyone. They could have said anything else or kept silent. But once Leia started the story, Obi-Wan went along with it.
A little farce. A little grace, if only for a minute, on that planet abandoned by the Force: Luma and Orden, two more victims of fate and of the Empire and of life itself, which has no compassion for orphan girls or for lonely men, visiting the planet of a dead and anonymous mother; trying to make sense of a pain that was not real, but which was so real at the same time.
Of course, Leia isn’t unaware of the relief that overcomes him, realizing that his lies had taken effect.
Her small brown eyes, still glassy with the candor that only childhood bestows, look at him intently. There is some sadness too. Perhaps apprehension. Obi-Wan doesn't take his eyes off her little face, very small and white, contrasting with the dirt of the truck bed, of her poncho, of his. She's an amazing little girl, he thinks. She could have been mine.
"All this time we've been together you've kept things from me. You've lied to me... Are you my father?" she asks him, with absolute seriousness. She speaks as Anakin spoke at his age, and Obi-Wan thinks it's as if they never had a chance to be children, as if they were born fully formed, little adults against the world.
Obi-Wan swallows, thinking that these are the consequences of lying. So he turns to her and bends down to answer her with a truth. At least one.
"I would love to say yes. But no, I'm not."
Leia lowers her eyes. She looks disappointed and sad. Alone. Obi-Wan tries to lay two fingers on her shoulder, but regrets it at the last moment. He imagines hugging her tightly. He remembers hugging Anakin when he was ten years old, knocking on his bedroom door and asking him if he hated him as much as the rest of his classmates hated him.
"Sometimes I try to imagine what he was like."
"Mmm. It's the same for me. We jedi are separated from our family at a very young age. Sometimes I remember my mother's shawl. My father's hands. I remember a baby."
"A baby?"
"Yes. I think I had a brother."
Leia smiles at the word "baby" and Obi-Wan smiles with her, glad to have brought her out of her momentary distress.
Because that's what truth does, Obi-Wan thinks. It illuminates. It points to what is there: it gives it attributes so that it can exist in the world and a name so that it can be called by others.
He had a brother.
He still has it. Somewhere in the vast universe. Alive and real, not just in his dreams or her daughter's imagination. He is more than a brother. He is Anakin. He is everything to him. Or was at one time.
He does not think how or when. He dares not guess at the condition of Anakin, whom he left to be consumed by the flames of Mustafar. That is the only problem with truth: it casts its light on things, it is impossible to stop seeing.
*
Darth Vader appears as a column of smoke. He sounds like a storm.
Every step he takes on the ground is like a meteorite crashing into its surface and every time he raises his hand to take someone's life Obi-Wan feels like he is the one he grabs and breaks his neck with the Force.
He can't fight that thing, so it runs. He runs like a coward, because that's what he is. A coward who runs and forgets his name and his status as a jedi and his status as a father, as a brother, as a lover. Darth Vader is a dark tower and he is nobody.
The lightsaber in his hands feels like hypocrisy. All of this feels staged and he is like the jester who has to make the King laugh or he will lose his head.
"What have you become?" he asks him, but the question could be directed at himself.
"I am what you have made me," a voice that is not Anakin's answers him, and his reply could answer both questions at the same time. One in front of the other, Obi-Wan is confronted with the reality of the facts: this is something they have done to each other. It’s not something that has only one culprit. The murderer is the victim and vice versa. The two are tied in a game of reflections and every blow struck is as if they are giving it to themselves and every caress is as if they are touching themselves.
They fight because they assume that this is how history goes: repeating the same mistake over and over again until the answer is different. The definition of insanity. They fight, but this time Obi-Wan is the one who loses. Darth Vader lifts him into the air, holding him by the windpipe, and underneath him, like a wizard, he makes flames and fire appear.
"Your pain has just begun," Anakin tells him, because he is Anakin and because he knows his hand more intimately than anything else in his life. He doesn't even know himself as well as he knows the feeling of having Anakin on top of him, taking him and taking from him what he wants. And if Anakin wants to take his life, they both know Obi-Wan will give it to him.
So Anakin drops him into the inferno of his own creation and burns him. It’s as brutal as he imagined: the fire eats at his clothes and clings to his skin like lips, and the flames kiss him violently, bite into his skin and, as if it has teeth, reaches into his flesh. The pain of being burned alive is so total, so complete, that all he can do is scream, because there is nothing else in his head but pain. He doesn't even think about getting up and running away.
For a couple of seconds all he knows is that he is dying and that the one who is killing him is Anakin. He's killing him like Obi-Wan killed him. With fire, with hatred.
No, he wants to tell him, but all that comes out of his mouth is screams: I didn't kill you because I hated you. I killed you because I loved you too much.
*
At first, when he dreamed of Anakin, he found some relief in knowing that his apprentice's face lingered unblemished somewhere in the galaxy.
They were dreams without structure. They were more like a collection of images: Anakin and him in some room with no other features than four walls and a ceiling. Sometimes Anakin was sailing a hovercraft to wherever. It didn't matter what the destination was, just that they were together. Anakin with his big hands on the wheel and him off to the side. Sometimes he would turn to look at him and he could see with absolute clarity the outline of his profile: his forehead, his button nose, his lips. In the dream, he and Anakin know they have already kissed. Anakin kissed him, in the training dojo, and Obi-Wan stopped eating for days because anything that touched his lips made him remember the kiss he should never have given him. He's a boy, and his Padawan braid flying behind him proves that Obi-Wan was the first to condemn them both by allowing it to happen.
But it's a dream that doesn't judge him. The dream just is, and that's it. When Obi-Wan opens his eyes, there is no fundamental change in the universe. Everything remains the same. Anakin in his memory and Obi-Wan in the eternal present, where he is alone and where he can do nothing to change the mistakes of his past. Where he can only run away from himself, every night, either through the drowsiness of sleep or alcohol.
The difference now is that he is dreaming and the person in front of him is not dead and is not Anakin.
His skin looks whitish as if he hasn't been in the sun for years. There is no more golden hair on his head. No more green eyes staring back at him: they are yellow, bloodshot. A dark mask covers half of his face and what little he can see of the rest of his body is incomplete, held in place by wires, as if trapped in a web of darkness.
And Obi-Wan tries to wade through the water to get away from the creature coming toward him, but he cannot. He cannot move from his place. He too is trapped by the same brambles, pinned down, and has no choice but to submit to the icy, slippery touch of Darth Vader, who touches him everywhere, and a whisper accompanies every inch of skin he caresses:
Mine, mine, mine, mine, mine, mine, mine, mine, mine.
Anakin's fingers run over his shoulder and his arm that now share a mark with his whole body: burned skin, irregular, touched by the terror of love, by the violence of revenge. They pass like a whisper from his arms to his chest, to his stomach and touch, there, a small scar on his belly, imperceptible to the whole galaxy but not to them. No, for them there is no invisible world, no inner world. Obi-Wan is like an open fish, an open and displayed lamb. There is nothing he possesses, inside or out, that has not been seen, or touched by him.
Mine, mine, mine, mine, mine, mine, mine, mine, mine.
*
When Tala sacrifices herself for the refugees, for him and Leia, Obi-Wan can't deny that he is letting people die so he won't die himself. He turns to look at the people sitting on the ground and remembers the war. He remembers the people he had to save from death or slavery. Their faces are the same. Eyes wide open, cheeks pale. None of them knows if it is true that they will survive as Roken and the others assure them. And the truth is that they have no chance of survival if Obi-Wan insists on continuing to flee.
He realizes that he cannot fight someone who has won against all odds. Because Anakin did not die that day on Mustafar, and because Anakin learned nothing from him. Anakin fell into darkness and took Obi-Wan with him, 10 years ago. That much is clear to him now.
They both fell the moment Anakin knelt before Darth Sidious and lost his face, his name and his heart. And Obi-Wan lost the same in consequence. Why is he fighting over his own corpse? What can happen to him that hasn't already happened to him?
So he lets himself be taken.
He asks Haja to take Leia to Alderaan, to her real family, and Leia looks at him with fury and disappointment, at him and at herself, as if wondering why she trust that crazy, sad-eyed, dirty-clothed jedi. And Obi-Wan is content with that, because if he's good for anything, it's disappointing others.
He stays on the empty ship, then. He stands there, waiting for Vader to take him, so that the refugees and Leia, Anakin's daughter, can flee and rebuild their lives. He doesn't have that left, because he has no more life to rebuild. He’s as dead as Anakin and now has to submit to the darkness of the Underworld, of the afterlife.
Silence surrounds him, first. He’s alone in the hall of the ship, looking at a point on the metal wall. He knows that he is on the other side, approaching with his meteorite footsteps and icy hands.
Silence surrounds him, first, and then, like the end of the world, the whole ship around him begins to break apart, to shatter into pieces. The walls, the floor, the seats, the wires, the fuel, the glass and the metal. Everything explodes around him and Obi-Wan feels Vader's hands destroy the entire space around him and sees him, again, so close, with Jabiim's sunlight on them both and there is no escape.
He doesn’t want to escape.
"You are mine now, my master," the smoke tower sentences and when it touches him, Obi-Wan lets go.