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The moment Obi-Wan Kenobi chooses to give up his life to save the Skywalker twins, the Skywalker twins decide something ... rather different.
He supposes he shouldn’t be surprised. Skywalkers have, after all, been surprising him for years now.
His freshly spoken words hang in the air.
If you strike me down, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
Vader—Anakin—stares at him through the red-black Sith hell eyes of that mask. The one Obi-Wan once cracked open. That helmet cracked, and Obi-Wan cracked along with it. He cracked, and he solidified all at once. He knew then something that remains true now.
He can’t save Anakin.
Offering Anakin his heart that night, the bloody mess of it, gave him the gift of one blue-eyed flash of the boy he knew before the creature, Vader, ate him up again. Light lives inside Vader, some fragile-flickering candle flame, but he will have to make it grow himself. Someone else will have to help him.
The brother, the child, the apprentice hides somewhere beneath that mask now. Lost to Obi-Wan. Lost to himself.
Obi-Wan holds his saber in both hands. He leaves himself open.
Listen. He must listen for his master's voice.
The scarlet saber, Vader's saber, stabs through him. Just below his navel. Meant to keep him and not to kill if he's gotten to treatment soon enough. Leia cries out from across the hangar. She cries out his name. Obi-Wan. His real name that she whispered to him back when she was just a little girl. Obi-Wan. Obi-Wan. How strange to even hear that name now when he has been Ben for so long. Ben, that mysterious ache of a man. The Force rumbles. It rumbles and roars in Obi-Wan’s ears. That’s not the Death Star. No. The murderous space station remains steady beneath his feet.
Vader—Anakin—spins on his heel. He senses it too. Obi-Wan falls to his knees, that singular and sustained pain burning and burning and burning. No, he will not let Vader—Anakin—turn his attentions toward the twins.
Gritting his teeth, and with a shaking hand, Obi-Wan bats his blade against Vader’s—Anakin’s—ankle. This cat-scratch won’t hurt him—everything is a prosthetic—but it it will serve to distract him. Weaken him. Vader—Anakin—yelps and takes an unsteady step back as the metal and wires start melting.
Obi-Wan prepares to die again. He waits for that saber to slice through his neck.
But again, the Skywalker twins have already decided.
And before he quite understands, before he sees Luke Skywalker's outstretched hands, the tears streaming down the lad’s face, Obi-Wan Kenobi is flying through the air, saber and all. Soaring. Leia raises one hand too. Obi-Wan sees it through the whirl of the hangar. Maybe Bail told her about her Force-sensitivity in the interim. Maybe she's just working off a feeling.
Raw power rattles the shiny steel floor beneath their feet.
And the Skywalker twins, these children he’s spent almost twenty years protecting, protect him instead.
Vader—Anakin—screams. It is more than rage. It is desperation. Furious fear.
Leia and Luke each toss one of Obi-Wan’s arms around their shoulders and turn toward the ship. Solo and Chewbacca open the Falcon’s bridge.
Their backs are to Vader.
Something else, something dripping darkness, flies through the air.
A sharp stab in his spine. Cold. Stuck. A knife. Yes, a knife. It hit … where did it hit?
Middle. Middle back. Thoracic … is that what it’s called? He can’t recall just now.
The pain compounds upon itself and Obi-Wan controls his breathing. Han replaces Leia—smart, he’s taller—and Obi-Wan allows the pilot and Luke to carry him to the ship.
Leia pulls an explosive out of her pocket—likely pilfered from a stormtrooper—and lobs it forward.
A cloud of smoke billows up.
Vader—Anakin—shouting not Kenobi, as he usually does in front of others, but Obi-Wan.
Obi-Wan.
Obi-Wan.
Obi-Wan.
This cry draws out Obi-Wan’s grief but does not earn the attention Anakin wants.
Anakin must choose.
Anakin must listen.
And Anakin has proved these past nineteen years that he will not listen to Obi-Wan.
Obi-Wan’s loyalty now, as far as Skywalkers go, must be to Anakin’s children.
Padme’s children.
If Anakin finds the light again and Obi-Wan is already on the other side—which seems likely at this point—Obi-Wan will usher him home.
Anakin has broken Obi-Wan’s heart a thousand times and then again, but the Force works in mysterious ways. The Force helped these children save him. They’re carrying him onto the Millenium Falcon right now. They’re carrying him to the small quarters where he meditated on the way from Tatooine. Slept a while. Chewbacca runs straight for the cockpit. Blaster fire bounces off the hard shell of the ship—a steadier vessel than he initially thought. Artoo, with the Death Star plans intact, beeps in concern. Threepio says something panicked.
Han and Luke lay Obi-Wan down on his side. Force alive, the pain comes steadily now. The saber burn melts through him. His small intestine might need a mech replacement if he manages to survive this. The knife wound sits sharp against his spine. Waiting. It’s waiting for something, and he doesn’t know what.
Luke, all anxious eagerness.
We have to take the knife out.
Leia, righteously angry, not at her brother—she doesn’t know he’s her brother—but at the situation. She keeps her head despite that. She’s different from her birth father and more like Bail in that way. Anakin’s anger was always a weapon. Bail’s is a tool.
We can’t take the knife out! We remove that knife and he bleeds out in a way we can’t stop. I care about him so I’d like to avoid that.
I care about him too! And we have to get to … where are we going?
Good question, princess.
Solo, smooth as ever. A damn good pilot though.
Yavin. We’re going to Yavin. Do you have any Bacta on this Force forsaken piece of junk, Solo?
Some, but not enough for all that.
Anything is enough to help, Han! Where is it?
Obi-Wan doesn’t hear Han’s reply to Luke’s inquiry.
The Falcon rumbles beneath him.
The world smears and slips.
And Leia, Leia, his darling girl, sits at his bedside. His vision rights itself when she does, and Obi-Wan makes out Luke scurrying away to retrieve the Bacta.
The Force hums.
Skywalker.
Skywalker and Kenobi.
Kenobi and Skywalker.
“Last I saw you,” Leia says, and if her eyes are wet he doesn’t mention it, “you said I would see you again if I ever needed help from an old man. It seems like I’m helping you, though.”
Obi-Wan laughs, and oh, no, that hurts worse.
“You asked for my help first, Princess. Help me—” he breathes in deep—“Obi-Wan Kenobi. You’re my only—”
“I know what I said,” she whispers. “And it’s just Leia. You know that.” She pauses, and she grasps his hand as she sets her mouth into a thin line. “I have the Force.”
“You do.”
There’s no point in lying now. How to tell her that Vader—Anakin—is her father, that Luke is her brother, will have to wait until he has more sense.
Padme.
Maybe he’ll start with Padme.
“I started noticing about a year after I saw you. Dad knew, but we talked about it without … talking about it. I could tell I needed to keep it a secret.”
“Leia—” Obi-Wan tries.
“Whatever you did, I know you meant well,” Leia assures him, and a smile plays at her lips. “That you and my dad and my mom did what needed doing to keep me safe and happy. I trust that. But you have to survive to tell me the truth, okay? About Luke too. I can tell he’s important. Swear to me you’ll hang on. I’m old enough now to handle it.”
“Darling—”
“Please, Ben.”
The Ben comes from the ten-year-old girl he met and not the woman in front of him—young still so young—who could probably take down Palpatine himself if she got the chance.
“I will, Leia.”
Leia sniffs and wipes her eyes. “Now, I’m going to have to get your tunics undone somehow. I hope it doesn’t hurt too much.”
“I know, dear,” he says. “I’m sorry you have to see me like this.”
Leia heaves a long-suffering sigh. She gets his belt off. She manages to untie his outer tunics and get them off—carefully—without disturbing the knife. He manages to bite back most of his winces and whimpers for her sake, though not all of them. His undertunic, however, won’t be so easily dealt with. He could lifts his arms, but that might dislodged the knife.
Luke, wide-eyed and desperate to help, returns and hands the supplies to Leia. “There’s one not-expired hypo of pain medication, a hypo of Anticeptin-D, and some Bacta patches. And scissors. I thought we might need to cut the tunics off. At least partly.”
“That’s it?” Leia asks.
“I only met Han a few days ago,” Luke answers, shooting a worried look at Obi-Wan, “but it makes sense from what I’ve seen.”
“That nerfherder is lucky he’s a good pilot,” Leia mutters. “Help me? I’m sorry I snapped at you.”
“It’s okay,” Luke answers with that sweet and boyish gaze of his even as power ripples beneath it all. “You’ve been through a lot.”
“Do you know if your father was on planet, dear?” Obi-Wan dares to ask.
Leia shakes her head, and the grief, that awful, sucking sensation Obi-Wan had when they discovered the space-dust remains of Alderaan, must be living in Leia’s body. Breha, her mother, gone. Her entire planet obliterated.
At the least, at the least, she should have Bail.
Obi-Wan knows, Force, he knows what it’s like to lose your whole world in one fell swoop.
This reminds him that Quinlan will be at Yavin waiting for him. Quinlan, who comes to see him whenever he can—every three months or so, usually.
Leia administers the two injections into his neck with an expert hand. They cut off his undertunics to get access to the saber wound. Luke sticks on the Bacta patch. A patch won’t do all the work by half, but maybe it will keep him alive just long enough to get to a tank.
Maybe.
The knife might have other ideas. But if they can stop him from bleeding out as Leia suggested ….
“What are you going to do about that space station?” Luke asks once they’re done, and both twins have taken up residence next to Obi-Wan’s bed. “We have to do something.”
“We’re going to blow it up,” Leia ways, looking off into the distance with those fire-spark eyes. “We have the plans.”
Obi-Wan reaches back and prods at the wound. Watery blood and fluid ooze out. A dizzy drowsiness thickens inside his skull. Presses against his brain. Makes his eyes droop. Whatever happens to him, the twins are together.
That was the plan. That’s what he’s been trying for all these years—keep them safe, then reunite them.
“I do believe,” he says, as the twins’ abstract art faces hover in front of him, “that I’m going to pass out.”
The nauseating spin of the world greets Obi-Wan when he wakes upon arrival to Yavin 4. The twins speak to each other. Chewbacca says he needs a hover stretcher in Shyriiwook, and not two minutes later he appears with a member of the Alliance and said stretcher in tow. The lightsaber wound burns to the depths of him. The tank. He’ll have to go in a tank to sort that and oh, he hates the slime of the Bacta tank more than he hates most things. Getting it out of his hair takes at least a week. Well, he’ll go in the tank if he survives whatever the knife still currently in his back has in store. It’s still buried somewhere in his spinal cord—the sensation in one leg is a bit patchy, isn’t it? No, not patchy. He can’t feel his left leg at all. But if Vader—Anakin—threw it … it’s probably some Sith contraption. Some part of the plan he clearly had to keep Obi-Wan on the Death Star if he got the chance.
Live. Obi-Wan was prepared and willing to die, but the twins saved him, and so he must live. Living for them and their safety and their light has been the heart of him for nineteen years.
He must try to live.
The pulsing pain in his back grows persistent. It grows … eager. That’s the first word that pops into his mind. How can pain be eager?
Not a normal knife, he reminds himself.
“Obi-Wan.” Leia—wonderful, smart, stubborn Leia who looks just like Padme—and has her political smarts—but with Anakin’s defiant fire in her eyes—crouches down next to him. Look how grown-up she is. She saved him once, and she’s here saving him again. “We’re going to get you inside. Just hold on, okay? You’re not allowed to die. Do you hear me?”
“I hear you, dear,” Obi-Wan mutters, and the shape of Leia melts into a blur of white.
Grief gums up Leia’s Force presence. Alderaan gone. Blown out of existence. Leia didn’t know if her father had gotten back on-planet yet. Bail. Bail Bail Bail his friend.
Luke. Where is Luke? A hazy blonde figure appears with wide blue eyes and a worried frown. There he is. There’s the boy who is Padme down to his core with Anakin’s enthusiasm and love of flying.
They lift him onto the stretcher. They carry him through the curious crowd. Heat beats in the air on this jungle moon of Yavin 4 as they transport him into a stone temple that shoots toward the sky. Old. Everything around the temple feels old. Perhaps an old monument to the Force? A former Jedi temple back in the days of the High Republic when there were Jedi outposts? Obi-Wan’s brain doesn’t work well enough, at present, to sift through the archive of Jedi history tucked away inside him.
Write it down.
If he survives, he ought to write it down. The Jedi history. The empire has tried to wipe all of it out, but he can help with that. He can honor his family and their culture.
Only able to see half of the people who have come out to gaze at him from his place laying on his side, he still hears their murmurs. Variations of Kenobi and Obi-Wan Kenobi and Master Kenobi is alive greet him.
There are a few people, if they’re still living and here, who will be … quite surprised. Guilt seeps through him. No other choice existed—the more people who knew he was alive, the more who might come looking—but he hated the secrets regardless.
He passes by a very purple Lasat and a fair-haired man who is astonishingly tall. There’s a green Twi’Lek with them. The Lasat, in particular, stares. The Twi’Lek—she seems to be a pilot—says something about Kanan and Ezra.
Ezra. Oh that dear boy.
More gasps of surprise. People giving their condolences to Leia about Alderaan. Urgency. Urgency all around them because the Death Star exists and something must be done.
Four familiar Force signatures—three he hasn’t felt in years and one he has—wait in the shape of a semi-circle ahead. He can’t see them yet, but they’re there.
A flash-bang bounce of light.
Ahsoka.
A sharp slice of Crescent moon.
Cody.
A playful sun by the shore.
Rex.
A crackling fire in a hearth.
Quinlan.
“You knew,” Ahsoka, her voice cracked with congestion, says with toothless accusation in Quinlan’s general direction. “I can tell. That’s where you’ve been going every couple of months. Wherever Master Obi-Wan has been.”
“Sorry, kid,” Quinlan answers with real regret. “I couldn’t tell anyone. Kind of happened by accident that I knew.”
Obi-Wan wants to apologize to Rex and Ahsoka and Cody—to Cody especially for carrying the burden of thinking he killed him that day on Utapau. I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry he wants to say. Quinlan, dearest, he wants to add. I missed you. But unconsciousness starts tugging at him. Black spots play in front of his vision. A tremble runs up his body from head to toe. He can’t make it stop now. He held himself together for almost twenty years and now he can hold nothing.
Someone says I think he has a fever. They carry him onward and into a room. A medical bay from the sounds of the beeping and the rustling sheets and the woosh woosh woosh of different machines. The room crowds with concern. The twins. Han and Chewbacca. Quinlan and Cody and Ahsoka and Rex.
The world becomes a cloudy swirl of colors. Sensations. The removal of the Bacta patch. An injection. Another injection. The knife slides out of his spine and warm-wet blood spills sticky onto his skin.
A carving cold creeps across his back like the knife, the tip of it at least, might still be there. Like someone is holding it and leaving a message behind. A foreign and furious feeling slips through his veins. That eagerness from before. And for a moment, just a moment, there’s a flash of a face he knows, mangled as it may be now. That face is in a Bacta tank. The eyes fly open and a grin, the one that stopped Obi-Wan’s heart nine years ago, slides across Anakin Skywalker’s face.
Hello, Master.
The dyad Obi-Wan suspected cements itself via the point of the knife, the Sith knife—not a normal knife—that was just unburied from his back.
The shaking worsens, and Obi-Wan cannot make it stop. He clasps onto consciousness with slick, sweaty fingers. Poison, he tries to say, but the words won’t come.
Bacta tank. Now.
That voice is not familiar. It must be one of the healers. Doctors. They’re called doctors outside of the temple and sometimes he forgets.
More carrying. More black spots. Woozy woozy woozy he’s so terribly woozy. Spasm after spasm of worry in the Force. The brush of a hand across his forehead. Quinlan. He knows that touch.
Leia’s voice.
What is that letter on his back? That’s … I don’t recognize it.
Letter? There’s a letter?
That, Quinlan says with a pinch in his voice, is Old Tongue. Sith language. I’m pretty fucking sure whenever that thing stops, it’ll say Vader. Vader’s the one who stabbed him, yeah?
Quinlan says Vader with all the grief of knowing exactly who Vader is. Does Ahsoka know? Rex?
More like threw, Luke adds. But it was Vader. Is that poison?
Ah. Obi-Wan understands now. Vader—Anakin—will know the moment Obi-Wan’s life slips away. He will control the manner of death. The timing of it all. Obi-Wan’s life-force is tied to how long it takes this poison to write out Vader’s name. Obi-Wan dared not to die in front of him, and so, Vader will control it regardless.
The preparation for the Bacta tank escapes Obi-Wan entirely. The lightsaber wound, initially the most painful thing, becomes a tickle. The stab in his back becomes everything. The central point of his existence.
As they lower him into the tank, Obi-Wan Kenobi is sure he has lost his mind, because beyond the liquid confines, a blurry face appears. Not Vader.
Bail. Bail Organa.
Except, Bail is most likely dead. Gone. Blown into stardust by an impossible weapon.
Bail Organa is dead.
And soon, despite the Skywalker Twins’ best and earnest efforts, he might be too.
Bail is not dead.
Or Obi-Wan is hallucinating.
Given the sheen of sweat and the way he shakes when he wakes up again, either is possible. The pain in his front is gone other than soreness.
The pain in his back is … not.
“Am I mad?” Obi-Wan asks the Bail-shaped figure in the chair next to this bed. The words come out slow. Thick and bone dry.
“It’s very possible, my friend,” the Bail-shaped figure answers. “But I am actually here, if that’s what you’re wondering. I got held up in my journey back home, which is why I’m here. You need water, I think.”
Obi-Wan, shaking and … rather damp, sits up and accepts the glass of water Bail puts to his lips. Much to his chagrin, he can’t hold the glass himself.
Cold. He’s so … cold.
His fever-blurry vision clears when he blinks. Luke is curled up asleep in a chair next to the bed. Voices filter in from the hallway. Quin. Cody. Rex. Ahsoka.
“Leia’s gone to help with the plan for taking down the Death Star,” Bail explains, apparently reading Obi-Wan’s mind. “She’ll be by.”
“She is where she needs to be.” Pride shoots through Obi-Wan’s veins. Leia, that spitfire little girl he met who saw down to the depths of him, has become someone truly astounding. “Bail,” he tries, “Alderaan. Breha—”
“I can’t.” Bail gently cuts Obi-Wan off, and the tears in his eyes shine. “I simply … she would want me to focus on this … on this monstrous weapon that took our home. Took her. After that’s done, I will … Leia and I will both tend to our grief. And I think that, well with all of this, the twins will need to know. We’ll need to tell them together.”
Obi-Wan wants to promise that he’ll be there for that. But the carving pain in his back says don’t be so certain. The nausea in his gut. The shallowly drawn-in breaths of his lungs. A flash of red-tinged black pops to life in front of Obi-Wan’s eyes. Inside his head? He can’t tell which. He can’t tell if it’s the fever or Vader—Anakin—toying with him.
His leg. His left leg. He still can’t feel it. Antibiotics go drip drip dip in the bag next to him. Obi-Wan doubts they’ll help. What he needs now are Force healers, and there simply … aren’t any left.
“The Bacta tank healed your saber wound,” Bail explains. “But not the corrosion in your spine. Not the—”
“Poison,” Obi-Wan whispers. “Yes, I suppose not. Sith magic.” He takes Bail’s hand and grasps it tight. “I’m ready, Bail. I was ready on the Death Star. The goal was reuniting the twins and I’d managed to—”
“Shut up, Obi-Wan,” Bail says through gritted teeth. “I just lost my planet and my wife. I’m not ready for more.”
With this, Obi-Wan cannot argue.
Luke wakes with a start. He fusses over Obi-Wan like the sweet boy he is, and because he’s his mother’s and his father’s son both, he tells him that he’ll be flying out to help destroy the Death Star. It surprises Obi-Wan that the guardian in him does not immediately snap, no. After all his years in the desert, surely letting Luke out to do such a dangerous thing, untrained, won’t do.
Yet the Force says, you must. And Obi-Wan, having trusted the Force more in the past nine years than he ever has before, doesn’t protest. Luke goes off to find Leia, who he says will want to know immediately. Han too.
“How many letters now?” Obi-Wan asks.
“Three. I think,” Bail replies. “I admit I’m no expert in the language, but Quinlan seemed to know.”
Obi-Wan can’t see the wound, but when he reaches around to his middle back, he can feel the raised letters like welts on his skin.
V. A. D.
Vader.
Cody, Rex, and Ahsoka come in. Quinlan, perhaps wanting to give them space and also perhaps wishing for a moment alone with him, leans against the doorframe of this tiny private room in the med bay.
Ahsoka hugs Obi-Wan without words. Without needing them. She is, perhaps, the young girl he met again for a fleeting moment.
“I’m sorry, dear,” Obi-Wan says softly. “I didn’t have a choice.”
“I know.” Ahsoka’s words muffle against the too-thin fabric of his medical gown. “I do plan on yelling at you when you’re well.” She pauses and pulls back. “Anakin did this to you?”
Ah. So, she does know. Given Rex’s downcast eyes, it’s clear he does as well. Obi-Wan is all too familiar with that heartbreak.
“I’m afraid so.”
There’s no time, just now, to tell them about Mustafar and Padme and Anakin’s cracked open helmet years later. If he lives, he will.
Rex, with his bald head and his white beard, squeezes Obi-Wan’s shoulder. He says, it’s damned good to see you, General Kenobi. We’ve missed you. Obi-Wan returns the sentiment.
And he turns to Cody.
He turns to Cody, who stands at the foot of the bed and stares ahead of himself with a hurting, haunted look. Like he’s seen a ghost and suddenly that ghost is breathing.
He has, hasn’t he? Obi-Wan feels like a ghost sometimes, existing in a world where most people think him long dead. His brief sojourn to help Leia would not have spread far. Would have been treated by the empire as a lie until they themselves believed it.
“It wasn’t your fault, Cody.” Obi-Wan’s voice catches as he studies his commander. His dear, dear friend. “Not for a moment.”
Cody meets Obi-Wan’s eye. He sets his shoulders and his faces twitches from the effort of not crying.
“Sir, I—”
“I haven’t been sir for a long time.” Obi-Wan puts his hand out to draw Cody toward him despite the shaking. “Just crazy old Ben, as the Tatooine inhabitants called me. Just Obi-Wan.”
Cody takes the offered hand and squeezes it. He says, it’s so good to see you, Obi-Wan.
Obi-Wan’s steady acceptance of events shakes just a touch. For all that he knows he has done exactly what he needed to do these last nineteen years, his isolation made things simpler. Aside from Quinlan’s sporadic visits, a few unsigned letters from Leia, and “accidentally” running across Luke now and again, he was alone. Now, here, seeing the faces of people he loves, the acceptance he felt on the Death Star becomes more painful.
He will do what he must, but dear stars, it hurts more.
Quinlan slips in once Obi-Wan’s spoken to the other three. He presses Bail’s shoulder. He sits on the side of Obi-Wan’s bed, puts a kiss to his sweaty forehead, and simply says, hey, you, in that way of his. Grief brightens his brown eyes, and perhaps he’ll speak to it if they have a moment alone. Having the opportunity to see Quinlan every few months these past nine years buoyed Obi-Wan’s spirits. The touch and the tenderness between them, the warmth of someone he loved in his tiny bed, helped remind him, much like his adventure with Leia, that he needed connection in his seclusion. The chance to see Quinlan grow older, to see those salt and pepper locs when so many Jedi didn’t get to age, helped him age more slowly than the desert might have liked.
The carving pain in his back intensifies. Another flash of a face when he shuts his eyes against the agony. A Bacta tank. A grief-giddy grin. A voice.
You could have died easier, Master. You could have stayed with me and kept breathing.
A coughing fit wracks Obi-Wan’s body so hard that for a long and lingering ten twenty thirty seconds, he can’t get air. Why can’t he … something feels stuck. Strangling him. A hand choking him from afar him like Vader’s—Anakin’s—hand on Mapuzo. Scrabbling at his throat did nothing. Nothing at all.
“Obes?” Quinlan questions. “Obi-Wan? Hit the bed if you can’t breathe.”
Obi-Wan hits the bed with his hand. Hard.
Quin’s hand goes to Obi-Wan’s back, and he gives it a firm thump. A second. A third.
Blood comes up sticky and scarlet from Obi-Wan’s lungs. It spatters thick and jelly-like on the bedsheets and leaves behind that wet, metallic taste in his mouth.
Finally, blessedly, air comes in.
The machine keeping track of his vitals screams.
Heart rate: 100
Systolic BP: 150
Fever: 102
Rex dashes off for one of the medics. Obi-Wan’s vision blurs again. Luke and Leia run in like the twin suns they are, and when they each lay a hand on him he cools down. His heart slows. The relentless burning eases. The sense that he is being watched from inside his own body by the boy he raised and couldn’t save, lessens.
“Obi-Wan?” Luke questions, and Ahsoka is looking and looking and looking at him. He must have called himself Skywalker earlier. Obi-Wan wasn’t there for the introductions.
Skywalker.
The name is a part of him as much as Kenobi.
“They’re starting to call us out to get ready to fly,” Luke continues. “But I could stay, instead. I could—”
“No.” Obi-Wan curls his sweat-damp hand around Luke’s arm just as Rex arrives with the medic. “You go, my boy. They need you. You and—”
Dear stars, he almost said you and your sister. He will, if he survives. Just not right now.
“You and Leia both,” he finishes instead.
“Ben,” Leia protests, reverting back to the old name.
“No,” Obi-Wan says again. “You know even more how much you’re needed. Go. There are more letters left. I expect I have time. If I survive, it will be because you saved me. Now you need to save the people on this base. You’ve seen what the Death Star can do.”
They have saved him. More than they know. If not for them, in the wake of losing his entire life in one catastrophic boom, the hope that has always been his might have left him.
A new hope.
That’s what Luke and Leia gave him. He clung to it by his fingernails that first decade even as he half-hated himself. He would go, in those days, to watch Luke. Leave him things. And that reminded him of the hope. Kept it a flickering flame. Finally, after Leia, he was able to grasp it fully with his hand again. It became a steady fire.
They both kiss him and go with Bail following in their wake—he too, is needed. Rex and Cody follow. The crusty but kind medic makes him drink, replaces his antibiotics with something even stronger—the side effects are apparently harder to bear—and tells him that they are thinking of everything they can. They give him blood pressure medication. Another round of fever reducers. Pain medication that barely takes the edge off, but they’re doing their best.
Quinlan and Ahsoka stay.
“Obes,” Quinlan says with tenderness as he lays a cool cloth over Obi-Wan’s forehead and tucks his sheets snugly around him. “Just rest, okay? We’ll be right here.”
Obi-Wan twines his fingers with Quinlan’s. Ahsoka rests her hand on his arm.
And when she asks the next question, she asks not with judgement, but with awe and admiration.
“Those are Anakin and Padme’s kids, aren’t they? You and Bail have been looking after them all this time.”
“I tried.” Tears grate into Obi-Wan’s voice as his physical state gets the better of him.
“You did, Obes,” Quinlan assures him. “For nineteen years, you did.”
Live for them. Obi-Wan was and is willing to die for his two dear children, but now he wants to live. The glimpse of this place, of the people he loves, of the twins together, makes him want in a way he has not for years. There is no wanting in the desert. There is survival. Sometimes peace. A sense of surety in what he overcame and in what he was doing. The knowledge that he could continue on beyond this life after what Qui-Gon taught him. That he could help from beyond this body.
“I’m sure you both”--Obi-Wan sucks in a breath as pain shoots through him and makes his muscles cramp—”have work to do. They’re going to blow this base if that space station isn’t destroyed. You should go.”
“Nope,” Quinlan says. “In fact, the healers told us to stay here in case any Force healing type ideas came to us. General Mothma told us to stay. General Syndulla. Bail. Leia, especially, and I’m not arguing with that one. Kallus will comm me if there’s anything needed from our little unit of spies.”
Grief grips Quinlan’s voice like someone in that little unit might have recently been lost. Probably getting the plans. That, Obi-Wan knows, can’t have been easy.
More pain. Another cramp in his abdomen. Another seizing shot of agony in his back. Cold. He’s so cold, and he’s hot too? How can it be both? Quinlan says freeze packs to Ahsoka, who gets up to retrieve something across the room. Cool, thin freeze packs are draped over his arms in addition to the cloth on his forehead. They make his shiver all the more, but he must endure it to get his fever down.
“How’d you get those kids off the Death Star, Master Obi-Wan?” Ahoska asks like the Padawan she once was. “Bet it was sneaky.”
“Shut off the tractor beam,” Obi-Wan mutters as consciousness starts to fall away. “Second time I’ve snuck right into an imperial facility.”
The med bay spins as Ahsoka says, second? And Quinlan answers, that story about him sneaking into Fortress Inquisitorious? That’s not a rebel legend.
That’s the last thing Obi-Wan hears before an inevitable tug sends him crashing into dreams.
The dreams come lucid and laced with poison.
A cockpit. He’s inside a cockpit for a fleeting moment wearing an orange jumpsuit. Listening to voices in his ear and the beep beep beep of a targeting computer.
A presence, dark and petulant, snatches him away.
He lands on a cold, hard floor.
Across a silver-gray room with a churning ocean below, a man waits. A machine that was once a man. Obi-Wan saw a sliver of that man years ago, and the sliver disappeared beneath a seething smirk.
Come back, the machine-man says, and I’ll spare you.
No, Obi-Wan replies, steady and stern. I won’t.
Die with my knife in your back then, the machine-man snarls, and with his face hidden by that Sith-Devil mask, Obi-Wan can’t see the tears he knows are there.
He can only hear them.
You put a knife in my back a long time ago, Anakin.
Anakin is dead.
No, Obi-Wan whispers. Not yet.
Use the Force.
The silver-gray room spins. A gentle sun beats down. A lake. Flowers all around him in bursts of wild color.
And a woman.
Her back to him.
Long, curly brown hair spilling loose. A blue robe tossed over a long white nightgown.
When she turns, a smile. Bright. Alive. Speaking to him from the beyond of the Cosmic Force.
Padme.
Dear stars, he has missed her, his brilliant and generous friend who should still be breathing.
He’ll be all right, Padme assures him, and Obi-Wan knows without knowing that she means Luke. You made sure of it. You and Bail. I handed those little ones to you when I couldn’t hold them even though I wanted to, and I knew what I was doing when I did. Those twin sun souls are Anakin. They are me. And they are you, too. Trust me. Trust yourself.
Let go. Trust me.
Use the Force.
Use the Force.
An almighty rumble shakes the ground beneath his feet. Cracks appear. The sun grows brighter and brighter and brighter until it blinds him, and he’s back in the cockpit. The targeting computer is silent, but that dark and petulant presence chases him anyway. Chases whoever is in the cockpit with him.
Luke.
Luke is in the cockpit.
In his dreams, Obi-Wan doesn’t panic.
Let go. Trust me.
Use the Force.
Twin bolts fly from the X-Wing's front and—
Obi-Wan jolts awake to an unholy boom.
The dreams cling to him as the machine next to his bed screeches. Sitting up, scrabbling at the sheets, his world melts. He melts. Cold as he is, heat comes off his body in waves. The base. Yes. Yavin. That’s where he is.
“The Death Star,” he mutters, swinging around to Quinlan. Yes, Quinlan is here. Quinlan and Ahsoka. “Was that … I heard an explosion. I saw … I was in a cockpit. Luke—”
“Shhh,” Quinlan soothes. “Yeah, love, I think the Death Star just bit the dust. Ahsoka, can you run for the medics? They might not have heard the machine in all the chaos.”
Ahsoka goes immediately. Quinlan’s gaze darts to the vitals machine. His hand goes to Obi-Wan's forehead, and he sucks in a breath through his teeth.
Obi-Wan … sinks. Quinlan’s voice sounds muffled and far away even though he’s right here. He can’t … breathe correctly. Can’t get enough air.
“Your fever is 105, Obes, but the medics will be right here, okay? I’m gonna need you to take a few pulls of an oxygen mask if you can.”
Obi-Wan nods. He accepts the mask and breathes and breathes and breathes.
Shouts of joy cut through the machine’s screeching. The base shudders with that joy like it can’t contain it all. In the Force, Obi-Wan knows the Death Star is gone. Luke destroyed it. Vader—Anakin—lives. Obi-Wan feels that in the Force too, and he also suspects that if he died, the poison might be gone. His life seems tied to his Vader’s. Fitting, really. They’ve been tangled up since the start.
Use the Force.
His body cooled when the twins touched him. It cooled down.
Wait.
A Skywalker created this wound.
Perhaps a Skywalker—or two of them—can heal it.
Medics come running in with Ahsoka. Two of them.
They fret over what to do. There’s nothing to do. One of them says we can’t let Obi-Wan Kenobi die. Obi-Wan shakes and shivers and sweats, and the cramps cut through his stomach over and over again.
“Quin,” Obi-Wan rasps as he pulls the mask off for a second or two, and it takes every ounce of his energy to even say his beloved’s name. The one familiar on his lips since he was thirteen. The one he missed so much for a decade. “The twins. I need the … twins.”
The medics flick off the machine so it will cease its screaming over his fever. They inject something directly into his neck. Quin picks up his comm.
“Kallus dammit,” Quinlan mutters when the first person he comms doesn’t answer. He keeps hold of Obi-Wan's hand. “You always answer. Even when you’re asleep. I’ll try your boyfriend.”
He tries said boyfriend, whoever that may be. No luck.
“Kriffing Lasat,” Quinlan complains with frustrated affection. “I get there’s a celebration, but come on.”
The third person Quin comms picks up.
“Hi, yeah, can you put out a call from Commander Vos on the intercom for Leia Organa and Luke Skywalker to come to the med bay?”
A pause. Quinlan’s eyes pop wide. Were this a different situation, Obi-Wan would laugh.
“Luke blew up the Death Star? Well, then he’ll be easy to find—he'll be the guy everyone is crowding around. Now, please. Master Kenobi is”—Quinlan grits his teeth, and Obi-Wan can tell he’s forcing himself to say something other than what he intended—“not well.”
Quin tosses his comm down onto the table and smooths Obi-Wan's sweaty hair back from his forehead again.
“They’re coming, yeah? They’ll be here. Do you just want to see them? You've got that look in your eye like you have a plan.”
Obi-Wan lets the medics push him gently back against the propped-up pillows. He tries to assure them that there’s nothing in this world they can do.
“They can”—Obi-Wan swallows against an over-dry throat—“heal this. Maybe. They're the only ones that can.”
Quinlan doesn’t question it.
The Force has done stranger things and so have Skywalkers.
Trust me, Padme said to him. Trust yourself.
Luke—all dressed in his orange jumpsuit—comes running in with Leia at his side. Both of them are breathless with joy and grief in equal measure. Bail rushes in just behind them. Cody and Rex too. The shouts of celebration continue.
A final, ferocious pain in Obi-Wan’s back. More blood coughed up from his lungs as the oxygen mask is torn off and replaced with a cannula instead. Red-spattered sheets. Cold. So … cold.
A name throbbing inside his head as everything flashes black before his eyes.
Vader.
Vader.
Vader.
That dark and petulant presence. A whisper in his ear.
Say goodbye, Master.
He pushes back against it with the true name of the boy he raised. The one he has never, not once, stopped loving.
Anakin.
Anakin.
Anakin.
Luke.
Leia.
Padme.
“Obi-Wan.” The gold drains from Luke’s face as he and Leia approach. Obi-Wan can only imagine how he looks. “Were you … I heard your voice? Were you talking to me?”
“He couldn’t stop saying you were talking to him,” Leia adds, her voice strung tight and her hyper empathy exploding into the room.
The dreams were … were they not dreams? Were they real? Was Padme real? Anakin? The cockpit felt real. Obi-Wan felt as if he was inside the X-Wing with Luke.
“I … might have.” Obi-Wan coughs again. “I think I was trying to.”
The truth of that sits in his bones. He was trying. He was trying to.
“I shot right because of you.” Luke grasps the bedrail with tears in his eyes. “Because of you, Obi-Wan.”
“You did that, Luke,” Obi-Wan insists, and the life is leaving him, it’s going it is going and he’s cold and his vision is blurring and—
Leia puts her hand on his arm. She looks him in the eye and she knows what he needs without him having to say a word. She was like that as a little girl, too. Seeing the wounded depths of him.
“Luke,” she says, and she’s shaking and she knows, doesn’t she? She knows about Anakin, at least. “Touch his arm. Keep hold of it.”
Luke’s blue eyes hold a question, but he does as Leia says. Quinlan puts a hand on Leia’s shoulder and Ahsoka does the same with Luke.
“Do what we did on the Death Star?” Luke asks quietly.
“Something like that.” Leia meets Obi-Wan's eye. “Right?”
Obi-Wan nods. Words are beyond him. Death, wearing Anakin’s face, knocks on his door. Whistle-sharp breathes come in and out too fast. He rattles the bed with his shaking. The pain swallows him whole.
“If you start to feel too weak, stop,” Quinlan says, and it’s exactly what Obi-Wan would have said if he could. “You might feel a little shaky after. It will go away once you rest. Ahsoka and I will bolster you. That should help, yeah?”
Luke and Leia nod too. They shut their eyes at Ahsoka’s gentle direction. Obi-Wan shuts his. This kind of Force healing is rare because of how quickly it zaps energy—even talented Jedi healers don’t usually try it. But the twins, these two grandchildren of the Force itself, can do things the most talented Jedi of the past would not have thought of. Obi-Wan hates asking it of them, but asking them to watch him die like this when it could be stopped is worse. That, he knows for certain.
One on side of the bed, a silver star shine.
One the other, a sun-melt gold.
Heat seeps out of his body.
The pain, pulsing through every inch of him, eases just a touch.
You can’t.
Vader—Anakin's—voice. A child losing a toy for a second time.
Obi-Wan doesn’t reply in the dilapidated dyad. Saying anything, any protest, could give Anakin a clue.
And giving Anakin a clue is giving Palpatine a clue.
That day will come soon enough.
Obi-Wan thrashes on the bed against his will. That dark and petulant presence pushes and pushes and pushes inside his skull until he’s sure a piece of it will burst bloody onto the bed. A corner of the sweat-slick sheets tears off the mattress.
No. No!
Words out of his own mouth. Not in his voice, but in that deep vocoder growl. Did he say them? Or were they only inside his head?
The poison, Vader, Anakin fighting back.
Leia, pressing on Obi-Wan's shoulder with her free hand, glows in the Force just like the father battling back against her used to.
“Yes,” she says through gritted teeth. “You let Tarkin blow up my planet. Tortured me. You’re not taking him too.”
He’s mine!
Instead of thrashing, Obi-Wan's body seizes up like stone. Luke, mirroring his sister, also puts a hand on Obi-Wan's shoulder, and this sends down a shot of liquid, loosening warmth. It undoes the stone almost as soon as the stone set in.
No one deserves to die more than Obi-Wan Kenobi.
Those words come out of Obi-Wan's mouth in Anakin’s wrecked and ruined voice, and once, in that cave, he believed them. Even as his tape-mended heart beats beneath his sternum hard enough to break bone, he knows what Anakin really means.
No one deserves to die more than Anakin Skywalker.
Obi-Wan is not just a target of his Padawan’s rage and grief.
He is the whipping boy for his self-hatred.
Obi-Wan's back arches up off the bed. Blood bubbles up from his lungs again, and his lungs answer with a bone-shuddering cough that makes his chest buzz with painful pins and needles.
“He deserves to live,” Luke protests with such passion, such earnest love, that tears spill out of Obi-Wan's closed eyes. “He deserves to live.”
Vader—Anakin—tries to say something else. Obi-Wan can’t make it out now, and it comes out of his own mouth like garbled nonsense.
The air comes easier. The cramps start subsiding and leave a soreness behind instead. Shivering. He’s not shivering as much as before.
Luke and Leia curl their hands more snugly around his forearm at exactly the same moment. The Force bursts bold between the three of them, rushing through Obi-Wan's ears with the same power he felt on the Death Star.
Skywalker
Skywalker
Skywalker.
A burn-edged image of a young Anakin.
Qui-Gon's voice.
Obi-Wan Kenobi, meet Anakin Skywalker.
Let go.
He goes limp against the pillows. Luke and Leia both shake badly, and yes … that’s enough. That’s quite enough.
“Let go, dear ones,” he says hoarsely. “You can let go.”
The medics flip the machine back on.
It beeps.
Body Temperature: 100
Heart rate: 90
Systolic BP: 135
Better. Much better.
His right leg hasn’t come back to life. His back still hurts significantly and his front still twinges. His head pounds and exhaustion devastates him.
He’ll live.
He’ll live.
Death has been denied.
For now.
Obi-Wan turns over at the medic’s request.
“There’s a scar,” he says in wonder. “The memory of the word but it’s not black anymore. Not bleeding.”
“Did we do it?” Luke asks as he runs a trembling hand through his mop of sweaty fair hair. “I know I’m … I’m … we’re—” he lands on the word we’re with a curious glance at Leia—
“Force-sensitive, but so are Quinlan and Ahsoka. Why us?”
Obi-Wan locks eyes with Bail. Bail, tears streaming down his face, gives a nod. Rex and Cody and Ahsoka stand silent.
And Leia, too-smart Leia, answers the question for him.
“Darth Vader is my birth father, isn’t he?” Tears well in her eyes too, and she’s not angry, not at him—she's angry at Anakin already. “And Luke is … we’re twins, aren’t we? Vader made that wound. We healed it. I don’t know how but … he’s powerful. I do know that.”
“Anakin Skywalker.” Luke completes Leia’s thought, and when he smiles, it’s just for her, his sister. “That’s his real name. You … Darth Vader, your pupil, he didn’t kill him. He is him.” Sadness ripples across Luke’s face. Sadness for what Obi-Wan couldn’t say. For himself. For Obi-Wan's own pain. Perhaps even for Anakin.
“Darth Vader did kill him,” Obi-Wan whispers, and Quinlan shuffles closer to smooth back his hair again in comfort. “In almost every way that mattered. I like to hope that might change one day.”
The twins each take one of Obi-Wan's hands. This journey will be difficult. Explaining all of this will be difficult, but the sense of completeness in him is unmatched.
Anakin’s children, Padme’s children, are together. They know the truth of each other.
“Your mother,” Obi-Wan says, as exhaustion sweeps through him, “was Padme Amidala. And she was the bravest woman I ever knew.”
“You used to talk about her.” Leia turns to Bail, who has come up beside her and put an arm around her shoulders. “About Padme.”
“She was one of my dearest friends.” Bail wipes his eyes. “I wanted you to know about her.”
“When I’m well, I’ll tell you the whole story,” Obi-Wan promises. “But know, dears, that everything Bail and I did, we did for you.”
Luke Skywalker, hero of the Rebellion and destroyer of the Death Star, rests his forehead against Obi-Wan's without a word. Force, how the boy’s world has spun out of orbit the past few days, taking him from a quiet moisture farm on Tatooine to all of this.
And Leia Organa, who didn’t cry once during their adventure together—she screamed she kicked she fought she did him the honor of showing him her fear but she didn’t let herself cry—finally does now. After the loss of her planet. Her mother. After almost losing him and hearing this.
And Leia, in all her stubborn goodness, clasps his hand tighter.
“We know you did.” She bites her lip, and she looks like Padme when she does. “Now please rest, or I’ll kill you myself.”
I love you.
“As you order, dear,” Obi-Wan says with a squeeze of her hand.
I love you too.
“You need warmer socks,” Leia complains from her place crouched down by a small set of drawers in Obi-Wan's quarters on one of the Alliance’s cruisers. Well, they were Quinlan’s quarters first. Now they both sleep here.
“Leia’s grumpy because Han keeps flirting with her, and she pretends he’s just annoying,” Luke teases. “But I know she likes it, because she gets this bright look in her eye like she wants to pounce.”
Leia throws one of the balled-up pair of subpar socks at her brother, but she can’t hold back a smile. What different lives they’ve led, the princess and the farm boy, and yet they have come together beautifully in the past few weeks. Luke can blow up the most terrifying weapon ever seen and tease his sister, apparently.
He wishes Padme could see it, and maybe, somehow, she can. She’s felt closer since he arrived here.
“I do have a meeting, dears,” Obi-Wan says idly. “If you’d like to register a complaint about my socks, you’ll have to take it up with Quinlan. They’re his, given that my illness and the evacuation from Yavin hasn’t exactly given me time to go shopping.”
Luke bursts out laughing. Leia mutters but fails to hide her grin. Obi-Wan puts his sock on the foot that still has sensation while Leia does the other. He can do it, but helping him as he adjusts to his new physical state seems to make her and Luke both happy, so he lets them. The strangeness of the knife wound has continued. The scar reading Vader in the old tongue has faded, but Bacta hasn’t been able to scrub it away entirely. While most stab wounds to the spine would cause permanent paralysis from the waist down or temporary paralysis from the waist down—two extremes—his particular wound has caused what is apparently called monoplegia in one leg. It could fade over time—though the medics think the chances of regaining full function in his left leg are slim. So, a hover chair it is. He can’t say that isn’t quite an adjustment, but he’s alive when he expected to be dead, and if it was good enough for Master Yoda in the temple, it’s good enough for him.
Yoda.
Perhaps he should go to Dagobah after some time, when it’s safer, and see if he can convince the grandmaster into the Alliance. Perhaps Qui-Gon will have some thoughts on how to do so.
He expected the Force to lead him down one path, and it has led him down another.
Obi-Wan drives his hover chair down the hallway—he's quite good at it, actually—and winces at a sudden stab of pain in his head. A blur of black in front of his eyes gone as quick as it came. These particular moments, he’s determined—with Quinlan’s and Ashoka’s input—are not physical. No, they’re the remains of the poison, the dyad, whatever strands connecting him with Anakin. His nightmares have been … how to describe them? Electric. Tangible. Like he could reach inside his mind and touch the terrifying images there. Thankfully, Anakin doesn’t seem to have realized there is something so deep as a dyad. He’s too caught up in his anger. His pain. One day, he might see it. One day, he’ll know that Luke and Leia are his children.
They will face that one day when it comes.
Quinlan joins them on their walk toward the main meeting room. Familiar faces wait there—Bail, Cody, Rex, Ahsoka, Mon Mothma. New faces he’s come to know are also there—General Syndulla, Captains Kallus and Orrelios—all Quinlan's friends. There was another friend of Quin’s, Cassian Andor, who died during the mission to retrieve the Death Star plans, and every night, Obi-Wan thinks of him during his meditation. He thinks too of young Ezra—close with these friends of Quinlan’s—and Caleb Dume, Depa’s Padawan that Obi-Wan was very fond of back at the temple. Caleb—now known as Kanan—is dead. Ezra is missing. The war continues to take and take and take from them, but they destroyed an impossible weapon even still.
Hope. Always hope.
Luke breaks away from them with an excited wave—he's off to find Han and wrestle him into the Alliance trainings they’re both meant to be taking. Han, of course, asked if they could get out of them given they blew up the Death Star.
Obi-Wan has found himself in another war.
Or perhaps a continuation of the first one.
They offered him the rank of general, and he took it with one caveat.
Don’t call him general.
Just call him Master Kenobi.
A reminder of the Jedi that have, by proof of the Alliance’s own symbol, inspired so much of their work.
The others greet him like an old friend. They eagerly welcome his input.
And Obi-Wan Kenobi, with at least two former lives behind him, begins again.
