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The pneumatic hiss of Vader’s helmet was the only sound in his quarters as he removed it, but not for long. One of his service droids powered up quickly and came to him silently, helping him remove his armor piece by piece, assisting him into his bacta tank with metallic hands the same as Vader had. The agony in the stumps of his limbs and the myriad burn scars across his body flared even in the mostly sterile air of his quarters, only soothed when he settled the oxygen tube in his mouth and pressed the button to fill his tank. It wasn’t as if Vader’s body had been uncommonly strained, but there was something that kept him feeling like a split nerve well past when the soothing medicinal gel covered him utterly.
Today, it was Obi-Wan Kenobi. Tomorrow, the entire Rebellion.
It had taken some time for it to sink in that Kenobi was actually dead—at first, when he had vanished entirely, Vader had assumed it to be some Force trick, had ordered the entire Death Star to be combed from top to bottom. But Obi-Wan was nowhere to be found, and the rebels had escaped with the Alderaanian princess in tow. Eventually Vader had been forced to acknowledge that Kenobi had merely… evaporated, the moment Vader struck the killing blow. He had felt it in the Force, the moment that Kenobi had ceased to exist, but he hadn’t fully been able to believe it until a full sweep of the area had been done as well.
So, there were some losses, some gains—the successful testing of the Death Star being one of them, Kenobi’s too-quick demise being another. There would yet be ample time in which to track the rebel womprats back to their nest, so Vader accepted the outcome of the day even if he wasn’t fully satisfied with it.
Vader fell into his usual tortured sleep, the ghosts of his past wreathing their way around his mind and stoking his connection to the dark side, his resentment and hatred. Kenobi counted among them, the way his Force signature reeled back from Vader’s own and the agonizing fires twenty years past drowning Vader. Vader twitched and turned suspended in his bacta until he spluttered awake too soon, far too soon.
The Force felt heavy with promise the moment Vader woke, as if whispering in his ear that he would achieve his utter victory that day—striking down the rebellion that had plagued his Master for years. He drained himself from his tank, donned his suit with the help of his medical droids, took a mere brief moment to acclimate to the heaviness of being in it, and then made his way to the bridge to discuss the capture of the escaped rebels with Grand Moff Tarkin.
Only… Vader stopped in his tracks the moment he stepped through the door, staring out the viewport with a slight hitch in his respirator as his failing lungs tried to draw in excess air. Outside of that window, there was a perfect view of Alderaan, blue-green with cloud systems swirling peacefully in its atmosphere. Vader couldn’t—how was it that Alderaan still existed? He had watched it be blown into slivers of asteroids not even one full day ago. It made no sense whatsoever.
“Ah, Lord Vader,” Tarkin said neutrally upon noticing Vader, nodding in his direction with his patronizing intent dripping in the Force around him. “It seems both you and our mind probe have failed to extract anything useful from the princess—bring her to me when you have the time, would you? Perhaps I will succeed where you have not.”
Confusion swirled around Vader for mere moments, but he did not say anything that would have given it away. Instead, in the privacy of his own helmet—one of the only benefits to the Force-forsaken thing—he contemplated how this had come to be. To live the same day over again, and one so important—it could only be a gift the Force itself bestowed upon him. A chance for total victory instead of partial, a realigning of history in accordance with the wishes of the Force, an eddy in the flow of time which Vader would use to crush the Rebellion once and for all. Vader had never received such a gift before, but he would be a fool to reject it.
“I will bring her to you,” Vader finally said, completely tonelessly.
And he would do so much more than that. Knowing the events of the day gave him a distinct advantage—he knew that Leia Organa spoke only lies when offering up the ruined base on Dantooine, and could watch the light leave her eyes himself for her deceit, crushing her windpipe in front of the Grand Moff. He knew that the light freighter they caught in their tractor beam was nothing to leave to the storm troopers, and he abandoned whatever meetings he had already attended in favor of being in the hangar when it landed. Naturally, an old Jedi far past his prime, a whelp with power and no finesse, two droids, and two smugglers were no match for Vader and a company of stormtroopers. As Vader had predicted from the moment he had realized he had been given a chance to adjust the narrative, it ended with two broken droids and three bodies scorched by plasma (and two minds half-broken by the vicious plumbing Vader had subjected them to to seek information) scattered across the hangar and that same empty cloak clutched so tightly in his metallic hands that it tore.
Total victory—what he’d desired. What he’d been given a second chance for by the Force, a correction in events. No one but he would ever remember that this day had been anything other than Darth Vader crushing enemies of the empire. It would be nothing but a footnote, a chronicle of the first time the Death Star had been used but certainly nowhere near the last.
Vader returned to his quarters with a snapped order to the troopers around him to clean up the bodies and send mechanics to strip to light freighter of anything useful. When Sidious called him, he was able to report much more favorable conditions than he had previously, and he was neither scolded nor praised for his efforts. As it should have been.
When he was finished with that, he once again stripped himself of his armor in favor of the bacta which kept him in stasis as he was, even if it could not heal the severe nature of his permanent wounds. Something that must have been close to satisfaction settled in Vader’s belly, curling up there and strangling what was left of his stomach. Vader breathed deeply of the pure oxygen being pumped to him, and his meditation on his brutal success once again had him slip into a restless and fitful sleep.
When he woke, the Force was full of promise. And when he stepped onto the bridge, Alderaan hung luminous and serene in the viewport, as it had the day before that, and the day before that.
The realization that this hadn’t been about crushing the foolish rebels who had dared come within swatting distance startled him enough that he was unable to hear Grand Moff Tarkin trying to talk to him until he had finished his little tirade, but that didn’t matter. Vader already knew everything that Tarkin would say.
Once again, he was strangely grateful that his vocoder smoothed over anything that might read as shock or disquiet. As ordered, he retrieved the princess from her cell, ignoring her barbed words and glares and attempts to pull from his grip utterly in favor of thinking.
What did the Force wish from him? It had been a long time since Vader had not had the reins in regard to that particular relationship, and he felt wrong-footed because of it. A third chance—he must have failed the first two times. But what more success could he achieve, if not crushing those who would bring harm to the empire under his heel? Was it something of a more personal nature?
If Vader had to be fully honest with himself, both times he had found himself unsatisfied with the outcome of his fight with Obi-Wan Kenobi, the old Master who had betrayed him and left him to die. The first time Kenobi had practically given himself up as some ill-conceived martyr, and the second the fight had fled from him the moment Vader had put his ‘saber through the blond boy’s heart. Neither time had been what he’d been fantasizing about to stoke his hatred and strength in the Force for two decades. Neither had truly been satisfying. But perhaps if Vader could achieve a proper duel with Kenobi, defeat him wholly and make him suffer as Vader had suffered, then he would be allowed to move on.
Vader was distracted up until the moment that Kenobi came into his vision again, red-tinted and then corrected for by his helmet. As it had been the first time, Kenobi looked worn and tired but his mouth proved that that was anything but the case.
Vader remembered the moment he had struck Obi-Wan with lethal intent, that first day—he remembered the feeling as his saber met the solidity of a body for but a nanosecond before it all went up in nothingness, not even smoke. He was certain that the intent and positioning of his lightsaber mattered, when it came to whatever Force trick Obi-Wan had utilized to make his body vanish. He could inflict wounds, but none of them fatal—a simple task, even if one of them was stuck in an agonizing metal cage and the other was far past his prime.
Vader knocked Kenobi’s ‘saber from his hands, instead of killing him outright. There would be no spouting off gibberish about how Kenobi would become more powerful than anything in Vader’s imagination—the Force was clearly lending its power to Vader, and not Obi-Wan.
“Pick it up,” Vader said slowly, settling into an opening stance again despite the strain it put on where his right thigh met the metal of the rest of his leg. “It won’t be that easy, old man. Fight me in earnest, or I will take your limbs as you once took mine and leave you alive to consider the consequences of your foolish behavior.”
Obi-Wan didn’t move, except for his eyes, which slid to the side toward the near children foolishly running towards Vader instead of away. “Do with me what you will, Darth. In the end, you cannot win.”
A rage of a magnitude he had not felt in some time coursed through Vader, making his blood as hot as the lavas of Mustafar. He would have yelled had his breath not been trapped behind teeth that cracked from how sharply his jaw was clenched. He turned his head toward the rebels, and pushed the four of them nearly as far as their light freighter, so that they could not even imagine intervening.
“Have it your way, Obi-Wan.”
In a single fluid move, one that had featured in nightmare after nightmare all cozied up to the ones of Padmé dying along with their child, Vader took three of his former Master’s limbs, leaving only his sword arm. Obi-Wan’s scream echoed in the cavernous hangar, something animalistic and entirely unlike the composed and treacherous man that Vader had known practically all his life. It was so loud that Vader could barely hear the thud his body made as it hit the durasteel floor.
He circled around and kicked the dropped lightsaber towards Obi-Wan’s only remaining hand. “Pick it up.”
Kenobi’s fingers, which had been outstretched towards the saber, curled inwards in obvious refusal. The man’s eyes, more gray than blue now, looked at him with a level of measured disgust and revilement that, were one to see just his eyes, never would have given away the fact that mere moments earlier most of his limbs had been severed by blindingly hot plasma.
“I will not.”
When Vader saw red, it wasn’t due to his helmet. Perhaps in the absence of a satisfying fight, the Force would be contented with the satiation of that dark part of him which clamored to have those who had hurt him hurt in the very same ways.
...But it was not. When Vader woke next, the Force around him whispered of a promise that now seemed somehow out of reach.
And the rage hadn’t left him, so when he saw Kenobi next he immediately put his ‘saber through his chest again. The chokehold his emotion had on him barely loosened as he watched that dull brown cape flutter to the ground for the fourth time.
He woke again, and the Force promised.
It was easy enough to disarm Obi-Wan, easier still to capture each rebel, and trivially easy once again to have the troopers and even Grand Moff Tarkin leave him to torture his former Master. Perhaps he had been too hasty before, too brutal. Like a good Corellian wine, the destruction of Obi-Wan Kenobi was something to savor slowly.
Jedi were trained not to break under torture, and Vader had once undergone this training himself, so he knew how comprehensive it was and how difficult it was to overcome. But there was no such thing as a perfect, utterly impervious set of armor, nor a defense with no gaps in it at all.
And Vader was not a mere torturer. As his old Master was his deepest and most intimate tormentor, so too was Vader one of Obi-Wan’s greatest regrets. He used this more than the promise of physical pain, leveraging their shared past and betrayals, and soon Obi-Wan’s carefree, flippant attitude and unshakable faith in the Force melted away like a snowflake sent into a bonfire. Soon, Vader was extracting something he never anticipated from Obi-Wan Kenobi—apologies.
Apologies.
“I’m sorry, Ana—Darth. I—I failed you most profoundly. I’m sorry.”
Anger swirled so thick in the Force as to choke, the dark side spinning through Vader like comfortable spiderwebs while Obi-Wan writhed on the gurney he was chained to. The old man’s eyes were wide and animalistic, his teeth frothy with his own blood. There was a vibro-knife sticking out of his calf, which Vader had nearly released the moment that paltry, inadequate sequence of words had spilled from—
“No. You didn’t fail me. You betrayed me, Obi-Wan. You threw me away without looking back.”
His voice was steady and emotionless as always, owing to the vocoder in his helmet. His respirator nearly rattled. His hands shook, and it was not only the movement of the vibro-knife. His body—the flesh parts—trembled, all the way down to the core of him, the meat that still felt so much that didn’t serve him.
Obi-Wan was apologizing to him now? Now, after his smugness that first day when, unknowing, Vader had made him disappear into nothingness? Now, after all that had happened, the myriad betrayals wreathed around both their necks like nooses?
Vader’s hand twitched; Obi-Wan howled, and the sound was like lightning.
“I—please, I never intended—”
“I do not care what you intended.” Something burned, inside Vader’s chest. Perhaps it was a malfunction—or perhaps it was long-harbored hatred. It couldn’t have been anything else. “I will not allow you to wash your hands of me, Obi-Wan. I will haunt you for the rest of your life and mine.”
Obi-Wan’s body stilled utterly, stained with red and dark grime from wherever he’d been before dropping himself practically in Vader’s lap. There was something new on Obi-Wan’s face, in between the worn lines and the crusted tear tracks—acceptance. His eyes, those eyes destroyed and bloodshot with pain, drilled into Vader’s very soul.
“Haunt me, then. Haunt me only, and not the entire galaxy.”
Vader pulled the vibro-knife from the flesh it was embedded in, ripping the skin anew, and he threw it clattering to the floor as he left the cell without another word. For the very first time, Vader left Obi-Wan Kenobi alive, suffering a broken, bruised, and bleeding body still in his grasp.
And yet, when he woke, the Force still spoke its nebulous promise. And Vader’s heart beat a harder line in his chest when he saw his former Master again, as hale and hearty as he could be at his age. And he dragged Obi-Wan into the belly of the Death Star again, the slightest hesitation in him before he took a different tack, approached his torture with questions.
He wanted no more apologies—he had information to pry free, on the rebels but especially on Obi-Wan himself, so that he might use it to escape this wretched loop. He had a certainty deep in his bones that somehow, Obi-Wan Kenobi was the key, and yet he remained utterly incomprehensible—
“Did Luke and Leia—did they escape? Just tell me that much, and you may do with me as you wish.”
Vader stood back from his work, and blood glinted off his bracers as he did.
“May? You’ve misunderstood our positions here severely, Obi-Wan.” He paused. “Why do you care about the rebels? Would you care that I had them chased down with tie fighters and their freighter destroyed, their frozen bodies retrieved as proof of their death?”
He had seen no bodies—only given orders. He had little doubt that he would end the day with a report that the rebels had once again escaped while his focus had been centered on Kenobi.
Vader felt the shift in the Force before he saw any outward change of Obi-Wan’s demeanor. The intensely bright light that consistently emanated from Obi-Wan Kenobi in the Force wobbled, cracked, crumbled. His signature dimmed, like a fuse inside of him had been crushed between Vader’s fingers, and Vader knew without asking that there was something personal there.
Obi-Wan looked stricken. “No… No, you wouldn’t…”
“There is little I wouldn’t do, Kenobi.” Vader leaned in close, hovering over Obi-Wan’s trembling lips. He pressed on Obi-Wan’s cracked ribs, crashed up against his mental fortitude like a tidal wave in the Force. “Spit it out; why are they important? Is it the princess? Do you still harbor fond feelings for her father—that matters little, for now both of them are dead.”
“The children,” Obi-Wan sobbed, more distraught now than at any other time, even when he had been desperately giving apologies for twenty-year-old grievances.
“None of them were children, Obi-Wan.” Parts of Vader relished in and parts rioted at the way Obi-Wan’s breath hitched miserably as he turned his face away, as Obi-Wan’s mind continued to try to put up its best defense against him. “Were either of them yours?”
Obi-Wan crumpled against him, unable to hold up against the onslaught of the dark side while so distraught. There were flashes of memories in his mind—Padmé Amidala, Vader’s deceased wife, dying in a medical center. Yoda. Bail Organa, taking the girl. Obi-Wan Kenobi, taking the boy. Sorrow and tender affection that weren’t Vader’s mingling in his chest as the babe sucked on Obi-Wan’s fingers, cradled in his arms.
Vader reeled, pulling away from Obi-Wan as if he’d been burned. “You kept my children from me?”
Obi-Wan blinked, disoriented until he was able to focus and guard himself once again from the dark. “Do you think Padmé would have preferred I pass her children over to the Emperor’s Fist? The moment you got your hands on them—”
Vader left his former Master alive that day—but it was a very near thing, and Obi-Wan did not escape unscathed. It wasn’t as if it changed anything in any case, whether Obi-Wan lived or died after Vader left his cell in a whirlwind of rage and pain. Vader still woke the same morning, and the Force still seemed a cloud heavy with rain.
Vader spent the next several days—if one could even call them several when they were all one—trying to find information on his son and daughter, then trying to simply talk with them and reveal to them the connection between them (the way they’d wholeheartedly resisted him after that had him spend several days doing nothing, nursing the agony in his heart). Bridges were clearly on the cusp of being razed already and the sort of deep relationship he had had with his mother could not be built up in just one single day. So, Vader eventually turned his gaze mournfully away from his children who had grown up so tenaciously in his absence, and returned it single-mindedly to his old Master. Once he was free, he could seek out his children again, apologize for what he’d already done to them without knowing their relation, and then make things good between them.
Vader knew that Obi-Wan Kenobi was the key to unlocking the entire puzzle; he just didn’t know how yet.
He woke. And he woke. And he woke.
The Force promised, and promised, and promised, but what it promised eluded Vader entirely.
Perhaps he should shift his focus. He had not even the slightest inkling what the Force was asking of him, but he knew what he wanted, and what he could have immediately.
He wanted to talk to Obi-Wan Kenobi more—to know more about the twenty years he had missed, to dig up whether the apologies he had given had been genuine or a desperate ploy to make the pain stop. Torture was… admittedly effective, in some regards, but utterly unhelpful in others. Vader sensed that he had gone as far as that method would take him, if even he had been intended by the Force to traverse that path at all.
The next time Vader crossed blades with Obi-Wan Kenobi, he merely disarmed him as he had before, and then collared and had him put in a cell. He stood before Obi-Wan, and left the implements of torture away. He was positively gentle—refusing even to press overmuch against Obi-Wan’s mind, except to remind him that Vader was still there.
It was ineffective. Without the coercion of pain, it appeared Obi-Wan would not speak to him unless to snark about his morality and everything that Vader had done over the past twenty years. But even leveraging Obi-Wan’s nervous system had already come to its end, and it only took Vader a few more days to work out how he might entice Obi-Wan to talk to him, like offering a bit of bantha cheese to a desert mouse.
The next day, after bringing Leia to Grand Moff Tarkin, he escorted her down to the hangar himself. It was trivial to dismiss the stormtroopers meant to accompany him—few dared to ever disobey him, and those who did always met a swift and painful demise.
“Let go of me—where are you taking me?” his daughter demanded, sounding like she would rather be shoved in a pen with a rancor than spend even one more second by his side.
“There will be someone who would like to see you,” Vader responded cryptically, which did not seem to comfort her at all. He hated it, the way she loathed him—but he understood why, and so he dragged the princess of an evaporated planet to the hangar, arriving just as the Death Star’s tractor beam finished drawing in Han Solo’s light freighter.
Vader had the area cleared, insisting upon doing the search himself as if he hadn’t seen the inside of that ship several times over. The gangplank did not lower, not even after several minutes, and so it was obvious that his old Master had felt his presence and had foolishly hoped that Vader wouldn’t also sense him in the Force. It had taken some time to recognize him on that first day, it was true, but now Vader brushed up against Obi-Wan nearly as easily as he had during the Clone Wars.
Vader didn’t care to think about the implications of that.
Vader tapped in a few codes in his commlink, then spoke directly into their ship. “Obi-Wan, I have something you want. Come out and we can discuss terms; failure to do so will have consequences you won’t enjoy.”
“Obi-Wan Kenobi?” Leia asked beside him, her expression shifting from pure disdain and hatred into something softer, filled with something adjacent to hero worship.
“Yes, your Jedi knight has arrived.” Vader released her elbow, and she rubbed it, taking a few steps back. Vader’s heart squeezed. “Don’t go far. He hasn’t saved you yet.”
The gangplank lowered, and Obi-Wan walked down it, seeming as serene as ever, utterly unflappable. But Vader could feel his confusion in the Force, the unease accompanying it. His gaze fell first on Leia at Vader’s side, and then on Vader himself as he reached the hangar floor. His lightsaber was still hooked to his belt, but Vader was well aware that he could summon it to his hand in less than a second.
“You for the princess,” Vader said, his metal hands curling into fists. “I ask for nothing more.”
“Nothing more?” Obi-Wan asked. “You’ll release the tractor beam so that everyone can leave?”
“I will.”
“Then…”
Luke came barreling down the gangplank, coming to a stop only when Obi-Wan held his hand back to physically stop him. “Ben, you can’t trust Darth Vader—there’s got to be another way.”
“There isn’t,” Vader interjected flatly. “Take the princess and leave—I keep Obi-Wan.”
“Luke, remember what I’ve taught you. I promise… I won’t be gone from you for very long. The living Force is all around us.”
A flare of anger shot through Vader’s gut—he knew that Obi-Wan was intending to be killed by him, to rejoin the Force by his very own hand. That was how Obi-Wan saw him, and sometimes Vader still wanted to prove Obi-Wan right.
But more than that, he just wanted to talk.
“Come, Obi-Wan,” Vader said, waving his daughter forward.
She scowled at him, but started for the ship anyway. Obi-Wan obediently strode toward him—he always had been willing to throw himself on the sword for others, a quality which Vader could grudgingly admit he now appreciated given its direction of protecting his own children. His brown cloak billowed slightly at his shifting, and his thin lips were pursed into a line. Vader was fairly certain by now that his slight limp was a mere byproduct of his age, and not something affected to make him appear more helpless.
“This must be a trap,” she murmured as they passed each other in the middle. “Be—be careful, Obi-Wan.”
Obi-Wan smiled, almost conspiratorial. “You worry too much about this old bag of bones—concern yourself with your own escape. It’s been a while since I got to spring a trap.”
Vader steered Obi-Wan out of the hangar, barked an order to have the tractor beam released, though this did little to dispel the vague suspicion radiating toward Vader in the Force. Because Vader did not wish to be disturbed by Tarkin poking his nose in, he took Obi-Wan to the detention cells, following him in and shutting the door.
Obi-Wan stared at him as he settled, finding a resting position that put less strain on his legs. He didn’t move, but he was tense he knew he might have to. His gaze roved around, taking in the various torture implements set out on a rolling cart in the corner. For a few moments, Vader’s respirator was the only sound, the rasp of it echoing in the tiny room.
Finally, Vader had his opportunity to speak, and he asked something for which he had never been able to get a straight answer during all his torture. “Where have you been, these past twenty years?”
Again, Obi-Wan’s gaze slipped to the implements, then back to Vader. Vader didn’t need to be able to sense the nuances of his emotional state in the Force to know that he was baffled—one look at his face was enough. He considered the question—or Vader’s intentions—for so long that Vader thought about following it up with some threat he wouldn’t have time to go through with.
His tone, when he finally did answer, was wary. “...Tatooine.”
Vader swore his respirator was malfunctioning—he coughed in his surprise, and agony sprouted deep in his chest from the unexpected movement of his lungs. It took him a few moments to recover, enough that had Obi-Wan the mind he might have gotten a saber through Vader’s suit if he was lucky.
“Tatooine, really?” Vader’s gaze instinctively searched Obi-Wan’s face for trickery, more treachery, but he found none, and that was most discomfiting. “Why?”
Obi-Wan’s expression shuttered instantly, and Vader had a feeling he’d lost this loop just in a single question. It made him want to break something.
After several more hours, Vader had discovered the veracity of that inkling he’d had. Somehow, asking why Obi-Wan had chosen Tatooine to spend his twenty years in hiding on of all the Force-forsaken places shut Obi-Wan down. He refused to answer any further questions, leaving Vader to gnash his teeth and retreat to his quarters late at night when the sensation of his skin finally became unbearable.
Vader realized while in his tank that what caused Obi-Wan to close himself off must have been the boy, his son, whom Obi-Wan had taken. And there was little reason to take the boy to Tatooine specifically when there were so many other backwater planets the empire barely touched, unless Obi-Wan wanted to involve the last scraps of family there that remained. It all made very neat sense, though Vader was certain that Obi-Wan would never admit to any of it.
Obi-Wan was not a man to admit to things easily.
As always, when he woke the Force was his first companion, selling him something Vader could neither examine nor buy. He spent days, weeks, working Obi-Wan over in exactly the same manner, taking each encounter and building up a repertoire of questions and statements which seemed to relax his former Master and make him more compliant, and which ones ended whatever fruitful discussion they had been having.
Vader learned of Obi-Wan’s time on Tatooine, the mundanities that called to his own childhood on the planet, Obi-Wan’s tales of broken vaporators and run-down speeder bikes and eopies and run-ins with the Tuskens. Despite how seemingly forthcoming he was, he always left something out; it was as if there was a void in the center of Obi-Wan’s ramblings, like something Vader could see in his periphery but not make out—even though Vader could now recognize when his former Master was concealing Luke.
There was something else.
It maddened him, in a sense, to not know—did Obi-Wan have a child of his own he was protecting? A lover to share his bed when the desert chilled at night? There was some piece missing. When Vader went to hunt it down, Obi-Wan would himself cool, whatever minute goodwill Obi-Wan had built up towards him gone in a puff of smoke replaced by long, evaluating looks by which Vader was always found wanting.
Vader loathed having to return to his quarters at the end of the night to rest, the way that Obi-Wan would approach him all over again in the morning with that same dreaded suspicion in his eyes, as if he were one moment away from slaughtering them all (Vader’s heart squeezed painfully at the thought). Each failure of his burned acutely; the resetting of all his hard work grew tiresome.
“How am I meant to believe you, when you and your ilk destroyed an entire planet to prove a point?” he asked one day, when Vader pushed too far and not far enough. “I cannot—I will not fall for whatever this is, Darth.”
“...Fine, then.” Vader left in a huff, irritation crackling in him. “As you wish, my old Master.”
It wasn’t difficult to twist and collapse a crucial beam inside the gargantuan firing mechanism of the Death Star, early in the morning when there were few troopers to see him do it. For the first time, the Death Star remained in Alderaanian orbit in the evening as well as the morning.
It… helped. Obi-Wan was more amenable toward him; Leia’s palpable hatred and despair simmered somewhat. It was easier to convince Obi-Wan to have discussions with him, even ones which lead to places where he ended up staring at the wall, his pain palpable in the Force. He never gave up Luke and Leia’s parentage again, though Vader craved to hear it uncoerced from Obi-Wan’s lips. He gave up other things more freely, and Vader was certain now that if the endless cycle of living the same day over and over were only to end, he might eventually be able to convince Obi-Wan to tell him who that specter was that haunted him so.
Some days he wanted to leave Obi-Wan’s side, to work out the crawling jitters underneath his skin that his former Master sometimes evoked. But he never did—how could he, when every moment spent apart was wasted time, bringing him ever closer to losing each hard-won scrap of progress?
It took hours and hours, endless days and days, for him to be ready. He knew that Obi-Wan would most likely turn away from him now just as he had then, but… he had to try.
“I’m sorry.”
The confession fell from his vocoder like a dead bird, practically thumping to the ground between them. Vader watched the way Obi-Wan’s face slackened in shock, clearly not believing that Darth Vader could ever feel remorse for the various sins that weighed down his metal-clad shoulders. Vader was mere moments from snarling out something cruel, leaving Obi-Wan and allowing the embarrassing hurt to fall away into oblivion where only he would remember it, when Obi-Wan finally gave him the courtesy of responding.
“Are you?”
Though Vader had somewhat expected derision, Obi-Wan sounded more surprised than anything, a similar breathless tone to one Vader had in past days elicited with vibro-knives, clamps, and soaking Obi-Wan in darkness. Vader’s heart pounded uncomfortably, and he felt exposed in a way he hadn’t since the first time he’d been put in this suit.
He ran away from Obi-Wan’s piercing eyes, loss of progress be damned. He would return the next day, but… for now retreat was the only option.
He would come back again. And the next day, come back he did, just as he had before.
“I’m sorry,” Vader said again, and it was easier the second time, somehow, with the assurance that it would be received like an unexpected womprat thrown at Obi-Wan’s feet—and nothing worse. “I have… regrets, Obi-Wan.”
“Do you?” Obi-Wan asked, unknowingly much in the same manner as the day before.
Vader felt better equipped to receive it, this time, knowing what would come, having thought about it for hours in the interim already. “I do. I have disgraced your teachings, my old Master.”
That much was more than true—to cling to Sidious the way he’d had to, he’d necessarily given up his former Master’s teachings. The way of a Sith was diametrically opposed to the way of a Jedi. Vader had promised himself to a lifetime of servitude to Sidious in exchange for things he’d never been given, but now… he loathed that he’d ever sworn himself to the man, however necessary he’d thought it at the time.
The thought made his heart do something strange and painful, deep inside of himself, so distracting that Vader nearly missed the tremble in Obi-Wan’s worn hands.
“You…” Obi-Wan started, and it seemed as if the word caused him a great deal of pain, as if it were a sharp rock lodged in his throat. He seemed nothing like the smug Jedi that Vader had seen those first few days when Obi-Wan had boarded the Death Star, and everything like an old, weary man. “Darth… I…”
He stopped, and Vader wondered if that was it, if his genuine apology would only ever be met with—could only ever be met with—half-formed sentences and bodily trembling, as if Obi-Wan remembered only the fires and the death and the betrayal and not the camaraderie that had come before then. Had he not had his respirator, which forced him to breathe even in absence of will, he would have stopped entirely, every cell of him harboring a desire for stillness to prepare for the final blow.
Obi-Wan looked up to the eyes of his mask, hands curling into fists, and he breathed out slowly, measured compared to the shaking of his body.
With the breath, so too went his mental shields. What had been carefully contained even throughout torture was now released, bleeding over from him and spilling into the Force so that Vader might read him as a datapad.
Vader didn’t even need to sift through anything to feel the bloodied regret of the past, the infinite sorrow, the bittersweet pangs at seeing each other like this again. He experienced it almost as if it were his own emotions—and in a sense, they were. A mirror to his own heart, laid bare in front of him. A wavering sort of willingness to forgive personal grievances, a more peaceful sort of acceptance hiding buried within the tumult of the other emotions. And then, suddenly, he found the hollow in Obi-Wan’s twenty years worth of stories, filled in by his mind where it never had been in his words.
The specter that haunted Obi-Wan was Vader.
“Master—” Vader choked out.
And just like that, Obi-Wan concealed his thoughts once again, affecting casualness, as if Vader did not feel like every single mechanical part of him was going to fail, every single biological part of him was going to fail from the revelation. There was excess moisture in Obi-Wan’s eyes, and he turned partly away, exposing his back to Vader’s gaze.
“Hasn’t it gotten a bit late for interrogations, my former apprentice?” Obi-Wan said, and his voice shook the same as his body. “My bones are old and tired.”
Vader felt the agonizing itch of his flesh, and he knew that it was in his best interest to return to his tank. He clenched his jaw so hard that it ached like fire. “I do not wish to go.”
“There is always tomorrow,” Obi-Wan returned, not knowing exactly how frustratingly incorrect he sounded to Vader, who knew that tomorrow everything would be erased again. “Please, leave me to my privacy. I must meditate.”
Vader, reluctantly, bowed his head. “As you wish.”
When he returned to his quarters and filled his tank with fresh bacta, he spent some hours drifting into something like meditation. He pondered on the mirrored state of their hearts, his and Obi-Wan’s, which he knew with little room for doubt. He had seen it in the Force, known that their minds were the most well-aligned they had been in twenty years—or more. Relationships were not built in one day, nor were they destroyed in one.
Vader still had no inkling of what the Force wished for him, what lesson to learn or battle to win, but he knew one thing: he wished to bare himself to Obi-Wan Kenobi, the way that Obi-Wan Kenobi had bared himself to Vader.
With that in mind, Vader woke and sensed the Force promise him something, and he was helped into his suit by his medical droids early. He descended to one of the maintenance levels, pulled that same beam he’d pulled for the past month, and then finally made his way to the bridge, where Grand Moff Tarkin waited for him. He retrieved his daughter for him, and while she lied to them he kept quiet, and when the Death Star failed to fire upon Alderaan he kept quiet. He kept quiet until they were halfway back to her cell, at which point he redirected them to the hangar Obi-Wan and his son would come to.
He traded Leia for Obi-Wan, knew what to say to get him to come quietly even if it inspired no confidence in either of his children. He brought Obi-Wan to the same cell he’d been using for these ‘interrogations,’ and as he often did, Obi-Wan tried to conceal his lightsaber in his robes.
“Keep your ‘saber,” Vader said offhandedly, distracted by what he thought was to come.
“Really, Darth, you’ve got such a sentimental streak,” Obi-Wan drawled, looking at him with disdain and suspicion. The sarcasm cut Vader to the quick, splitting something open deep inside. It was—innocuous, mundane, the usual fare for these loops. Obi-Wan Kenobi thought Darth Vader an irredeemable monster—and indeed, Vader himself had thought somewhat similarly until now. But hearing his old Master treat him as a joke, even unknowing that Vader had been slowly and steadily peeling back the calcified layers around his heart, revealing the soft and quick-beating flesh of it, was far too much for Vader to stomach.
“You don’t even know what I’ve done for you,” Vader started, his vocoder fuzzing at points due to the unusual force he was putting behind his words. “I’ve given over Luke and Leia freely, my children, for you—” Obi-Wan blanched at his words, something made up of nonsense and desperation falling from his lips, but Vader continued nevertheless—“I’ve saved Alderaan for you—were it not for my interference it and all its people would be nothing more than space dust now, obliterated by the Death Star. I have brought you here utterly unharmed and I haven’t even had you restrained. You retain possession of your lightsaber. I… I…”
His respirator seized and panic followed, but the hiccup resolved itself within a few moments. Oxygen still reached his lungs. For another second or two, Vader cursed himself, for he had ruined this day with his outburst and would have to wait for the time to pass so that he could begin again.
Obi-Wan’s lip curved down, his face creasing with his frown. “Even if you are telling the truth, one day does not outweigh twenty years, Darth. The lives you have taken and havoc you’ve wreaked…”
“I cannot—I can’t change any of that,” Vader shot back, washing his hands of sounding reasonable and collected because he had already irrevocably misstepped. “All I can fix is today—and I have.”
Obi-Wan went silent for some time, for so long that Vader agonized and relished in equal measure that he had stunned his charismatic former Master into silence. There was little left to be gained in remaining here, but for some reason Vader could not leave. He was rooted to the spot as firmly as if someone were holding him there with the Force, but his mind was a whirlwind, knowing that whatever feedback he got now, he could take and use tomorrow to have Obi-Wan believe him, to remain calm when Obi-Wan pressed him—
“Why?”
Vader stopped again, like machinery which kept getting debris stuck between the cogs. He looked at Obi-Wan for a few moments, wondering if he’d hallucinated the hoarse whisper because of how familiar Obi-Wan’s voice was to him now.
“Why what?”
“Why have you made such an effort?”
Obi-Wan looked at him with a measure of wary expectation, and Vader knew he had to speak and speak the truth.
“Because I regret it, Obi-Wan. I regret so much of it. I want…” He swallowed dryly and painfully, measured his words. “I want you to see me. As I am.”
Even though it was painful, to see his old Master treat him with suspicion. Even though it hurt, to hear him say such things as he’d heard day in and day out. Even though he might never free himself from this single day, the day in which he’d first killed the man he now wished to bare himself to.
He needed Obi-Wan to see him, for better or for worse.
Before he lost whatever courage he could muster and flee the room as he had many times before, he raised his heavy arms and pressed the lock for his helmet. A pneumatic hiss joined the isochronal rhythm of his respirator.
The first thing Vader felt as he began to lift his helmet was the irritation of unclean air. Even on a starship, where the air was by necessity recycled through massive purifiers, it was not so clean as to be entirely free of pain. His bloodshot yellow eyes, his burned and ruined scalp, even his ears protested the unsterile atmosphere.
And yet, Vader pulled his helmet off anyway, allowing it to rest in his hands, cradled in front of his chest. He saw Obi-Wan Kenobi without the assistance of his helmet’s lenses for the first time in a very long time.
Some fundamental tension bled out of Vader, and he lowered his defenses, his mental shields. Everything came spooling out of him, all at once, bleeding into the Force and opening like a holo to Obi-Wan’s senses—every wretched wrongdoing from the past twenty years, the endless repetitive days he’d waded through until this point, the regret for the things he couldn’t do over and some of the things he had already overwritten, the desperation to escape and start something new, the desire to have Obi-Wan and Luke and Leia and the absence of the other desires which had ruled him for the past two decades. All of it. It hurt, to dredge all of it up like glass being dragged through his soft damaged tissues, to know that even now—especially now—Obi-Wan could still pull away from him, that he could still reject him after seeing the aching core of him.
Obi-Wan gasped quietly like he’d had a vibro-knife slipped between his ribs, a familiar sound in an unfamiliar context. His blue-gray eyes were wide with shock, seeing what had become of Vader, that his injuries had never fully healed. Seeing his entire self, his whole soul, ugly and malformed as it was. Vader couldn’t help but look away in something like shame, but his eyes were drawn back mere moments later, wanting to catalog this in its entirety, to remember it when no one else would even if it was like taking a ‘saber to his weary and withered heart.
“I know…” Vader said softly, when Obi-Wan still said nothing. “I know.”
Tears welled in Obi-Wan’s eyes, sparkling like jewels at the corners of his crows’ feet, and in response Vader felt his tear ducts burn without being able to shed his own. He hadn’t expected to see Obi-Wan’s face soften in anguish, merely at seeing his face, at seeing his heart.
He didn’t expect it when Obi-Wan stepped toward him either, coming close on legs that trembled. He didn’t expect that Obi-Wan would reach out toward him with his wrinkled hands, or that he would hesitate at the last moment.
For a moment, the two of them were perfectly still. Vader had never gotten here before—he didn’t know what Obi-Wan’s reaction would be, what he would do. But he wanted Obi-Wan to do something, anything—
He wanted Obi-Wan to accept him, to love him, as impossible as that felt.
“I’m sorry,” Obi-Wan whispered, his voice tremulous and just barely there. “I should have…”
“There are many things we should have done,” Vader replied, but not intending to be unkind by it. “But we cannot change them.”
Their eyes locked, and Vader saw that Obi-Wan understood what he meant by it, that he saw his heart and intentions. He saw the guilt fading, washed away by acceptance and… perhaps even forgiveness.
Obi-Wan’s fingers gently ghosted along the marred skin of Vader’s head. It hurt, the pressure on such delicate flesh, but it was also the best Vader had felt in a very long time. Shaking, Obi-Wan drew Vader closer to him, and Vader allowed it. He bent in his knees when Obi-Wan drew him down, closed his eyes to allow whatever was to come to pass.
He made a sound when Obi-Wan’s lips pressed against the scarred skin of his forehead—the bristles of his beard were soft enough that it didn’t quite bring pain, though the level of sensation was overwhelming. The sound was soft, almost disconsolate, though the vocoder flattened it into almost nothing. Vader felt as though his heart might burst in his chest, that this was how the great Sith lord would die, felled by this unexpected tenderness from a most unlikely source.
“Will you stay with me this time?” Vader asked, his voice so cracked and broken that not even the best of technologies could have disguised it. He needed this—needed to know that he could have this. He had never known before.
Obi-Wan was quiet for some time, even after his chapped lips pulled away from Vader’s exposed scalp. Vader’s heart sank, pieces chipping from it, until one of Obi-Wan’s hands trailed down from his head to his left hand, taking the gloved metal fingers in his own and squeezing as if it were still flesh and blood.
Obi-Wan’s breath felt like a summer breeze on his skin. “We never really left each other, did we?”
“Master,” Vader pleaded, begging for a real answer. It was true; Vader had been haunted by Obi-Wan since they’d parted, and he knew with a grave certainty that it had been much the same for his old Master. That still spoke nothing of the future, whatever future the Force would even give him.
“Yes… I will stay,” he said, letting his lips graze Vader again. “With you.”
The moment felt almost electric in its intimacy; few had ever even seen Vader like this and lived, let alone touched. Vader felt that electricity running up the remnants of his spine, something like hope swirling around in his stomach.
“I can take you away from here. Somewhere safer.”
Vader straightened up again, but he didn’t let go of Obi-Wan’s hand. He never wanted to again, if he could help it—the hand was like an anchor to him, one he didn’t quite fully believe existed yet. If he was only to have this for mere hours before returning to the agonizing distrust and distance, then he wished to do it somewhere that was not here.
Obi-Wan looked at him when he opened his eyes, examining him and seemingly finding him adequate. “Would you? And where would that be?”
Vader had no idea, yet—he hadn’t thought that far ahead. “Let’s get to my shuttle first.”
“Alright,” Obi-Wan responded after a moment.
Vader got the distinct sense that he had been evaluating how far away the children’s light freighter could have gotten until now, but at the moment he had little inclination to go after them. That path was closed off to him, barred until… until he had more than just the one single day.
Vader donned his helmet once more, sighing in something like relief when the air filtered rapidly and the sting all around him faded marginally.
It wasn’t difficult to order his shuttle prepared, or to take Obi-Wan from his cell—in which he had only spent one solitary hour with Vader—and once he had done those two things, it was simple to have Obi-Wan board the shuttle and he himself afterwards. He had nothing precious to him here on the Death Star, and so he only needed himself and his ‘saber alongside.
In all likelihood none of this would matter the moment he put himself in the small bacta tank in the infirmary at the back of the shuttle, but that somehow made it all the more meaningful that Obi-Wan sat in the copilot’s seat without saying anything. Vader finished his pre-flight checks and ordered the hangar door open, and then they were gone.
That easily—except that the holoprojector in the middle of the two of them suddenly flickered. Grand Moff Tarkin stood with a military stiffness, his arms at his sides.
“Lord Vader, where are you going? Need I remind you that the Emperor—”
Vader pressed a button on the console to end the call, huffing in irritation. He didn’t care. He would not waste another second on Tarkin or Sidious ever again, if he could help it. He’d had enough of him over the past months and months of being stuck in the same day.
Obi-Wan looked at him out of the corner of his eye, Vader could see it when he punched in the coordinates for some Outer Rim planet which had next to no Imperial presence. Before confirming his selection, he input a secondary code to keep it from being logged in any Imperial systems, planning to rip the actual physical components from the ship once they were away from here.
He sent them into hyperspace, leaving everything unimportant behind. Bright white streaks blurred around them as space bent, and then they were caught in that signature soothing blue hum.
Vader and Obi-Wan sat in silence for quite some time, watching each other, evaluating each other. Vader could feel Obi-Wan’s Force signature around him, poking and prodding at his own, trying to find the cracks in his armor, or where the hold of the dark side might have given way to the gentleness of the light. Obi-Wan—for once—did not at all shy away from the broken parts of him, the parts which still harbored anger and resentment for the betrayals and suffering he’d had heaped upon him. Vader, in return, tried not to cling to that warm and comforting presence in the Force.
“Is there a bed somewhere?” Obi-Wan asked eventually, stretching in a way only old men who’d put too much strain on their bones stretched. He smiled wryly. “We should keep our strength up, on the run from the Empire now and all.”
Vader felt a pang of disappointment, of desperation—if they went to bed (and they would need to, because Vader was beginning to feel the crawling of his skin more exacerbated than normal by having removed his helmet), then all of this would melt away as if in a dream, and Vader would have only himself and a group of people he wanted to love him hating him instead. But upon seeing Obi-Wan yawning with his face half turned away, all his sense left him once again.
“There is one.”
“And where will you sleep?” Obi-Wan questioned. “Surely you still do; everyone must sleep.”
“There is a bacta tank in the infirmary.” Vader stood. “I must rest there.”
Vader could feel Obi-Wan’s hesitation as he strode towards his destination, the creak of his chair as he stood distinctly slow and gentle.
“...Would you allow me to assist you? It can’t be easy to get all of that off.”
Vader paused, a particular joint in his leg creaking as he did. He would not blame Obi-Wan if he was just affecting politeness—he knew his body was no longer a pleasure to look at, and Obi-Wan now must have known it too, after seeing the barest glimpse. It was already enough to know that Obi-Wan Kenobi would, in some world, run away with him. That he would, in some world, look upon Vader and press lips to his forehead, for whatever reason he had done so.
His heart pounded as he passed into the infirmary. “If you wish.”
He had just unclipped his cape and thrown it over the chair next to the horizontal, low-lying bacta tank when he heard Obi-Wan’s footsteps follow his instead of departing into either the refresher or the small bunk. He turned to face Obi-Wan, then stilled, hesitant.
“I do wish to,” Obi-Wan said, something complicated on his face. “Tell me what to do.”
If it were possible for Vader to weep, he might have—how gracious, how cruel of the Force to give him this, to allow him this moment of tenderness and belonging only to rip it away in the morning. He directed Obi-Wan’s hands, having him help to strip each piece of armor plating away from him, baring more and more of his mottled and burned flesh. Obi-Wan’s fingers ghosted over the skin of his stomach, the ridges and places where metal had replaced it, but he looked at Vader’s face no longer, and he guarded his thoughts so closely that Vader could not read the shape of them.
When it was just Vader and no armor, bare and itching in the open air, Obi-Wan filled the tank halfway. The top was flipped open, and Obi-Wan helped him climb in, and Vader sighed as his raw flesh was soothed by the medical gel. Vader sneaked a glance at Obi-Wan’s face—so tender and focused—as he was lowered down into it, and the knowledge that he would likely wake up in a different, larger, more luxurious tank in the morning forced him to cling to Obi-Wan’s hands even as he turned away to retire himself for the night. His hands just wouldn’t release, the metal fingers clamping tightly down so that Obi-Wan could not leave him to be replaced by another within mere hours.
But when Obi-Wan turned back again, his face was half surprise and half understanding, no pity but compassion. That face drew truth out of Vader like a fishhook at the end of a line.
“I—I don’t want you to leave me,” Vader hissed, some syllables falling away without artificial assistance. “Not again.”
“I won’t,” Obi-Wan murmured. His hands relaxed in Vader’s hold, letting Vader keep him—for the moment. “I promised I would stay with you.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
If Vader lost this one, this day, this brief moment of tenderness after ages of agony and anguish—
Obi-Wan looked him in his eyes, and suddenly he shifted his grip, so that he was the one holding Vader’s durasteel hands. “I will be here tomorrow—and there will be a tomorrow. Trust the Force—do you not think that it guided you here for a reason?”
Vader tried to take in air as he had once been taught, feeling for the Force and letting it push him instead of the other way around. He sat up, bringing himself closer to Obi-Wan, and then closer still, letting himself be guided by the energy all around them.
He leaned in toward Obi-Wan, his lips parted and making a hungry, desperate noise. He halted, a mere breath from Obi-Wan’s lips, mortified at his inability to control himself. Of course, even though Obi-Wan and he had taken the first step toward reconciliation, Obi-Wan would never, not in a million years—
Obi-Wan’s breath came in shuddering, and Vader thought for sure that it must be disgust, but then… Obi-Wan closed the distance. Their lips met, and Vader made a sound like he was dying. It was just a gentle press, chaste and sweet, but Vader knew that the ache of it would haunt him for at least as long as the phantom ache of his limbs had.
When they broke apart, Vader did his best to cling to Obi-Wan, and Obi-Wan held him in return. His head was getting light—without his respirator or the pure oxygen of the tank, he wasn’t getting enough in his lungs—but he would have stayed there forever if only it meant being held by his Master who had kissed him.
“Master…” Vader whispered, his voice ruined and raspy without the vocoder.
“Go to sleep, my dear apprentice,” Obi-Wan responded, running his hand gently between Vader’s shoulder blades. “It’s late. We can discuss this in the morning—all of it.”
Vader, after a moment’s hesitation, nodded, and he let Obi-Wan finish lowering him into the tank. He didn’t want to lose this; he was terrified to. Before setting the tank to finish filling up, Obi-Wan settled Vader’s oxygen tube in his mouth, and his knuckles dragged softly against Vader’s cheek for a moment. Then, the tank filled up, Vader closed his eyes, and Obi-Wan left the room.
He stretched his senses in the Force for quite some time, wanting to feel the way Obi-Wan puttered around. He didn’t shower—perhaps Vader would need to get him used to the idea that water was not quite so precious anymore—but he drank a glass before lying down to sleep in his bunk. Obi-Wan’s Force signature settled long before his own, but Vader was able to soak himself in the proximity of his former Master, in the tender green shoots of their reconciliation, and eventually he too succumbed to a deep and miraculously dreamless sleep.
When Vader woke, the Force promised him nothing, but instead was settled in satisfaction, even the dark side sated around him. There was a particular strand in it that led Vader to a signature he wanted to wrap himself around utterly like a constrictor, but he resisted the impulse. He heard the bacta in the horizontal tank—not his tank on the Death Star, a different tank—drain halfway, allowing him to open his eyes and blink away the thick healing fluid as the top of it opened up.
Above him, the lined and aged face of Obi-Wan Kenobi hovered, not quite smiling, but definitely not scowling either. There was, if he wished to be romantic about it, a gentle twinkle in his eye. As if in answer to an unspoken question, his purpose at Vader’s side, Obi-Wan tipped his head toward Vader’s empty suit.
There was a hand reached out to him, and it was all he had ever wanted. With only a moment’s hesitation, long enough that he could recognize a long-dormant spark of joy coming to life in him, Vader reached toward his old Master, forgiving and forgiven.
Metal and flesh met in the middle, and Obi-Wan carefully pulled Vader out of the tank and toward his new life.