Chapter Text
Cold metal grips him by the ankle, biting into raw, pink skin.
There is no sound here — not the kind he expected, anyway. When he wades into the Force, he can hear the faintest hints of life; scurrier paws scampering over stone; water dropping from the ceiling somewhere; the flicker of the torch outside his cell, his only source of light. No screams. No pleas for it all to end, by any means necessary.
Obi-Wan should have expected this.
Some part of him always knew what Anakin was capable of. He never wanted to admit it, not to the Council, and certainly not to himself, but he knew. Even when he was a youngling, small, like his son, Anakin had a penchant for greed, for possessiveness. A refusal to be left behind or abandoned. An inclination to punish those who dared to try.
He knew that when (not if) his former Padawan caught up to him, death would seem like a luxury. As Obi-Wan drifts in the rocky current of the Force, he recalls a mission on Syrius-9, Anakin thirteen or fourteen years standard. A forested planet, uninhabited, the Jedi temple there reclaimed by the earth. He found Anakin deep in the woods, lounging against a felled tree, an insect caught between his fingers.
“What do you have there?”
His Padawan looked askance at him, then back to the creature in his hand. Sky-blue wings jutted from its back, beating desperately against the air. “Don’t know. It was caught in a crawler’s web, so I saved it.” The wings flapped harder. Anakin’s fingers bore down on it, merciless. “But now it’s trying to get away.”
“As is its nature, Anakin,” Obi-Wan explained patiently. He approached the boy with calm, sure steps, as unease crept up his spine. The Force was strong here, and disturbed. “It is a wild thing. Let it go.”
And Anakin had pouted at him, sour-faced, like a child. “But I don’t want to. I saved him, so that means he’s mine.” He looked back at the flutterwing trapped between his thumb and forefinger, and his gentle eyes hardened. “He can’t get away if I do this.”
“Anakin!”
The insect made no sound, nor did its wing, as Anakin reached up with his other hand and tore it in half. It was too small a creature to even feel pain, really, or to share what pain it did feel with the Force, but Obi-Wan was no less horrified by this boy he’d raised.
And yet he’d still held Anakin on the journey home as he cried and grieved, having discovered the flutterwing dead in the box he’d kept it in. And he forgave Anakin for his madness, and his cruelty, and his fragile heart, and they gave the little insect a Jedi funeral when they returned to Coruscant, privately, just the two of them. Anakin was no happier releasing it to the Force than he had been to release it to the wind. But Obi-Wan forgave him for that, too.
Footsteps pull him from his meditation. Obi-Wan’s tired eyes open slowly, watching as Anakin — Vader — approaches from the shadows, into the dim light of the lone torch.
A tray of nutriblock slides beneath the bars of his cell door, floating to his side, aided by the Force. Obi-Wan doesn’t spare it a glance. Instead he stares into Anakin’s beautiful, tormented face and asks, “Luke?” with all the exhausted strength he can muster.
“You were dreaming,” Vader tells him, instead of answering. “What about?”
He’s been here long enough to know better, and so he doesn’t reply, refusing to be drawn into what will undoubtedly become another argument. “Where is Luke, Darth?”
“My son is resting now. In my chambers, where he belongs.” He approaches the bars, blocking out the light, plunging Obi-Wan’s cell into darkness. The Force is with him: he doesn’t flinch away. “What were you dreaming about?”
It’s pointless to say nothing. An even worse idea to lie. “You,” he says, shivering at the pleased glint that fills those golden eyes, the Force coiling around him like a vice. “And what you’re capable of, when it comes to the things you believe belong to you.”
“Luke does belong to me,” Vader says, and the torch behind him flickers and goes out, the cavern now as black as his armor. His voice carries through the air, ringing off of the stone from all directions. “And he will remain with me, at my side.”
And then he turns to leave, his footsteps Obi-Wan’s only indication. Obi-Wan closes his eyes — there is nothing to see now, anyway — and calls, patient, through the darkness: “Remember what happens to those you throw in cages, Darth,” searching for Luke’s wild presence in the Force, his heart beating like wings, somewhere in the castle far above them. “They will always find some way to elude you, no matter how hard you try.”
The Force tightens around his throat, vicious. The footsteps stop, the corridor silent now, apart from his desperate, guttural gasps for air. Obi-Wan claws at his throat, but he can no longer wield the Force, it obeys no one here but its Master. Red and white flashes fill his vision, dissecting the pitch black. Drool slaloms down his chin as he struggles to breathe.
Then the Force ripples, as if struck, and warmth spears through the biting chill of Vader’s Force presence, urging it back. The icy grip around his throat recedes, and a calm, albeit worried touch takes its place, as gentle as a warm breeze, as solid as the ground beneath his feet.
Luke…
He doubles over, coughing, retching onto the damp stone floor, as Vader’s heavy footsteps once more fill his ears, growing quiet and further away with each purposeful, gloating step.
“Not this time,” the Sith Lord says, arrogant. Victorious. “My Master.”
And then he is gone.