bad dreams (saving an email about SW dreams, here)
Oh, yes, my cracked dreams.
Okay, lemme see how well I can recreate this weirdness . . .
Obi-Wan is wandering out in the Jundland Wastes, far away from his hut in the southwest corner of the Dune Sea, with his baby bantha - which for whatever reason (probably the fact that my brain keeps flashing on the original StarGate movie and that mastage that runs off with Daniel) seems to be big enough to carry him, already - because my dream pretty much begins with him rediscovering the cave holding the Rakatan star temple in the Eastern Dune Sea that helped (the then apparently still in the process of falling to the Dark Side) Jedi Knight Revan locate the Star Forge. And this probably has as much to do with my own convoluted plottings for Tatooine and Alderaan in my WIP than anything else, so if it sounds weird, just kind of nod and smile and skim over it.
The way he finds the cave is a bit odd - it's kind of like something in Splinter of the Mind's Eye, actually. He sees a flash of something in the sand, dismounts to go investigate, and the sand opens up underneath him. The sparkle was a gem in the edge of a portal that has eroded away to only the thinnest shell under the contiual friction fraying of all that sand, and his weight it too much for it. It breaks open and he tumbles down into the caverns.
He's not hurt by the fall - just startled and a bit miffed to have been caught so utterly off guard. But then he looks around and sees the symbol of the Infinite Empire - a symbol that he recognizes from his research into the history of violence between the Jedi and the Sith (research done privately and quietly in the Temple Archives years ago, after Qui-Gon's death on Naboo had catapulted him into Jedi Knighthood and he had been granted rights and privledges to various restricted materials in the Jedi Archives, research that involved reading into the life of Jedi Master and one-time Sith Lord Reven, as a part of his investigation into the Sith. And he knows, then, what it is that he has tumbled into - the temple cavern holding one of the star maps used to locate that terrible weapon, the Star Forge. Gingerly, he sets about exploring, fascinated by the find but appalled by the fact that the cavern is still here, still intact, and still apparently full of artifacts.
There are lights up in the ceiling that come on automatically, sensing the presence of a living being within the underground temple complex. At some point, Obi-Wan wanders far enough into the cavern - which is really a huge system of interlocking (and most likely enlarged/refined) caves and passageways all strung together in a pattern that actually conforms, in miniature to a section of the Star Map contained at its heart - that he finds a sliver of what looks like glass or diamond, set prominently on display in one of the cavernous temple's many rooms so that its prisms catch the light and give off rainbowed sparkles of dappled light. Curious, he picks the prism up, and as he turns the crystal in his fingers, the light around it builds and gathers together into a brilliant ball of banded light (think, auroa borelias type colored light) that swiftly swells like a gas flame into a nebulous globe, azure-bright and big enough and bright enough to engulf his hands entirely.
As soon as the light blooms like that, a beatific smile stretches across his features, so altering his face that for a moment he is not Ben Kenobi, not the broken remnant of a Jedi Knight and Master whose failure has doomed the galaxy to the darkness of the Sith, but just Obi-Wan again - the same bright-eyed and smiling little boy who stood alone in the rain, naked and laughing, just for the joy of learning of this miracle of water falling from the sky, not long after he was first brought back to Coruscant by an extremely young and openly loving Jedi Knight by the name of Qui-Gon Jinn, and who trusted Qui-Gon to come carry him away back inside and wrap him in first towels and then dry clothes and warm blankets, before lovingly tucking him away into bed for the night, fingers lingering in his hair and the light touch of his mind urging peacefulness as Obi-Wan drifted away into sleep. The tension collected at the base of his spine uncoils like a spring and sparks up his back as a sudden and unshakeable bliss roots him into place, adamant as pain. For perhaps the first time in his life, he is abruptly and absolutely utterly deeply profoundly happy. He understands, for a moment, that life isn't all about suffering, sacrifice and pain, sorrow and stife, loss and regrets and despair, but instead growth, and learning, and love. He realizes, with a bone-seizing laugh that rocks the core of him with its certainty of joy, that life itself is nothing more than a stream of love -
You will have a name in this time, childling. And you will have all the limits that go with having a name. You will have a name in this time because where you are everything has a name . . . Where you are, young one, everything that can happen has happened. Where you are, nascent one, everything that has happened is happening again . . . And though you will begin to learn the names of everything in your new life, no matter how many names you learn, no matter what sequence you arrange them in, they will tell you nothing about the source or the end. They exist because you do, to assure yourself that your existence can and does happen, then and now, always, and almost as you imagine this is happening . . . But names, young life, will be dwarfed by the hugeness of your breath, even though their hunger will be your long traveling, their practice all you will ever endure, their eventual test to perfect the space your passing leaves behind.
Why are we here, in this time/place of names? Each instant, we're changed. Why? Nothing has been created. Everything is a shadow of what will be. And if nothing is a shadow, everything has already been created, everything is fated. All of us have a destiny. Don't be afraid! There are no secrets. Our senses fit the world. What you see is seen, what you know is known, what you feel is felt. Heaven and earth move through each other, but the mind, at the last, is moveless. We are presense. Do not be afraid! Everything is energy, everything is fuel, is change, is growth. Love it. Love it all. Every sound, every odor, every touch, every sensation, every thought, every thing, all things, it all changes us, allows us growth, gives us energy. Embrace. Accept. Grow. Love. Above and beyond all other things, love. The past is but a disguise. Let go of its static limitations. Embrace change, embrace growth. You are consciousness itself - not the objects of consciousness. You have a body, but you are not your body. You are the awareness of your body. You have thoughts, but you are not your thoughts. You have feelings, but you are not your feelings. Who, then, are you? You are the living center of the transparent and inflexible diamond of time. And Infinity is Unity. All things are one thing. It never ends. Life never ends. All things die into newness.
You want out? Stillness of mind is a door. Memory, the continuing history of grief. Your back is a road for your shadow and all the darkness of the worlds to cross. You are more than a shape, more than mere density, more than the emptiness in the grain of your bones, more than the singing nothingness between the atoms of your blood. Named and pinned to your time/place, you are, again, the transparent and inflexible heart of the diamond core of time. As long as the past is real, you will remain. And you will be named. Nothing/everything happens by coincidence. What matters is that you go through events to the stillness behind them. Things can lose their gravities, their coherence, their names. Things fall apart. Things die into newness. But think! Understand that you can't understand. And this is progress. It is like digging holes in a river, like forgetting one thing to remember another. It's because another persistence pushes under the blood, because we're doomed to squint after absolutes, because nothing less will do. The body is the unconscious of the world. Remember! The innocence you own waits where you left it, deep as the last of your fears. Let go! Stillness is the space of our lives, so empty it can hold all things. Love, youngling. Infinity is Unity, and it is growth, is life, is change, is love -
It is rapture, it is ecstacy, it is truth, being offered up to him. Obi-Wan knows this, utterly and unquestionably, with a clarity so deep that it should be transparent, and yet instead it is radiant, vibrant, with color and shadow, light and darkness entwined, and it is so very, very good, it feels so simple, so true, so right -
But then his soul remembers Anakin and is screaming a denial so absolute that it disrupts his connection with the Rakata crystal and unroots him from the depths of its message, and Obi-Wan flings the shard from him with all of his considerable strength - so violently that the crystal flies into the farther wall and, because of the nature of the material forming it and the incredible speed at which it is travelling, imbeds itself into that wall so deeply that it is lost to sight - before turning and running, at a speed that renders him little more than a blur rushing through the cavernous temple, back out to where the temple portal's collapse tumbled him down into the caverns in the first place. A controlled acrobatic leap takes him back up out of the caves, and then he is back with his bantha and headed for the nearest settlement - and a drink that he desperately feels he needs, to take the edge off of his pain - just as fast as his bantha can carry him.
In my dream, that's why Obi-Wan's in the "cantina," more than half-drunk and half-mad with pain, when Anakin/Vader finally makes it back to Tatooine. I know it's Dama's inn but it actually looks like what I remember a cantina on Bakura being described as, with floating repulsor-chairs and whatnot. Obi-Wan is about halfway through drinking what will be the last of several glasses full of some very potent blue alcoholic drink (erhm, sorry! That blue drink might be a subconscious holdover from my perception of Romulan ale, or it might be something from an actual SW fanfic or even something in the EU. I'm really not sure!) when something pushes past the fog of misery clouding his mind and he almost chokes on his drink. A sense of warmth/light, a power, a presence he has not felt since -
Obi-Wan swallows the last of his drink, rises as he reaches deep into his desert robes to locate the carefully hidden hilt of his lightsaber, and in the same motion turns, ignites the 'saber, and flings his glass to shatter at Vader/Anakin's feet.
The worst, unformed fear of his heart is cofirmed by what he sees.
Anakin has become a monster, a pieced-together hybrid of droid and human even more unnatural and wrong-feeling within the Force than General Grievous had been, encased in a life-support shell of gleaming black, managed by a thoracic processor that winks pale green and red color against the cloak draping and encasing that deadened shell like a shroud. The jointed limbs look ungainly, clumsy, and ugly; the featureless curves of black that serve for eyes are inhuman; and the underthrust grillwork of what Obi-Wan suspects (and will soon learn absolutely) is a vocabulator suggests the jaws of a saurian predator built of polished blast armor. All in all, it is like some monstrously overblown, sickeningly dark image of an evil Mandalorian warrior crossed with some insectile, chitinous black droid. It has obviously been designed to strike terror into the hearts of those who look upon it. And it stinks of the Dark Side of the Force. It stinks of fear, and anger, and pain.
It stinks of Mustafar, and betrayl, and agony and -
O Force! Anakin, how could you?
*********
And this is how it feels to be the black-armored and boxed-in remnant of Anakin Skywalker, the being Emperor Palpatine - Darth Sidious of the Sith - has remade into the image of his own dark desire, the black monstrosity that is Darth Vader: his universe is consists of and is bounded by limitless pain.
The light burns. It always burn him. A part of him has never returned from that day, from lying abandoned upon black glass sand beside a lake of fire, with flames feasting messily upon his flesh.
He can hear himself breathing. It comes hard, and harsh, and it scrapes agonizingly against nerves already rubbed raw, but he cannot stop it. He can never stop it. He cannot even slow it down. He doesn't have control over his own lungs anymore. Mechanisms hardwired into his chest bypass the scorched and supposedly charred beyond recovery, beyond any/all hope of use, lumps that once were working lungs in order to breathe for him. They will pump oxygen into what remains of his bloodstream forever, unless destroyed or disrupted by some powerful outside power or Force.
He can't hear the sound that the glass makes when it shatters, literally right upon the toes of his black leather boots. Not in the way he once did. Sensors in the shell that prisons his head trickle meaning directly into his brain, information translated from sound-waves into a semblance of knowledge of sound, of understanding that there is a specific noise that has resulted from the action of this thrown and now broken vessel.
Scorched-pale eyes colorless with the scars of unhealed damage may very well be open, but it is optical sensors that integrate light and shadow into a hideous simulacrum of the world around him.
Or perhaps the simulacrum is perfect, and it is the world that is hideous. The thought, almost as soon as it occurs, is just as firmly shoved back into the darkness, where it belongs. But the pain of it - that is not so easily dismissed.
After all, his life is pain, now.
And the sight - the simulacrum of sight - of the man before him -
The pain is vaster than all the oceans of all the worlds. Deeper than the spaces between the stars. Because he knows this man - he knew this man so well, once upon a time, back when he was still just Anakin Skywalker, the Jedi's Chosen One and the darling of the HoloNet, the hero of the Republic, the famous Hero With No Fear, part of that legendary and beloved team collectively known by the title of the Warrior of the Infinite, otherwise known as Kenobi and Skywalker, Anakin and Obi-Wan, and O Force! He had thought he had no heart left within him, to break, but this -
This -
This agony is so awful that it burns with its awful coldness. It is thousands of times worse than the pain he'd felt upon remembering the atrocities he had committed, under Palpatine's - no, Sidious' command, in the slaughter of all those innocents at the Jedi Temple. The shocked betrayal in the eyes of the children are nothing compared to this, to the inescable knowledge of how completely he has failed, how utterly he has betrayed, the man before him now. It holds not even the palest reflection of the true immensity and intensity of the pain of the treachery, the treason, he commited against Obi-Wan, against the team that they were, the bond that they shared. The love that they had, pure in spite of all the malicious whispers, and right, he now knows, completely and absolutely right, despite all of the dark frowns and doubts of the other Jedi. The realization of that, the inescapable knowledge of it - Force! It is tens, no, hundreds, no, thousands of times worse than even the pain he felt when he remembered what he had done, how he had caused the death of Padmé, the woman he had so selfishly taken to wife, though he knew that it was forbidden and had even, by the date of their secret wedding, understood why. That pain had burnt far hotter than even the lava fields of Mustafar, but this pain, this - !
This agony is so unspeakably terrible that it overwhelms and utterly destroys the burning core of hatred and anger that has fueled him ever since he reawakened to this pale mockery of life, after Mustafar, trapped by his own selfish, fearful actions and Sidious' unending lust for power within the darkness of Vader's shadow, entombed alive within this black husk. The pain of Padmé's loss had made him burn with rage: the agony of understanding that he had destroyed and discarded the one truly good thing in his life, out of his own petty anger and fear and that damnable flaw in him that always made him want more than he should, to feel as though he needed more than the Jedi would allow, than Obi-Wan could ever be willing to give him, shatters him utterly.
It is for answers that he has come here: answers to the cry of his broken heart, which cannot comprehend why/how Obi-Wan could have left him there, burning, to die upon Mustafar, even after all of the horrible things he had said and done; answers to his questions about how seriously he was actually hurt, and how necessary these inferior and increasingly seemingly unnecessary mechanical alterations actually were, when Sidious arrived to "save" him from the lava; answers to the question that he has never, until this very moment, even allowed to form fully enough to register within his mind, the question as to whether or not Obi-Wan has ever loved him and suffered for it, suffered for him, as Anakin has loved and suffered because of Obi-Wan.
Instead, faced with the imperfectly translated knowledge of the sound of a thrown and violently shattered glass, the stomach-turning hideous wrongness of the simulacrum of the sight of Obi-Wan - an Obi-Wan who is once again looking upon him over the ignited blade of his lightsaber, his face so twisted by emotion that it is entirely possible that even with two functioning eyes, the sight of him might have seemed wrong - and the hollowness of absolute despair, swallowing him and his pain until nothing of him remains but the echoes of that cry from his breaking heart, he finds that he has no questions to ask.
Instead, that hateful and hated another voice speaks for him, out from the vocabulator that serves him in place of what he had been assured, by the Emperor, were lips and tongue and throat and laranyx so badly damaged by heat and fire, so close to being entirely burned away, that he should count it a miracle that the vocabulator can function well enough to pick up on and translate whatever words he might try to speak into the appropriate sounds. And what it says is: "Obi-Wan. Master. Please. Please. Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi. You're my only hope."
*********
For a moment, the hatred within Obi-Wan is so intense that he cannot even begin to think around it.
And so in that moment, he abandons all thought and lets go.
Lets go of a lifetime of striving to obey, to conform, to please, to strip away and destroy all the parts of himself that are undesirable and to reshape what is left until all that remains is a model of Jedi excellence, a lifetime of sacrifice and pain and endless striving, unending strife, a lifetime that has made him who he is, that is responsible for landing him here, a broken down man good for nothing and no one, unable, apparently, to even successfully manage to cover his tracks well enough to protect one innocent little child -
It is the last straw. Figuratively, and literally. The thought of Luke, that he has now failed so utterly that he will have doomed that innocent baby, shatters what little is left of his control.
And the sound of his control breaking, within the Force, is like the sound of a world cracking in two, the sound of a world being broken open like an egg being smashed with a hammer, broken open and exploded into fragments so small that nothing salvagable of the whole survives amongst that wreckage.
Ah. So. This is it, then. This is why the Council was so afraid of anger, so terrified at the thought of a Jedi losing control. Now I understand. It is because we can, in our fury, in our anger, easily crush worlds.
Once upon a time, Obi-Wan Kenobi had thought he understood anger. He had thought he understood hatred. He had thought he understood blind, unreasoning, ravening, mindelessly destructive fury. In the wake of Naboo, and the muder of his Master, Qui-Gon Jinn, he had thought he understood all of these things far too well.
Now, he knows absolutely that he has known nothing.
It is a hatred and a rage so absolute, so refined, so powerful, that it dwarfs all else. It consumes him utterly, and he wants it, he wants to be consumed by it, invites it in knowingly, lovingly, laughing as he beckons it to it. The power that it gives him is so vast that it requires less effort than it would be worth it to even flick his wrist into the throwing gesture directing that power, channeling it through him and throwing the abomination that once was Anakin Skywalker swiftly and violently across the room, tossing him casually through not one wall, not two, but three, until his crumpled black form is finally ejected entirely from the building, fragments of the broken walls clinging to his cape and dusting the high gloss of his armor until it appears more grey than black, an effect that is only heightened when he hits the dirt outside of the cantina and bursts through its sandy crust, throwing up particles of dust and silica in an exploding cloud of debris. And here, too, the boy once again shows his true colors, for the whimpering coward had raised not even so much as a finger to defend himself. Incensed, Obi-Wan leaps after the fallen figure, and whips his lightsaber viciously around it, scoring his armor deeply, deliberately, and cutting away that ridiculous black cape - so much like the cloak that Dooku, that Tyranus, once adopted, and somehow just reminescent enough of Anakin's always more cape-like outer robe that the very sight of it makes Obi-Wan see red, makes him see red until he attacks the foul thing with his lightsaber and succeedes in reducing it to smoking strips of useless fabric - but not attempting to strike any kind of fatal blow against the Sith, not yet. Oh, no, that would be far too easy. Far too quick an end for him.
He doesn't deserve quick or easy.
He deserves to suffer. He deserves pain. He deserves humiliation. He deserves to be crushed and broken open and destroyed so utterly, so thoroughly, that he will be begging for death, before it is over with!
Obi-Wan Kenobi is so thoroughly transported and transformed with the power of his own rage and hatred against the Sith, against this thing, against Anakin, even for allowing himself to be trapped into becoming this hideous amalgamation that is so clearly at least as much machine as it is flesh, that the obvious irony inherent in the act of his surrender to that anger escapes him entirely.
Because Anakin has, after all, been proven right. Again. And that means that he's always been right. Emotions can make one stronger in the Force, and they can supply one with more clarity of purpose. A Jedi can become much more than he is, simply by embracing all of that impetus and allowing it to propel him up along the cresting wave of the Force.
Anakin, it would seem, has been right about many things. Including the sweet addictiveness of this, the absolute rush that comes from giving in to all that emotion and allowing it to carry him and drive him far deeper into the Force than he would ever have the strength to go, otherwise.
So it is entirely surprising, when it filters through that red-tingued euphoria, that the only sounds to be heard are not pleas for mercy, but rather broken sobs, so very like the remembered sound of a storm of gut-wrenchingly violent weeping from a certain child, quite small for his age but with enough heart and courage to put even those of the greatest of men to shame, who had dashed so very recklessly into the melting pit on Naboo, only minutes after the fight with the Sith had ended, only moments too late to be able to try to do anything to save Master Qui-Gon . . .
No! He will not think about that! He will not think about how much pain he'd been in, and how Anakin's grief had given him a way to show that pain without feeling as if he were failing, as a Jedi, for giving in to the emotion, and no, damnit! He won't -
Oh, Sith hells! Who's he kidding? He already has.
The creature is crying. Crying, for Force's sake. What in the name of the Force - ?!
He is about to open his mouth to demand an explanation for this ridiculous behavior when he realizes his mouth is already open - still open, that is - and that his throat is raw from screaming. Screaming.
Stars end, when did he start screaming? And what was he screaming for? And why -
Oh. Yes. That's right. He's been screaming at the monster who's just dropped down into a boneless mass at his feet, because the distraction of all that weeping made him lose his grip on the Force and the Force-hold he'd had on the creature's head and really, it had seemed like the most lovely, perfect little idea at the time, to grab him by the head and just squeeze and squeeze and squeeze until that damned black mask shattered and -
Well, Sith spit! No wonder the bloody thing's crying! There's still some part of Anakin in there and he's been screaming his head off about how he's betrayed the Order and murdered children and hurt Padmé so badly in his jealous, petty anger that she'd died trying to give birth and that he's a monster and the Council and the Order were right, Anakin never should have been allowed into the Temple, and he always knew he was dangerous, and that Anakin has killed everyone and everything good in the galaxy now and how does that make him feel, does it make it happy to know what he's murdered everything good and pure and clean left in this whole Sith-forsaken galaxy?! Is the circle not now complete, is it not fitting that he should return here, to Tatooine, to finish the job?!
Sith hells! He's still crying and it sounds so much like Anakin did, in the melting pit and what in the name of the Force is he supposed to do now!?
*********
He is crying. He hadn't known he could cry still, hadn't known a lot of things, before this moment. Hadn't known what his Master looks like, his face flushed with anger and power and his eyes so hard and blue that they shine like diamonds, hard and brilliant and icy-bright, hadn't known what he sounds like, in the grips of an anger so powerful that he is roaring - no, positively screaming with fury. Hadn't known what it would feel like, to be berated and humbled and thrown around like a rag doll with the Force, held in a white-hot grip of fury so tight that even the armor of his supposedly all but indestructable helmet is all but buckled from the strain, almost broken from it. The worst thing of all is that he still doesn't know many of these things. It isn't his eyes that have looked upon the flushed and fury-twisted face of Master Kenobi. It isn't his ears that have heard the sound of Obi-Wan's voice, raised and roughed with so much loathing and anger that it is almost deafening. And there's so very little of his body left, within this damnable armor, can it really even be said that it is his body that has been so violently and powerfully manhandled, by the Force flooding in torrents through his enraged former Master . . . ?
He deserves this. He deserves worse than this. He deserves to be killed by Obi-Wan, not just tossed around and shaken while being told, in exquistely painful detail, of all of his worst sins - well, all of them but one.
He has just committed the worst sin of all.
He has broken Obi-Wan Kenobi, made him give in to hatred and rage and embrace the Dark Side of the Force.
And for what? For him? Because of him?
If he could, he would gladly erase all of his life, just to undo this last mistake.
So he is entirely astonished when, after being unceremoniously dropped in a heap at his former Master's feet, he finds Obi-Wan bending over him, his hands on his shoulders, lifting him up, as Obi-Wan quietly and with an almost palpable sorrow - the emotion tangible, in the Force, despite his many hurts, the incredible damage to his connection with the Force - ask, "Anakin - Padawan -Partner - Force, beloved, what am I going to do with you?"
And yeah, I have to stop there, I'm afraid, cause the rest makes no sense whatsoever and I think I was waking up at that point anyway, and like I said, pretty darn cracked, eh? As fore the rest of my bad dreams, well . . . you know the passages in the RotS novelization that leads up to the confrontation between Anakin and Obi-Wan?
1ST PART: A silvery flash outside caught Darth Vader's eye, as though an elegantly curved mirror swung through the smoke and cinders, picking up the shine of white-hot lava. From one knee, he could look right through the holoscan of his Master while he continued his report. He was no longer afraid; he was too busy pretending to be respectful. "The Separatist leadership is no more, my Master."
"It is finished, then." The image offered a translucent mockery of a smile. "You have restored peace and justice to the galaxy, Lord Vader."
"That is my sole ambition. Master."
The image tilted its head, its smile twisting without transition to a scowl. "Lord Vader - I sense a disturbance in the Force. You may be in danger."
He glanced at the mirror flash outside; he knew that ship. In danger of being kissed to death, perhaps . . . "How should I be in danger, Master?"
"I cannot say. But the danger is real; be mindful."
Be mindful, be mindful, he thought with a mental sneer. Is that the best you can do? I could get that much from Obi-Wan . . . "I will, my Master. Thank you." The image faded. He got to his feet, and now the sneer was on his lips and in his eyes. "You're the one who should be mindful, my 'Master.' I am a disturbance in the Force."
Outside, the sleek skiff settled to the deck. He spent a moment reassembling his Anakin Skywalker face: he let Anakin Skywalker's love flow through him, let Anakin Skywalker's glad smile come to his lips, let Anakin Skywalker's youthful energy bring a joyous bounce to his step as he trotted to the entrance over the mess of corpses and severed body parts. He'd meet her outside, and he'd keep her outside. He had a feeling she wouldn't approve of the way he had . . . redecorated . . . the control center. And after all, he thought with a mental shrug, there's no arguing taste . . .
Then there's some stuff between Yoda and Palpatine.
Then: Padme stumbled down the landing ramp into Anakin's arms. Her eyes were raw and numb; once inside the ship, her emotional control had finally shattered and she had sobbed the whole way there, crying from relentless mind-shredding dread, and so her lips were swollen and her whole body shook and she was just so grateful, so incredibly grateful, that again she flooded with fresh tears: grateful that he was alive, grateful that he'd come bounding across the landing deck to meet her, that he was still strong and beautiful, that his arms still were warm around her and his lips were soft against her hair.
"Anakin, my Anakin . . . " She shivered against his chest. "I've been so frightened . . . "
"Shh. Shh, it's all right." He stroked her hair until her trembling began to fade, then he cupped her chin and gently raised her face to look into his eyes. "You never need to worry about me. Didn't you understand? No one can hurt me. No one will ever hurt either of us."
"It wasn't that, my love, it was - oh, Anakin, he said such terrible things about you!"
He smiled down at her. "About me? Who would want to say bad things about me?" He chuckled. "Who would dare?"
"Obi-Wan." She smeared tears from her cheeks. "He said - he told me you turned to the Dark Side, that you murdered Jedi . . . even younglings . . . " Just having gotten the words out made her feel better; now all she had to do was rest in his arms while he held her and hugged her and promised her he would never do anything like any of that, and she started half a smile aimed up toward his eyes -
But instead of the light of love in his eyes, she saw only reflections of lava. He didn't say, I could never turn to the dark side. He didn't say, Murder younglings? Me? That's just crazy. He said, "Obi-Wan's alive?" His voice had dropped an octave, and had gone colder than the chills that were spreading from the base of her spine.
"Y-yes-he, he said he was looking for you . . . "
"Did you tell him where I am?" "No, Anakin! He wants to kill you. I didn't tell him anything - I wouldn't!"
"Too bad."
"Anakin, what - "
"He's a traitor, Padme. He's an enemy of the state. He has to die."
"Stop it," she said. "Stop talking like that . . . you're frightening me!"
"You're not the one who needs to be afraid."
"It's like - it's like - " Tears brimmed again. "I don't even know who you are anymore . . . "
"I'm the man who loves you," he said, but he said it through clenched teeth. "I'm the man who would do anything to protect you. Everything I have done, I have done for you."
"Anakin . . . " Horror squeezed her voice down to a whisper: small, and fragile, and very young. " . . . what have you done?" And she prayed that he wouldn't actually answer.
"What I have done is bring peace to the Republic."
"The Republic is dead," she whispered. "You killed it. You and Palpatine."
"It needed to die."
New tears started, but they didn't matter; she'd never have enough tears for this. "Anakin, can't we just . . . go? Please. Let's leave. Together. Today. Now. Before you - before something happens - "
"Nothing will happen. Nothing can happen. Let Palpatine call himself Emperor. Let him. He can do the dirty work, all the messy, brutal oppression it'll take to unite the galaxy forever - unite it against him. He'll make himself into the most hated man in history. And when the time is right, we'll throw him down - "
"Anakin, stop - "
"Don't you see? We'll be heroes. The whole galaxy will love us, and we will rule. Together."
"Please stop - Anakin, please, stop, I can't stand it . . . "
He wasn't listening to her. He wasn't looking at her. He was looking past her shoulder. Feral joy burned from his eyes, and his face was no longer human. "You . . . "
From behind her, calmly precise, with that clipped Coruscanti accent: "Padme. Move away from him."
"Obi-Wan?" She whirled, and he was on the landing ramp, still and sad. "No!"
"You," growled a voice that should have been her love's. "You brought him here . . . "
She turned back, and now he was looking at her. His eyes were full of flame. "Anakin?"
"Padme, move away." There was an urgency in Obi-Wan's voice that sounded closer to fear than Padme had ever heard from him. "He's not who you think he is. He will harm you."
Anakin's lips peeled off his teeth. "I would thank you for this, if it were a gift of love."
Trembling, shaking her head, she began to back away. "No, Anakin - no . . . "
"Palpatine was right. Sometimes it is the closest who cannot see. I loved you too much, Padme." He made a fist, and she couldn't breathe. "I loved you too much to see you! To see what you are!"
A veil of red descended on the world. She clawed at her throat, but there was nothing there her hands could touch.
"Let her go, Anakin."
His answer was a predator's snarl, over the body of its prey. "You will not take her from me!"
She wanted to scream, to beg, to howl, No, Anakin, I'm sorry! I'm sorry . . . I love you . . . , but her locked throat strangled the truth inside her head, and the world-veil of red smoked toward black.
"Let her go!"
"Never!"
The ground fell away beneath her, and then a white flash of impact blasted her into night.
Then there's more with Yoda and Palpatine.
Then: Obi-Wan knelt beside Padme's unconscious body, where she lay limp and broken in the smoky dusk. He felt for a pulse. It was thin, and erratic. "Anakin - Anakin, what have you done?"
In the Force, Anakin burned like a fusion torch. "You turned her against me."
Obi-Wan looked at the best friend he had ever had. "You did that yourself," he said sadly.
"I'll give you a chance, Obi-Wan. For old times' sake. Walk away."
"If only I could."
"Go some place out of the way. Retire. Meditate. That's what you like, isn't it? You don't have to fight for peace anymore. Peace is here. My Empire is peace."
"Your Empire? It will never have peace. It was founded on treachery and innocent blood."
"Don't make me kill you, Obi-Wan. If you are not with me, you are against me."
"Only Sith deal in absolutes, Anakin. The truth is never black and white." He rose, spreading empty hands. "Let me take Padme to a medcenter. She's hurt, Anakin. She needs medical attention."
"She stays."
"Anakin - "
"You don't get to take her anywhere. You don't get to touch her. She's mine, do you understand? It's your fault, all of it - you made her betray me!"
"Anakin - " Anakin's hand sprouted a bar of blue plasma.
Obi-Wan sighed. He brought out his own lighstaber and angled it before him. "Then I will do what I must."
"You'll try," Anakin said, and leapt.
Obi-Wan met him in the air. Blue blades crossed, and the volcano above echoed their lightning with a shout of fire.
Yeah, well, that dream I had, where Obi-Wan leaves him there weeping on his knees and Anakin strikes Palpatine's head off? It's exactly like that (except for a few minor changes to the wording surrounding the mentions of Obi-Wan and Anakin's immediate reaction to learning that Obi-Wan's there, too), but with a window into Anakin's head that gave me the heebie jeebies (because Vader is just a mask he's put on for Palpatine, a disguise that he's put on as a necessity in order to save Padme, to let him get close enough to Palpatine to learn how to save Padme, after which he fully intends to just kill Palpatine and use his power to make everything right again - as if any power in the world could make the slaughter of innocent children right! - and he's become so focused on that goal that he doesn't even see the things he's doing in order to reach it. There's nothing in his head from the attack on the Temple but the noise of thunder and the feel of rain and a blackness that the rest of his mind automatically shies away from. It's like there's this hole in him, one he's deliberately ripped into his mind/psyche, and everything he can't handle has been thrown down into that hole, so far that it's like it's not even there any more. Anakin knows - vaguely - that he's done something and that it's something horrible, but he just can't remember it. It's like it's just - gone. And his whole mind is like this. There are these terrible ugly black gashes torn into him where there's nothing but blackness, and each one hides an atrocity of some kind - the Sand People, Jabiim, Dooku, et. - and he understands that something is wrong with him, that something is seriously wrong with him, but Anakin thinks that it's not important because he's not important, his own suffering isn't important, the only thing that's important to him is saving Padme and making sure that Obi-Wan doesn't get involved in this because he can't put things right again with Obi-Wan and THAT'S why he gets snarly when she brings him up - because he's terrified that Obi-Wan will turn against him if he finds out that Anakin's given in to Palpatine/Sidious like this, even if it's only a sham, in his head - and freaks out when Obi-Wan shows up, because that terror of being judged and found wanting, of Obi-Wan turning away from him, translates directly into an unreasoning fury with Padme for betraying him by bringing Obi-Wan there and putting both Anakin's plans and Obi-Wan's life - because of the orders he knows he has from Palpatine/Sidious to regard all Jedi as traitors - at risk this way), a window into Obi-Wan's heart that made me cry (at the core of which is a mantra that he keeps repeating silently to himself, like some kind of warped, backwards variation on the Bene Gesserit litany against fear: If I remake myself in the image of ice, I cannot be touched by these things. If I cannot be touched, I will not feel. If I do not feel, I cannot be hurt. If I cannot be hurt, I can do my duty. If I do my duty, the galaxy will not fall into darkness. I MUST do my duty. To do my duty, I must not feel. If I remake myself in the image of ice . . . ), and a few crucial difference right there near the end of the discussion between Anakin and Padme that segue into Obi-Wan cutting all ties with Anakin and then leaving him there, weeping and broken, on his knees, right after Anakin snarls, "You made her betray me!"
And it goes something like this: "Made her betray you? Anakin, I begged Padme for her help in finding you! I told her what you had done, at the Temple, I warned her about how dangerous you have become, and she would have none of it! She would not hear a word against you! She did not believe me. Her faith in you was so great that she turned me away! I was forced to follow her in secret and then stow away on her ship to even get here! If Padme has turned against you, Anakin, then it is only because she was no longer able to deny the truth that her own ears were telling her - that you, yourself, have betrayed her and everything that she has ever believed in, everything that she has loved and fought for and tried to protect, in all the galaxy! Betrayal?" A noise that might have been a hollow laugh or could have been been the not quite entirely choked off sound of a sob escaped from behind Obi-Wan's firmly shut lips. "Anakin, it is you who have betrayed us, all of us, in turning to the Dark Side! And for what? To what purpose? Greater power? Forbidden knowledge? Sith Holocrons to help you strike greater terror into the hearts of the subjects of your so-called Empire? There is no possible reason capable of excusing your own treachery, no reward great enough to have made it worth the price of your soul - which you, yourself, surrendered in the moment you put your lightsaber to the first of the innocent residents of the Temple!"
"Everything I've done has been for Padme! You don't know - you can't know - you haven't even been here, and why would you care even if you had? You Jedi are all the same - heartless, soulless puppets parroting obscure philosophies and mystical riddles as if they were knowledge, as if any sentient being is his right mind could rejoice at the thought of losing someone he loves! To Hell with Yoda and to Hell with you all, hiding your cold, empty hearts behind your damned Jedi platitudes! Infinite compassion? The Jedi have no compassion! How can you even dare to claim that the Jedi have compassion? You have no hearts, none of you do, or else you would understand! I couldn't just stand by and do nothing while she dies! Not if I could somehow win the power to save her!"
"SAVE her?! What are you - Anakin, Padme may very well die, because of you! You nearly killed her, just now! What can you possibly hope to - "
"DON'T YOU SAY THAT! I LOVE Padme! I'd never hurt her! She's my wife and I LOVE her! I've done this for her, to save her! She'll die if I don't, she'll die when the baby comes! I have to save her! You don't understand! I let my mom die - I knew she was in pain, I had the dreams, the same kind of dreams I've been having about Padme since I found out she was pregnant, and I knew she was in trouble, but I did nothing! I knew she was suffering and I did nothing because I was afraid - afraid to act out, afraid to go against the Council's will, afraid that I'd be cast out if I went against their will and went to see her! And then she died! It was too late by the time I found enough courage to go, and I couldn't save her! I CAN'T go through that again! I can't lose anyone else because of my weakness, my cowardice! If I have to act, then I will! I'll save her, Master! I HAVE to save her! I - "
The ice around Obi-Wan's heart shatters under the weight of the words Anakin Skywalker has just spoken. The pain is immediate and crippling, stealing away his breath until he can barely make himself force out the following words: " . . . wife . . . ? Padme is - " The next words out of Anakin's mouth seal his fate, for it is those words that break Obi-Wan Kenobi - those utterly selfish words and the blatantly morally rotten morass that reveals there is nothing left of the boy, the young man, who was always so good and so firmly entrenched within the light, so absolutely on the side of justice, that Obi-Wan could not help but love him, could not keep himself from cherishing and wanting to protect that huge heart, that open and giving soul, desiring to do anything and everything within his power to protect and to support Anakin in all of his endeavors, even the ones that put him at odds with the High Council, for Mace Windu has been right in assuming that Obi-Wan is Anakin's partisan and that his devotion to Anakin is far and away greater than his loyalty to the High Council and the Order. Obi-Wan has, since the moment he first accepted responsibility for the essentially orphaned Anakin, been the boy's guardian and stalwart friend and loyal companion, and until this moment Obi-Wan has firmly believed that there is nothing that he would not do, nothing he would not endure, for Anakin's sake. But this - this is too much. The weight of this knowledge is too great. Obi-Wan shatters like a diamond struck just SO, right at the apex of a network of faultlines and weaknesses that he himself has carved into being, with his blind affection and unshakeable attachment and loyalty to Anakin. Anakin, who is apparently so willfully blind, so self-centered, that he cannot even see how he is destroying the very thing he has been so desperate to protect. Anakin, who has been lying to him - to all of them - for years. Anakin, who cares so little for the Light, for the life, that he has squandered and run roughshod over the love and devotion of the only two living souls who have trusted and believed in him and his goodness implictly. Anakin, whose eyes are blazing an animalistic golden-yellow as he screams out his irrational and twisted reasons for having personally murdered so many innocent souls that Obi-Wan's mind buckles and breaks under the strain of trying to make that knowledge make some kind of sense against Anakin's claims.
"She's my wife and I'll do ANYTHING I have to, to save her! And you can't stop me! You WON'T stop me! I'll - "
The voice that come out of Obi-Wan Kenobi then is full of so much power and so deeply saturated with rage that it hardly even sounds human. "DO YOU MEAN TO TELL ME YOU'VE DONE ALL OF THIS, THAT YOU'VE PLEDGED YOUR TROTH TO THE LAST DARK LORD OF THE SITH AND PERSONALLY OVERSEEN THE MURDER OF EVERY LAST RESIDENT OF THE JEDI TEMPLE - INCLUDING THE YOUNGEST OF THE BABIES IN THE CRECHE - BECAUSE OF A WOMAN YOU KNOW SO LITTLE AND CARE SO LITTLE ABOUT THAT YOU'VE ALL BUT KILLED HER, JUST NOW, IN A FIT OF RAGE, BECAUSE SHE HAS PROVEN TO HAVE A WILL AND A MIND GREAT ENOUGH TO FORM AN OPINION OF HER OWN?!"
There is so much Force power in that voice that it knocks Anakin backwards, jolting him and breaking the panicked loop his mind his been trapped within ever since his exhausted and feverish brain first seized upon the notion that if he did as Master Yoda advised him to do, then Padme would surely die, whereas if he just closed his eyes and mind and heart against the horror of such odedience and gave in to Palpatine, he would be rewarded with enough power and knowledge to save Padme. And so Anakin finds himself staring, his mind a humming blank, at the stranger who is standing before him wearing the robes and form and features of his former Master. "I - I - I'm not - I DIDN'T - "
"LOOK at her, Anakin! Just LOOK at her! LOOK at what you have DONE to her! If Padme Amidala dies in childbirth, then it will be because of the damage that YOU, Anakin Skywalker, have inflicted upon her, not because of any weakness in her body or external threat from the outside or anything else but YOU!"
Padme is spread out before his staring eyes like a sacrificial offering. The touch of his own Force signature is so strong around the damaged column of her throat that she reeks of his taint, stinks of the Dark Side. Anakin's horror is such that his mind automatically flinches, trying to look away, to deny, to somehow get rid of the ugly truth staring him in the face. "I - I - I didn't - I couldn't - I love - "
"Love? LOVE! WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU KNOW OF LOVE?! YOU, who think of nothing and no one but your own desires, your own pleasures, your own power?! HOW DARE YOU SPEAK TO ME OF LOVE WHEN YOU SO OBVIOUSLY KNOW NOTHING OF ITS TRUE NATURE!?"
It is not Obi-Wan Kenobi who is speaking these things, shrieking these words at him. It CAN'T be Obi-Wan Kenobi who is standing before him, screaming and boiling with so much rage, blazing with so much power, that he is little more than a force of nature - a seething hurricane of so much concentrated anger and pain coupled to so much raw energy that the words exploding out of the man's mouth tear into Anakin like jagged lines of dark fire, shredding him with their power and incinerating him with their pain. The Force-compulsion is so strong that Anakin's mind buckles beneath it, his shields all giving way, until he is utterly defenseless and broken, trembling like a man with palsy in the face of so much power and so much emotion. " . . . I . . . "
"YOU are the traitor, Anakin Skywalker. The ONLY traitor here. The blood of the younglings is on your hands. The deaths of the Jedi are on your hands. The destruction of the Jedi Order and all that it has stood for, all that it has fought for, all that is has sought to protect, the light it has struggled to kindle and spread, is upon your hands. You are a traitor, a disgrace to the Jedi, and a blight upon the face of humanity! The Force itself cries out against you, Anakin Skywalker! YOU ARE A MONSTER!"
Anakin's heart is shattering, his mind breaking open beneath the pressure of that unstoppable power, the juggernaut of that rage, which is determined to strip him utterly bare and hold him, bloody and keening, up to the face and shape of his own sin. "I don't - I'm not - Obi-Wan - Master - PLEASE - "
"Don't you DARE speak that name to me! Don't you DARE to call me your Master now! You've chosen another, CHOSEN ONE," the words are an epithet of such hatred that they sound like a curse, "and with that choice you've cut all of your ties to me, broken all of the promises you made in service to the Light, and you've made the Dark your new home. Lie in the bed you've made and rot in that darkness, SITH!"
" - OBI-WAN - !"
"DON'T YOU TOUCH ME! Don't you DARE try to touch me - or her - ever again! You are a self-centered coward, a traitor, a murderer, and a Sith, and YOU ARE MY ENEMY, DARTH VADER. Qui-Gon would be appalled; Shmi Skywalker would be ashamed: I wash my hands of you! Master Yoda was right: Anakin Skywalker is dead. I DO NOT KNOW YOU."
"MASTER! Obi-Wan - please, I don't understand, I'm not - I couldn't have - I DIDN'T MEAN - "
The voice is implacable, cold and inescapable as the void. "I know not the man who stands before me. The man I have known as Anakin Skywalker and trusted and loved with all of the strength that is within me is dead. I renounce all ties to him and his. I sever all bonds that have formed between us. You, I name an abomination. You, I label as anathema. You, I pronounce - "
"OBI-WAN! Obi-Wan, DON'T! PLEASE! I never meant - I didn't want - Obi-Wan, I LOVE YOU! Please - Master, PLEASE - "
" - anathematized, excommunicate, cast out of the Light and cut off from the face of - "
"Don't, DON'T, Master, DON'T -"
" - the Living Force for all time. May those who look upon your face see nothing but your eyes and the truth they tell of your fall. May the hand of every living being be turned against you. May the Force itself rise up and cast you out of its embrace for all time and - "
" - but I love you, I LOVE YOU, Obi-Wan, PLEASE - "
" - no more mercy be shown to you than that which you have granted to the victims of your vanity! Sith you have chosen to become and Sith you should be to all who look upon you! I know you as nothing but a Dark Lord of the Sith and my enemy!"
And with that pronouncement, the gathering tide of Force-enhanced fury peaks, and breaks, and there is a wrenching, a snapping, a ripping apart, and -
- and Anakin's is left so broken open that it feels as if his soul is bleeding out from him, pouring away out of the ragged wound this exploding supernova of Force energy in the shape of Obi-Wan Kenobi has torn into him, where he's buthered the old Master-Padawan bond, sundered the ties that have bound them together as Force-partners, gouged out and uprooted every last tendril of love, of trust, of sharing, that has ever been between them, ever bridged the gap between their minds and hearts and souls and bound them up together into one whole and functional unit. The pain is so far beyond anything he has ever felt that he blacks out, collapsing to the ground like puppet whose strings have all but simultaneously and irrepairably severed. It is his own keening cry, his own wordless wail of loss and denial and anguish, that wakes him.
Obi-Wan - the semblance of Obi-Wan, if Obi-Wan were a man carved of ice, a soulless and heartless statue carved of cold stone and imbued with so much Force energy that he glows like the surface of a star - is standing over him, Padme in his arms.
" . . . Obi-Wan . . . " His throat is so raw from screaming that the name - the plea for mercy, for rescue, for understanding and pity and love - is little more than a soundless moan of breath.
"I will not cut down an unarmed man. I will not stoop so low - will not sully myself or the name of the Jedi Order by lowering myself to your level. Be warned, Sith. If I see you again, I will show you no mercy. My lightsaber will be drawn against you." And with that, Obi-Wan - this stranger wearing Obi-Wan's body - turns on his heel and marches back into the ship, carrying Padme's disturbingly limb body away with him. A few moments later, the ship lifts off, and then he is gone. As easily and as quickly as that, Anakin Skywalker is abandoned, cast off and left to fester in his own poisons, in the darkness that he has willingly - and to no purpose but destruction, as he can now clearly see - invited into himself.
*Shudders and averts eyes and mind firmly from the rest* Yeah. So. These are really ugly things to be thinking about and I don't like dreaming about this and feeling the utter desolation in Obi-Wan when he turns his back on Anakin, having to be there when he collapses on the ship and sobs for the man he's failed, the love he's lost, because he truly believes that the soul of Anakin Skywalker has been entirely destroyed. The Anakin he knew and loved could never have done the things that Obi-Wan has seen and heard this being with the figure/form of Anakin but the ugly eyes of a Sith do: ergo, Anakin Skywalker is dead, to Obi-Wan Kenobi, the shining bright soul that was Anakin Skywalker betrayed and most foully murdered by the evil ways of Darth Vader. And this shatters him. Utterly. Completely. He gathers together enough of a semblance of control to keep it together long enough to get Luke to Tatooine and Owen and Beru, and then he goes out into the wilderness of the deserts as a madman, keening his grief into the winds and letting them carrying away his pain and his memories until he is little more than the shell of a man. If he's not entirely insane at that point, he's so close to it that it makes little difference, either way. And it's here that my dreams really start bleeding together, because I get a series of events from here that lead up to a slightly difference version of the "cantina" scene then (after Anakin has struck off Palpatine's head, when he came to Mustafar to "save" him and watched the Sith Lord go up in flames, in the lava), one with Anakin still as Anakin (no blasted black box of armor). Falling into the Rakatas cave/temple jolts him back into a semblance of himself, but it's only temporary. And that sense of self is subsumed and destroyed by the pain when he remembers Anakin's betrayal and loss again. Betrayed and tumbled back to his grief once more by the desert, he flees the cave and the sands for the nearest town and another form of oblivion - one that is drug-induced and cannot be interferred with by such insignificant things as thoughts, because in the grips of such oblivion, thoughts cannot exist whole. And there he is met with Anakin - an Anakin who has killed Palpatine and come crawling back to him as if the addition of another murder to his long litany of deaths could be enough to make up for the crimes he has committed! And there Obi-Wan fulfills his vow and meets this stranger clad in the painfully familiar form of Anakin Skywalker with his drawn lightsaber. And the next part is such a morass of agony and tears and hurting and the deliberate infliction of pain, far too much of it and too violent to rest easy with me at all, frankly, that I can't bring myself to try to work my way through it to see what lies beyond. I'm scared of it. I'm frightened of the amount of pain in them and the propensity towards violence that it breeds. I don't want anything to do with it. Nope. Nope. Nope. And no. *Claps hands over ears to shut out the crying and firmly averts eyes to an image of the boys cuddling in bed* And I think I've dwelt on this about enough. Any longer, and I'll never be able to sleep tonight.
Okay, lemme see how well I can recreate this weirdness . . .
Obi-Wan is wandering out in the Jundland Wastes, far away from his hut in the southwest corner of the Dune Sea, with his baby bantha - which for whatever reason (probably the fact that my brain keeps flashing on the original StarGate movie and that mastage that runs off with Daniel) seems to be big enough to carry him, already - because my dream pretty much begins with him rediscovering the cave holding the Rakatan star temple in the Eastern Dune Sea that helped (the then apparently still in the process of falling to the Dark Side) Jedi Knight Revan locate the Star Forge. And this probably has as much to do with my own convoluted plottings for Tatooine and Alderaan in my WIP than anything else, so if it sounds weird, just kind of nod and smile and skim over it.
The way he finds the cave is a bit odd - it's kind of like something in Splinter of the Mind's Eye, actually. He sees a flash of something in the sand, dismounts to go investigate, and the sand opens up underneath him. The sparkle was a gem in the edge of a portal that has eroded away to only the thinnest shell under the contiual friction fraying of all that sand, and his weight it too much for it. It breaks open and he tumbles down into the caverns.
He's not hurt by the fall - just startled and a bit miffed to have been caught so utterly off guard. But then he looks around and sees the symbol of the Infinite Empire - a symbol that he recognizes from his research into the history of violence between the Jedi and the Sith (research done privately and quietly in the Temple Archives years ago, after Qui-Gon's death on Naboo had catapulted him into Jedi Knighthood and he had been granted rights and privledges to various restricted materials in the Jedi Archives, research that involved reading into the life of Jedi Master and one-time Sith Lord Reven, as a part of his investigation into the Sith. And he knows, then, what it is that he has tumbled into - the temple cavern holding one of the star maps used to locate that terrible weapon, the Star Forge. Gingerly, he sets about exploring, fascinated by the find but appalled by the fact that the cavern is still here, still intact, and still apparently full of artifacts.
There are lights up in the ceiling that come on automatically, sensing the presence of a living being within the underground temple complex. At some point, Obi-Wan wanders far enough into the cavern - which is really a huge system of interlocking (and most likely enlarged/refined) caves and passageways all strung together in a pattern that actually conforms, in miniature to a section of the Star Map contained at its heart - that he finds a sliver of what looks like glass or diamond, set prominently on display in one of the cavernous temple's many rooms so that its prisms catch the light and give off rainbowed sparkles of dappled light. Curious, he picks the prism up, and as he turns the crystal in his fingers, the light around it builds and gathers together into a brilliant ball of banded light (think, auroa borelias type colored light) that swiftly swells like a gas flame into a nebulous globe, azure-bright and big enough and bright enough to engulf his hands entirely.
As soon as the light blooms like that, a beatific smile stretches across his features, so altering his face that for a moment he is not Ben Kenobi, not the broken remnant of a Jedi Knight and Master whose failure has doomed the galaxy to the darkness of the Sith, but just Obi-Wan again - the same bright-eyed and smiling little boy who stood alone in the rain, naked and laughing, just for the joy of learning of this miracle of water falling from the sky, not long after he was first brought back to Coruscant by an extremely young and openly loving Jedi Knight by the name of Qui-Gon Jinn, and who trusted Qui-Gon to come carry him away back inside and wrap him in first towels and then dry clothes and warm blankets, before lovingly tucking him away into bed for the night, fingers lingering in his hair and the light touch of his mind urging peacefulness as Obi-Wan drifted away into sleep. The tension collected at the base of his spine uncoils like a spring and sparks up his back as a sudden and unshakeable bliss roots him into place, adamant as pain. For perhaps the first time in his life, he is abruptly and absolutely utterly deeply profoundly happy. He understands, for a moment, that life isn't all about suffering, sacrifice and pain, sorrow and stife, loss and regrets and despair, but instead growth, and learning, and love. He realizes, with a bone-seizing laugh that rocks the core of him with its certainty of joy, that life itself is nothing more than a stream of love -
You will have a name in this time, childling. And you will have all the limits that go with having a name. You will have a name in this time because where you are everything has a name . . . Where you are, young one, everything that can happen has happened. Where you are, nascent one, everything that has happened is happening again . . . And though you will begin to learn the names of everything in your new life, no matter how many names you learn, no matter what sequence you arrange them in, they will tell you nothing about the source or the end. They exist because you do, to assure yourself that your existence can and does happen, then and now, always, and almost as you imagine this is happening . . . But names, young life, will be dwarfed by the hugeness of your breath, even though their hunger will be your long traveling, their practice all you will ever endure, their eventual test to perfect the space your passing leaves behind.
Why are we here, in this time/place of names? Each instant, we're changed. Why? Nothing has been created. Everything is a shadow of what will be. And if nothing is a shadow, everything has already been created, everything is fated. All of us have a destiny. Don't be afraid! There are no secrets. Our senses fit the world. What you see is seen, what you know is known, what you feel is felt. Heaven and earth move through each other, but the mind, at the last, is moveless. We are presense. Do not be afraid! Everything is energy, everything is fuel, is change, is growth. Love it. Love it all. Every sound, every odor, every touch, every sensation, every thought, every thing, all things, it all changes us, allows us growth, gives us energy. Embrace. Accept. Grow. Love. Above and beyond all other things, love. The past is but a disguise. Let go of its static limitations. Embrace change, embrace growth. You are consciousness itself - not the objects of consciousness. You have a body, but you are not your body. You are the awareness of your body. You have thoughts, but you are not your thoughts. You have feelings, but you are not your feelings. Who, then, are you? You are the living center of the transparent and inflexible diamond of time. And Infinity is Unity. All things are one thing. It never ends. Life never ends. All things die into newness.
You want out? Stillness of mind is a door. Memory, the continuing history of grief. Your back is a road for your shadow and all the darkness of the worlds to cross. You are more than a shape, more than mere density, more than the emptiness in the grain of your bones, more than the singing nothingness between the atoms of your blood. Named and pinned to your time/place, you are, again, the transparent and inflexible heart of the diamond core of time. As long as the past is real, you will remain. And you will be named. Nothing/everything happens by coincidence. What matters is that you go through events to the stillness behind them. Things can lose their gravities, their coherence, their names. Things fall apart. Things die into newness. But think! Understand that you can't understand. And this is progress. It is like digging holes in a river, like forgetting one thing to remember another. It's because another persistence pushes under the blood, because we're doomed to squint after absolutes, because nothing less will do. The body is the unconscious of the world. Remember! The innocence you own waits where you left it, deep as the last of your fears. Let go! Stillness is the space of our lives, so empty it can hold all things. Love, youngling. Infinity is Unity, and it is growth, is life, is change, is love -
It is rapture, it is ecstacy, it is truth, being offered up to him. Obi-Wan knows this, utterly and unquestionably, with a clarity so deep that it should be transparent, and yet instead it is radiant, vibrant, with color and shadow, light and darkness entwined, and it is so very, very good, it feels so simple, so true, so right -
But then his soul remembers Anakin and is screaming a denial so absolute that it disrupts his connection with the Rakata crystal and unroots him from the depths of its message, and Obi-Wan flings the shard from him with all of his considerable strength - so violently that the crystal flies into the farther wall and, because of the nature of the material forming it and the incredible speed at which it is travelling, imbeds itself into that wall so deeply that it is lost to sight - before turning and running, at a speed that renders him little more than a blur rushing through the cavernous temple, back out to where the temple portal's collapse tumbled him down into the caverns in the first place. A controlled acrobatic leap takes him back up out of the caves, and then he is back with his bantha and headed for the nearest settlement - and a drink that he desperately feels he needs, to take the edge off of his pain - just as fast as his bantha can carry him.
In my dream, that's why Obi-Wan's in the "cantina," more than half-drunk and half-mad with pain, when Anakin/Vader finally makes it back to Tatooine. I know it's Dama's inn but it actually looks like what I remember a cantina on Bakura being described as, with floating repulsor-chairs and whatnot. Obi-Wan is about halfway through drinking what will be the last of several glasses full of some very potent blue alcoholic drink (erhm, sorry! That blue drink might be a subconscious holdover from my perception of Romulan ale, or it might be something from an actual SW fanfic or even something in the EU. I'm really not sure!) when something pushes past the fog of misery clouding his mind and he almost chokes on his drink. A sense of warmth/light, a power, a presence he has not felt since -
Obi-Wan swallows the last of his drink, rises as he reaches deep into his desert robes to locate the carefully hidden hilt of his lightsaber, and in the same motion turns, ignites the 'saber, and flings his glass to shatter at Vader/Anakin's feet.
The worst, unformed fear of his heart is cofirmed by what he sees.
Anakin has become a monster, a pieced-together hybrid of droid and human even more unnatural and wrong-feeling within the Force than General Grievous had been, encased in a life-support shell of gleaming black, managed by a thoracic processor that winks pale green and red color against the cloak draping and encasing that deadened shell like a shroud. The jointed limbs look ungainly, clumsy, and ugly; the featureless curves of black that serve for eyes are inhuman; and the underthrust grillwork of what Obi-Wan suspects (and will soon learn absolutely) is a vocabulator suggests the jaws of a saurian predator built of polished blast armor. All in all, it is like some monstrously overblown, sickeningly dark image of an evil Mandalorian warrior crossed with some insectile, chitinous black droid. It has obviously been designed to strike terror into the hearts of those who look upon it. And it stinks of the Dark Side of the Force. It stinks of fear, and anger, and pain.
It stinks of Mustafar, and betrayl, and agony and -
O Force! Anakin, how could you?
*********
And this is how it feels to be the black-armored and boxed-in remnant of Anakin Skywalker, the being Emperor Palpatine - Darth Sidious of the Sith - has remade into the image of his own dark desire, the black monstrosity that is Darth Vader: his universe is consists of and is bounded by limitless pain.
The light burns. It always burn him. A part of him has never returned from that day, from lying abandoned upon black glass sand beside a lake of fire, with flames feasting messily upon his flesh.
He can hear himself breathing. It comes hard, and harsh, and it scrapes agonizingly against nerves already rubbed raw, but he cannot stop it. He can never stop it. He cannot even slow it down. He doesn't have control over his own lungs anymore. Mechanisms hardwired into his chest bypass the scorched and supposedly charred beyond recovery, beyond any/all hope of use, lumps that once were working lungs in order to breathe for him. They will pump oxygen into what remains of his bloodstream forever, unless destroyed or disrupted by some powerful outside power or Force.
He can't hear the sound that the glass makes when it shatters, literally right upon the toes of his black leather boots. Not in the way he once did. Sensors in the shell that prisons his head trickle meaning directly into his brain, information translated from sound-waves into a semblance of knowledge of sound, of understanding that there is a specific noise that has resulted from the action of this thrown and now broken vessel.
Scorched-pale eyes colorless with the scars of unhealed damage may very well be open, but it is optical sensors that integrate light and shadow into a hideous simulacrum of the world around him.
Or perhaps the simulacrum is perfect, and it is the world that is hideous. The thought, almost as soon as it occurs, is just as firmly shoved back into the darkness, where it belongs. But the pain of it - that is not so easily dismissed.
After all, his life is pain, now.
And the sight - the simulacrum of sight - of the man before him -
The pain is vaster than all the oceans of all the worlds. Deeper than the spaces between the stars. Because he knows this man - he knew this man so well, once upon a time, back when he was still just Anakin Skywalker, the Jedi's Chosen One and the darling of the HoloNet, the hero of the Republic, the famous Hero With No Fear, part of that legendary and beloved team collectively known by the title of the Warrior of the Infinite, otherwise known as Kenobi and Skywalker, Anakin and Obi-Wan, and O Force! He had thought he had no heart left within him, to break, but this -
This -
This agony is so awful that it burns with its awful coldness. It is thousands of times worse than the pain he'd felt upon remembering the atrocities he had committed, under Palpatine's - no, Sidious' command, in the slaughter of all those innocents at the Jedi Temple. The shocked betrayal in the eyes of the children are nothing compared to this, to the inescable knowledge of how completely he has failed, how utterly he has betrayed, the man before him now. It holds not even the palest reflection of the true immensity and intensity of the pain of the treachery, the treason, he commited against Obi-Wan, against the team that they were, the bond that they shared. The love that they had, pure in spite of all the malicious whispers, and right, he now knows, completely and absolutely right, despite all of the dark frowns and doubts of the other Jedi. The realization of that, the inescapable knowledge of it - Force! It is tens, no, hundreds, no, thousands of times worse than even the pain he felt when he remembered what he had done, how he had caused the death of Padmé, the woman he had so selfishly taken to wife, though he knew that it was forbidden and had even, by the date of their secret wedding, understood why. That pain had burnt far hotter than even the lava fields of Mustafar, but this pain, this - !
This agony is so unspeakably terrible that it overwhelms and utterly destroys the burning core of hatred and anger that has fueled him ever since he reawakened to this pale mockery of life, after Mustafar, trapped by his own selfish, fearful actions and Sidious' unending lust for power within the darkness of Vader's shadow, entombed alive within this black husk. The pain of Padmé's loss had made him burn with rage: the agony of understanding that he had destroyed and discarded the one truly good thing in his life, out of his own petty anger and fear and that damnable flaw in him that always made him want more than he should, to feel as though he needed more than the Jedi would allow, than Obi-Wan could ever be willing to give him, shatters him utterly.
It is for answers that he has come here: answers to the cry of his broken heart, which cannot comprehend why/how Obi-Wan could have left him there, burning, to die upon Mustafar, even after all of the horrible things he had said and done; answers to his questions about how seriously he was actually hurt, and how necessary these inferior and increasingly seemingly unnecessary mechanical alterations actually were, when Sidious arrived to "save" him from the lava; answers to the question that he has never, until this very moment, even allowed to form fully enough to register within his mind, the question as to whether or not Obi-Wan has ever loved him and suffered for it, suffered for him, as Anakin has loved and suffered because of Obi-Wan.
Instead, faced with the imperfectly translated knowledge of the sound of a thrown and violently shattered glass, the stomach-turning hideous wrongness of the simulacrum of the sight of Obi-Wan - an Obi-Wan who is once again looking upon him over the ignited blade of his lightsaber, his face so twisted by emotion that it is entirely possible that even with two functioning eyes, the sight of him might have seemed wrong - and the hollowness of absolute despair, swallowing him and his pain until nothing of him remains but the echoes of that cry from his breaking heart, he finds that he has no questions to ask.
Instead, that hateful and hated another voice speaks for him, out from the vocabulator that serves him in place of what he had been assured, by the Emperor, were lips and tongue and throat and laranyx so badly damaged by heat and fire, so close to being entirely burned away, that he should count it a miracle that the vocabulator can function well enough to pick up on and translate whatever words he might try to speak into the appropriate sounds. And what it says is: "Obi-Wan. Master. Please. Please. Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi. You're my only hope."
*********
For a moment, the hatred within Obi-Wan is so intense that he cannot even begin to think around it.
And so in that moment, he abandons all thought and lets go.
Lets go of a lifetime of striving to obey, to conform, to please, to strip away and destroy all the parts of himself that are undesirable and to reshape what is left until all that remains is a model of Jedi excellence, a lifetime of sacrifice and pain and endless striving, unending strife, a lifetime that has made him who he is, that is responsible for landing him here, a broken down man good for nothing and no one, unable, apparently, to even successfully manage to cover his tracks well enough to protect one innocent little child -
It is the last straw. Figuratively, and literally. The thought of Luke, that he has now failed so utterly that he will have doomed that innocent baby, shatters what little is left of his control.
And the sound of his control breaking, within the Force, is like the sound of a world cracking in two, the sound of a world being broken open like an egg being smashed with a hammer, broken open and exploded into fragments so small that nothing salvagable of the whole survives amongst that wreckage.
Ah. So. This is it, then. This is why the Council was so afraid of anger, so terrified at the thought of a Jedi losing control. Now I understand. It is because we can, in our fury, in our anger, easily crush worlds.
Once upon a time, Obi-Wan Kenobi had thought he understood anger. He had thought he understood hatred. He had thought he understood blind, unreasoning, ravening, mindelessly destructive fury. In the wake of Naboo, and the muder of his Master, Qui-Gon Jinn, he had thought he understood all of these things far too well.
Now, he knows absolutely that he has known nothing.
It is a hatred and a rage so absolute, so refined, so powerful, that it dwarfs all else. It consumes him utterly, and he wants it, he wants to be consumed by it, invites it in knowingly, lovingly, laughing as he beckons it to it. The power that it gives him is so vast that it requires less effort than it would be worth it to even flick his wrist into the throwing gesture directing that power, channeling it through him and throwing the abomination that once was Anakin Skywalker swiftly and violently across the room, tossing him casually through not one wall, not two, but three, until his crumpled black form is finally ejected entirely from the building, fragments of the broken walls clinging to his cape and dusting the high gloss of his armor until it appears more grey than black, an effect that is only heightened when he hits the dirt outside of the cantina and bursts through its sandy crust, throwing up particles of dust and silica in an exploding cloud of debris. And here, too, the boy once again shows his true colors, for the whimpering coward had raised not even so much as a finger to defend himself. Incensed, Obi-Wan leaps after the fallen figure, and whips his lightsaber viciously around it, scoring his armor deeply, deliberately, and cutting away that ridiculous black cape - so much like the cloak that Dooku, that Tyranus, once adopted, and somehow just reminescent enough of Anakin's always more cape-like outer robe that the very sight of it makes Obi-Wan see red, makes him see red until he attacks the foul thing with his lightsaber and succeedes in reducing it to smoking strips of useless fabric - but not attempting to strike any kind of fatal blow against the Sith, not yet. Oh, no, that would be far too easy. Far too quick an end for him.
He doesn't deserve quick or easy.
He deserves to suffer. He deserves pain. He deserves humiliation. He deserves to be crushed and broken open and destroyed so utterly, so thoroughly, that he will be begging for death, before it is over with!
Obi-Wan Kenobi is so thoroughly transported and transformed with the power of his own rage and hatred against the Sith, against this thing, against Anakin, even for allowing himself to be trapped into becoming this hideous amalgamation that is so clearly at least as much machine as it is flesh, that the obvious irony inherent in the act of his surrender to that anger escapes him entirely.
Because Anakin has, after all, been proven right. Again. And that means that he's always been right. Emotions can make one stronger in the Force, and they can supply one with more clarity of purpose. A Jedi can become much more than he is, simply by embracing all of that impetus and allowing it to propel him up along the cresting wave of the Force.
Anakin, it would seem, has been right about many things. Including the sweet addictiveness of this, the absolute rush that comes from giving in to all that emotion and allowing it to carry him and drive him far deeper into the Force than he would ever have the strength to go, otherwise.
So it is entirely surprising, when it filters through that red-tingued euphoria, that the only sounds to be heard are not pleas for mercy, but rather broken sobs, so very like the remembered sound of a storm of gut-wrenchingly violent weeping from a certain child, quite small for his age but with enough heart and courage to put even those of the greatest of men to shame, who had dashed so very recklessly into the melting pit on Naboo, only minutes after the fight with the Sith had ended, only moments too late to be able to try to do anything to save Master Qui-Gon . . .
No! He will not think about that! He will not think about how much pain he'd been in, and how Anakin's grief had given him a way to show that pain without feeling as if he were failing, as a Jedi, for giving in to the emotion, and no, damnit! He won't -
Oh, Sith hells! Who's he kidding? He already has.
The creature is crying. Crying, for Force's sake. What in the name of the Force - ?!
He is about to open his mouth to demand an explanation for this ridiculous behavior when he realizes his mouth is already open - still open, that is - and that his throat is raw from screaming. Screaming.
Stars end, when did he start screaming? And what was he screaming for? And why -
Oh. Yes. That's right. He's been screaming at the monster who's just dropped down into a boneless mass at his feet, because the distraction of all that weeping made him lose his grip on the Force and the Force-hold he'd had on the creature's head and really, it had seemed like the most lovely, perfect little idea at the time, to grab him by the head and just squeeze and squeeze and squeeze until that damned black mask shattered and -
Well, Sith spit! No wonder the bloody thing's crying! There's still some part of Anakin in there and he's been screaming his head off about how he's betrayed the Order and murdered children and hurt Padmé so badly in his jealous, petty anger that she'd died trying to give birth and that he's a monster and the Council and the Order were right, Anakin never should have been allowed into the Temple, and he always knew he was dangerous, and that Anakin has killed everyone and everything good in the galaxy now and how does that make him feel, does it make it happy to know what he's murdered everything good and pure and clean left in this whole Sith-forsaken galaxy?! Is the circle not now complete, is it not fitting that he should return here, to Tatooine, to finish the job?!
Sith hells! He's still crying and it sounds so much like Anakin did, in the melting pit and what in the name of the Force is he supposed to do now!?
*********
He is crying. He hadn't known he could cry still, hadn't known a lot of things, before this moment. Hadn't known what his Master looks like, his face flushed with anger and power and his eyes so hard and blue that they shine like diamonds, hard and brilliant and icy-bright, hadn't known what he sounds like, in the grips of an anger so powerful that he is roaring - no, positively screaming with fury. Hadn't known what it would feel like, to be berated and humbled and thrown around like a rag doll with the Force, held in a white-hot grip of fury so tight that even the armor of his supposedly all but indestructable helmet is all but buckled from the strain, almost broken from it. The worst thing of all is that he still doesn't know many of these things. It isn't his eyes that have looked upon the flushed and fury-twisted face of Master Kenobi. It isn't his ears that have heard the sound of Obi-Wan's voice, raised and roughed with so much loathing and anger that it is almost deafening. And there's so very little of his body left, within this damnable armor, can it really even be said that it is his body that has been so violently and powerfully manhandled, by the Force flooding in torrents through his enraged former Master . . . ?
He deserves this. He deserves worse than this. He deserves to be killed by Obi-Wan, not just tossed around and shaken while being told, in exquistely painful detail, of all of his worst sins - well, all of them but one.
He has just committed the worst sin of all.
He has broken Obi-Wan Kenobi, made him give in to hatred and rage and embrace the Dark Side of the Force.
And for what? For him? Because of him?
If he could, he would gladly erase all of his life, just to undo this last mistake.
So he is entirely astonished when, after being unceremoniously dropped in a heap at his former Master's feet, he finds Obi-Wan bending over him, his hands on his shoulders, lifting him up, as Obi-Wan quietly and with an almost palpable sorrow - the emotion tangible, in the Force, despite his many hurts, the incredible damage to his connection with the Force - ask, "Anakin - Padawan -Partner - Force, beloved, what am I going to do with you?"
And yeah, I have to stop there, I'm afraid, cause the rest makes no sense whatsoever and I think I was waking up at that point anyway, and like I said, pretty darn cracked, eh? As fore the rest of my bad dreams, well . . . you know the passages in the RotS novelization that leads up to the confrontation between Anakin and Obi-Wan?
1ST PART: A silvery flash outside caught Darth Vader's eye, as though an elegantly curved mirror swung through the smoke and cinders, picking up the shine of white-hot lava. From one knee, he could look right through the holoscan of his Master while he continued his report. He was no longer afraid; he was too busy pretending to be respectful. "The Separatist leadership is no more, my Master."
"It is finished, then." The image offered a translucent mockery of a smile. "You have restored peace and justice to the galaxy, Lord Vader."
"That is my sole ambition. Master."
The image tilted its head, its smile twisting without transition to a scowl. "Lord Vader - I sense a disturbance in the Force. You may be in danger."
He glanced at the mirror flash outside; he knew that ship. In danger of being kissed to death, perhaps . . . "How should I be in danger, Master?"
"I cannot say. But the danger is real; be mindful."
Be mindful, be mindful, he thought with a mental sneer. Is that the best you can do? I could get that much from Obi-Wan . . . "I will, my Master. Thank you." The image faded. He got to his feet, and now the sneer was on his lips and in his eyes. "You're the one who should be mindful, my 'Master.' I am a disturbance in the Force."
Outside, the sleek skiff settled to the deck. He spent a moment reassembling his Anakin Skywalker face: he let Anakin Skywalker's love flow through him, let Anakin Skywalker's glad smile come to his lips, let Anakin Skywalker's youthful energy bring a joyous bounce to his step as he trotted to the entrance over the mess of corpses and severed body parts. He'd meet her outside, and he'd keep her outside. He had a feeling she wouldn't approve of the way he had . . . redecorated . . . the control center. And after all, he thought with a mental shrug, there's no arguing taste . . .
Then there's some stuff between Yoda and Palpatine.
Then: Padme stumbled down the landing ramp into Anakin's arms. Her eyes were raw and numb; once inside the ship, her emotional control had finally shattered and she had sobbed the whole way there, crying from relentless mind-shredding dread, and so her lips were swollen and her whole body shook and she was just so grateful, so incredibly grateful, that again she flooded with fresh tears: grateful that he was alive, grateful that he'd come bounding across the landing deck to meet her, that he was still strong and beautiful, that his arms still were warm around her and his lips were soft against her hair.
"Anakin, my Anakin . . . " She shivered against his chest. "I've been so frightened . . . "
"Shh. Shh, it's all right." He stroked her hair until her trembling began to fade, then he cupped her chin and gently raised her face to look into his eyes. "You never need to worry about me. Didn't you understand? No one can hurt me. No one will ever hurt either of us."
"It wasn't that, my love, it was - oh, Anakin, he said such terrible things about you!"
He smiled down at her. "About me? Who would want to say bad things about me?" He chuckled. "Who would dare?"
"Obi-Wan." She smeared tears from her cheeks. "He said - he told me you turned to the Dark Side, that you murdered Jedi . . . even younglings . . . " Just having gotten the words out made her feel better; now all she had to do was rest in his arms while he held her and hugged her and promised her he would never do anything like any of that, and she started half a smile aimed up toward his eyes -
But instead of the light of love in his eyes, she saw only reflections of lava. He didn't say, I could never turn to the dark side. He didn't say, Murder younglings? Me? That's just crazy. He said, "Obi-Wan's alive?" His voice had dropped an octave, and had gone colder than the chills that were spreading from the base of her spine.
"Y-yes-he, he said he was looking for you . . . "
"Did you tell him where I am?" "No, Anakin! He wants to kill you. I didn't tell him anything - I wouldn't!"
"Too bad."
"Anakin, what - "
"He's a traitor, Padme. He's an enemy of the state. He has to die."
"Stop it," she said. "Stop talking like that . . . you're frightening me!"
"You're not the one who needs to be afraid."
"It's like - it's like - " Tears brimmed again. "I don't even know who you are anymore . . . "
"I'm the man who loves you," he said, but he said it through clenched teeth. "I'm the man who would do anything to protect you. Everything I have done, I have done for you."
"Anakin . . . " Horror squeezed her voice down to a whisper: small, and fragile, and very young. " . . . what have you done?" And she prayed that he wouldn't actually answer.
"What I have done is bring peace to the Republic."
"The Republic is dead," she whispered. "You killed it. You and Palpatine."
"It needed to die."
New tears started, but they didn't matter; she'd never have enough tears for this. "Anakin, can't we just . . . go? Please. Let's leave. Together. Today. Now. Before you - before something happens - "
"Nothing will happen. Nothing can happen. Let Palpatine call himself Emperor. Let him. He can do the dirty work, all the messy, brutal oppression it'll take to unite the galaxy forever - unite it against him. He'll make himself into the most hated man in history. And when the time is right, we'll throw him down - "
"Anakin, stop - "
"Don't you see? We'll be heroes. The whole galaxy will love us, and we will rule. Together."
"Please stop - Anakin, please, stop, I can't stand it . . . "
He wasn't listening to her. He wasn't looking at her. He was looking past her shoulder. Feral joy burned from his eyes, and his face was no longer human. "You . . . "
From behind her, calmly precise, with that clipped Coruscanti accent: "Padme. Move away from him."
"Obi-Wan?" She whirled, and he was on the landing ramp, still and sad. "No!"
"You," growled a voice that should have been her love's. "You brought him here . . . "
She turned back, and now he was looking at her. His eyes were full of flame. "Anakin?"
"Padme, move away." There was an urgency in Obi-Wan's voice that sounded closer to fear than Padme had ever heard from him. "He's not who you think he is. He will harm you."
Anakin's lips peeled off his teeth. "I would thank you for this, if it were a gift of love."
Trembling, shaking her head, she began to back away. "No, Anakin - no . . . "
"Palpatine was right. Sometimes it is the closest who cannot see. I loved you too much, Padme." He made a fist, and she couldn't breathe. "I loved you too much to see you! To see what you are!"
A veil of red descended on the world. She clawed at her throat, but there was nothing there her hands could touch.
"Let her go, Anakin."
His answer was a predator's snarl, over the body of its prey. "You will not take her from me!"
She wanted to scream, to beg, to howl, No, Anakin, I'm sorry! I'm sorry . . . I love you . . . , but her locked throat strangled the truth inside her head, and the world-veil of red smoked toward black.
"Let her go!"
"Never!"
The ground fell away beneath her, and then a white flash of impact blasted her into night.
Then there's more with Yoda and Palpatine.
Then: Obi-Wan knelt beside Padme's unconscious body, where she lay limp and broken in the smoky dusk. He felt for a pulse. It was thin, and erratic. "Anakin - Anakin, what have you done?"
In the Force, Anakin burned like a fusion torch. "You turned her against me."
Obi-Wan looked at the best friend he had ever had. "You did that yourself," he said sadly.
"I'll give you a chance, Obi-Wan. For old times' sake. Walk away."
"If only I could."
"Go some place out of the way. Retire. Meditate. That's what you like, isn't it? You don't have to fight for peace anymore. Peace is here. My Empire is peace."
"Your Empire? It will never have peace. It was founded on treachery and innocent blood."
"Don't make me kill you, Obi-Wan. If you are not with me, you are against me."
"Only Sith deal in absolutes, Anakin. The truth is never black and white." He rose, spreading empty hands. "Let me take Padme to a medcenter. She's hurt, Anakin. She needs medical attention."
"She stays."
"Anakin - "
"You don't get to take her anywhere. You don't get to touch her. She's mine, do you understand? It's your fault, all of it - you made her betray me!"
"Anakin - " Anakin's hand sprouted a bar of blue plasma.
Obi-Wan sighed. He brought out his own lighstaber and angled it before him. "Then I will do what I must."
"You'll try," Anakin said, and leapt.
Obi-Wan met him in the air. Blue blades crossed, and the volcano above echoed their lightning with a shout of fire.
Yeah, well, that dream I had, where Obi-Wan leaves him there weeping on his knees and Anakin strikes Palpatine's head off? It's exactly like that (except for a few minor changes to the wording surrounding the mentions of Obi-Wan and Anakin's immediate reaction to learning that Obi-Wan's there, too), but with a window into Anakin's head that gave me the heebie jeebies (because Vader is just a mask he's put on for Palpatine, a disguise that he's put on as a necessity in order to save Padme, to let him get close enough to Palpatine to learn how to save Padme, after which he fully intends to just kill Palpatine and use his power to make everything right again - as if any power in the world could make the slaughter of innocent children right! - and he's become so focused on that goal that he doesn't even see the things he's doing in order to reach it. There's nothing in his head from the attack on the Temple but the noise of thunder and the feel of rain and a blackness that the rest of his mind automatically shies away from. It's like there's this hole in him, one he's deliberately ripped into his mind/psyche, and everything he can't handle has been thrown down into that hole, so far that it's like it's not even there any more. Anakin knows - vaguely - that he's done something and that it's something horrible, but he just can't remember it. It's like it's just - gone. And his whole mind is like this. There are these terrible ugly black gashes torn into him where there's nothing but blackness, and each one hides an atrocity of some kind - the Sand People, Jabiim, Dooku, et. - and he understands that something is wrong with him, that something is seriously wrong with him, but Anakin thinks that it's not important because he's not important, his own suffering isn't important, the only thing that's important to him is saving Padme and making sure that Obi-Wan doesn't get involved in this because he can't put things right again with Obi-Wan and THAT'S why he gets snarly when she brings him up - because he's terrified that Obi-Wan will turn against him if he finds out that Anakin's given in to Palpatine/Sidious like this, even if it's only a sham, in his head - and freaks out when Obi-Wan shows up, because that terror of being judged and found wanting, of Obi-Wan turning away from him, translates directly into an unreasoning fury with Padme for betraying him by bringing Obi-Wan there and putting both Anakin's plans and Obi-Wan's life - because of the orders he knows he has from Palpatine/Sidious to regard all Jedi as traitors - at risk this way), a window into Obi-Wan's heart that made me cry (at the core of which is a mantra that he keeps repeating silently to himself, like some kind of warped, backwards variation on the Bene Gesserit litany against fear: If I remake myself in the image of ice, I cannot be touched by these things. If I cannot be touched, I will not feel. If I do not feel, I cannot be hurt. If I cannot be hurt, I can do my duty. If I do my duty, the galaxy will not fall into darkness. I MUST do my duty. To do my duty, I must not feel. If I remake myself in the image of ice . . . ), and a few crucial difference right there near the end of the discussion between Anakin and Padme that segue into Obi-Wan cutting all ties with Anakin and then leaving him there, weeping and broken, on his knees, right after Anakin snarls, "You made her betray me!"
And it goes something like this: "Made her betray you? Anakin, I begged Padme for her help in finding you! I told her what you had done, at the Temple, I warned her about how dangerous you have become, and she would have none of it! She would not hear a word against you! She did not believe me. Her faith in you was so great that she turned me away! I was forced to follow her in secret and then stow away on her ship to even get here! If Padme has turned against you, Anakin, then it is only because she was no longer able to deny the truth that her own ears were telling her - that you, yourself, have betrayed her and everything that she has ever believed in, everything that she has loved and fought for and tried to protect, in all the galaxy! Betrayal?" A noise that might have been a hollow laugh or could have been been the not quite entirely choked off sound of a sob escaped from behind Obi-Wan's firmly shut lips. "Anakin, it is you who have betrayed us, all of us, in turning to the Dark Side! And for what? To what purpose? Greater power? Forbidden knowledge? Sith Holocrons to help you strike greater terror into the hearts of the subjects of your so-called Empire? There is no possible reason capable of excusing your own treachery, no reward great enough to have made it worth the price of your soul - which you, yourself, surrendered in the moment you put your lightsaber to the first of the innocent residents of the Temple!"
"Everything I've done has been for Padme! You don't know - you can't know - you haven't even been here, and why would you care even if you had? You Jedi are all the same - heartless, soulless puppets parroting obscure philosophies and mystical riddles as if they were knowledge, as if any sentient being is his right mind could rejoice at the thought of losing someone he loves! To Hell with Yoda and to Hell with you all, hiding your cold, empty hearts behind your damned Jedi platitudes! Infinite compassion? The Jedi have no compassion! How can you even dare to claim that the Jedi have compassion? You have no hearts, none of you do, or else you would understand! I couldn't just stand by and do nothing while she dies! Not if I could somehow win the power to save her!"
"SAVE her?! What are you - Anakin, Padme may very well die, because of you! You nearly killed her, just now! What can you possibly hope to - "
"DON'T YOU SAY THAT! I LOVE Padme! I'd never hurt her! She's my wife and I LOVE her! I've done this for her, to save her! She'll die if I don't, she'll die when the baby comes! I have to save her! You don't understand! I let my mom die - I knew she was in pain, I had the dreams, the same kind of dreams I've been having about Padme since I found out she was pregnant, and I knew she was in trouble, but I did nothing! I knew she was suffering and I did nothing because I was afraid - afraid to act out, afraid to go against the Council's will, afraid that I'd be cast out if I went against their will and went to see her! And then she died! It was too late by the time I found enough courage to go, and I couldn't save her! I CAN'T go through that again! I can't lose anyone else because of my weakness, my cowardice! If I have to act, then I will! I'll save her, Master! I HAVE to save her! I - "
The ice around Obi-Wan's heart shatters under the weight of the words Anakin Skywalker has just spoken. The pain is immediate and crippling, stealing away his breath until he can barely make himself force out the following words: " . . . wife . . . ? Padme is - " The next words out of Anakin's mouth seal his fate, for it is those words that break Obi-Wan Kenobi - those utterly selfish words and the blatantly morally rotten morass that reveals there is nothing left of the boy, the young man, who was always so good and so firmly entrenched within the light, so absolutely on the side of justice, that Obi-Wan could not help but love him, could not keep himself from cherishing and wanting to protect that huge heart, that open and giving soul, desiring to do anything and everything within his power to protect and to support Anakin in all of his endeavors, even the ones that put him at odds with the High Council, for Mace Windu has been right in assuming that Obi-Wan is Anakin's partisan and that his devotion to Anakin is far and away greater than his loyalty to the High Council and the Order. Obi-Wan has, since the moment he first accepted responsibility for the essentially orphaned Anakin, been the boy's guardian and stalwart friend and loyal companion, and until this moment Obi-Wan has firmly believed that there is nothing that he would not do, nothing he would not endure, for Anakin's sake. But this - this is too much. The weight of this knowledge is too great. Obi-Wan shatters like a diamond struck just SO, right at the apex of a network of faultlines and weaknesses that he himself has carved into being, with his blind affection and unshakeable attachment and loyalty to Anakin. Anakin, who is apparently so willfully blind, so self-centered, that he cannot even see how he is destroying the very thing he has been so desperate to protect. Anakin, who has been lying to him - to all of them - for years. Anakin, who cares so little for the Light, for the life, that he has squandered and run roughshod over the love and devotion of the only two living souls who have trusted and believed in him and his goodness implictly. Anakin, whose eyes are blazing an animalistic golden-yellow as he screams out his irrational and twisted reasons for having personally murdered so many innocent souls that Obi-Wan's mind buckles and breaks under the strain of trying to make that knowledge make some kind of sense against Anakin's claims.
"She's my wife and I'll do ANYTHING I have to, to save her! And you can't stop me! You WON'T stop me! I'll - "
The voice that come out of Obi-Wan Kenobi then is full of so much power and so deeply saturated with rage that it hardly even sounds human. "DO YOU MEAN TO TELL ME YOU'VE DONE ALL OF THIS, THAT YOU'VE PLEDGED YOUR TROTH TO THE LAST DARK LORD OF THE SITH AND PERSONALLY OVERSEEN THE MURDER OF EVERY LAST RESIDENT OF THE JEDI TEMPLE - INCLUDING THE YOUNGEST OF THE BABIES IN THE CRECHE - BECAUSE OF A WOMAN YOU KNOW SO LITTLE AND CARE SO LITTLE ABOUT THAT YOU'VE ALL BUT KILLED HER, JUST NOW, IN A FIT OF RAGE, BECAUSE SHE HAS PROVEN TO HAVE A WILL AND A MIND GREAT ENOUGH TO FORM AN OPINION OF HER OWN?!"
There is so much Force power in that voice that it knocks Anakin backwards, jolting him and breaking the panicked loop his mind his been trapped within ever since his exhausted and feverish brain first seized upon the notion that if he did as Master Yoda advised him to do, then Padme would surely die, whereas if he just closed his eyes and mind and heart against the horror of such odedience and gave in to Palpatine, he would be rewarded with enough power and knowledge to save Padme. And so Anakin finds himself staring, his mind a humming blank, at the stranger who is standing before him wearing the robes and form and features of his former Master. "I - I - I'm not - I DIDN'T - "
"LOOK at her, Anakin! Just LOOK at her! LOOK at what you have DONE to her! If Padme Amidala dies in childbirth, then it will be because of the damage that YOU, Anakin Skywalker, have inflicted upon her, not because of any weakness in her body or external threat from the outside or anything else but YOU!"
Padme is spread out before his staring eyes like a sacrificial offering. The touch of his own Force signature is so strong around the damaged column of her throat that she reeks of his taint, stinks of the Dark Side. Anakin's horror is such that his mind automatically flinches, trying to look away, to deny, to somehow get rid of the ugly truth staring him in the face. "I - I - I didn't - I couldn't - I love - "
"Love? LOVE! WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU KNOW OF LOVE?! YOU, who think of nothing and no one but your own desires, your own pleasures, your own power?! HOW DARE YOU SPEAK TO ME OF LOVE WHEN YOU SO OBVIOUSLY KNOW NOTHING OF ITS TRUE NATURE!?"
It is not Obi-Wan Kenobi who is speaking these things, shrieking these words at him. It CAN'T be Obi-Wan Kenobi who is standing before him, screaming and boiling with so much rage, blazing with so much power, that he is little more than a force of nature - a seething hurricane of so much concentrated anger and pain coupled to so much raw energy that the words exploding out of the man's mouth tear into Anakin like jagged lines of dark fire, shredding him with their power and incinerating him with their pain. The Force-compulsion is so strong that Anakin's mind buckles beneath it, his shields all giving way, until he is utterly defenseless and broken, trembling like a man with palsy in the face of so much power and so much emotion. " . . . I . . . "
"YOU are the traitor, Anakin Skywalker. The ONLY traitor here. The blood of the younglings is on your hands. The deaths of the Jedi are on your hands. The destruction of the Jedi Order and all that it has stood for, all that it has fought for, all that is has sought to protect, the light it has struggled to kindle and spread, is upon your hands. You are a traitor, a disgrace to the Jedi, and a blight upon the face of humanity! The Force itself cries out against you, Anakin Skywalker! YOU ARE A MONSTER!"
Anakin's heart is shattering, his mind breaking open beneath the pressure of that unstoppable power, the juggernaut of that rage, which is determined to strip him utterly bare and hold him, bloody and keening, up to the face and shape of his own sin. "I don't - I'm not - Obi-Wan - Master - PLEASE - "
"Don't you DARE speak that name to me! Don't you DARE to call me your Master now! You've chosen another, CHOSEN ONE," the words are an epithet of such hatred that they sound like a curse, "and with that choice you've cut all of your ties to me, broken all of the promises you made in service to the Light, and you've made the Dark your new home. Lie in the bed you've made and rot in that darkness, SITH!"
" - OBI-WAN - !"
"DON'T YOU TOUCH ME! Don't you DARE try to touch me - or her - ever again! You are a self-centered coward, a traitor, a murderer, and a Sith, and YOU ARE MY ENEMY, DARTH VADER. Qui-Gon would be appalled; Shmi Skywalker would be ashamed: I wash my hands of you! Master Yoda was right: Anakin Skywalker is dead. I DO NOT KNOW YOU."
"MASTER! Obi-Wan - please, I don't understand, I'm not - I couldn't have - I DIDN'T MEAN - "
The voice is implacable, cold and inescapable as the void. "I know not the man who stands before me. The man I have known as Anakin Skywalker and trusted and loved with all of the strength that is within me is dead. I renounce all ties to him and his. I sever all bonds that have formed between us. You, I name an abomination. You, I label as anathema. You, I pronounce - "
"OBI-WAN! Obi-Wan, DON'T! PLEASE! I never meant - I didn't want - Obi-Wan, I LOVE YOU! Please - Master, PLEASE - "
" - anathematized, excommunicate, cast out of the Light and cut off from the face of - "
"Don't, DON'T, Master, DON'T -"
" - the Living Force for all time. May those who look upon your face see nothing but your eyes and the truth they tell of your fall. May the hand of every living being be turned against you. May the Force itself rise up and cast you out of its embrace for all time and - "
" - but I love you, I LOVE YOU, Obi-Wan, PLEASE - "
" - no more mercy be shown to you than that which you have granted to the victims of your vanity! Sith you have chosen to become and Sith you should be to all who look upon you! I know you as nothing but a Dark Lord of the Sith and my enemy!"
And with that pronouncement, the gathering tide of Force-enhanced fury peaks, and breaks, and there is a wrenching, a snapping, a ripping apart, and -
- and Anakin's is left so broken open that it feels as if his soul is bleeding out from him, pouring away out of the ragged wound this exploding supernova of Force energy in the shape of Obi-Wan Kenobi has torn into him, where he's buthered the old Master-Padawan bond, sundered the ties that have bound them together as Force-partners, gouged out and uprooted every last tendril of love, of trust, of sharing, that has ever been between them, ever bridged the gap between their minds and hearts and souls and bound them up together into one whole and functional unit. The pain is so far beyond anything he has ever felt that he blacks out, collapsing to the ground like puppet whose strings have all but simultaneously and irrepairably severed. It is his own keening cry, his own wordless wail of loss and denial and anguish, that wakes him.
Obi-Wan - the semblance of Obi-Wan, if Obi-Wan were a man carved of ice, a soulless and heartless statue carved of cold stone and imbued with so much Force energy that he glows like the surface of a star - is standing over him, Padme in his arms.
" . . . Obi-Wan . . . " His throat is so raw from screaming that the name - the plea for mercy, for rescue, for understanding and pity and love - is little more than a soundless moan of breath.
"I will not cut down an unarmed man. I will not stoop so low - will not sully myself or the name of the Jedi Order by lowering myself to your level. Be warned, Sith. If I see you again, I will show you no mercy. My lightsaber will be drawn against you." And with that, Obi-Wan - this stranger wearing Obi-Wan's body - turns on his heel and marches back into the ship, carrying Padme's disturbingly limb body away with him. A few moments later, the ship lifts off, and then he is gone. As easily and as quickly as that, Anakin Skywalker is abandoned, cast off and left to fester in his own poisons, in the darkness that he has willingly - and to no purpose but destruction, as he can now clearly see - invited into himself.
*Shudders and averts eyes and mind firmly from the rest* Yeah. So. These are really ugly things to be thinking about and I don't like dreaming about this and feeling the utter desolation in Obi-Wan when he turns his back on Anakin, having to be there when he collapses on the ship and sobs for the man he's failed, the love he's lost, because he truly believes that the soul of Anakin Skywalker has been entirely destroyed. The Anakin he knew and loved could never have done the things that Obi-Wan has seen and heard this being with the figure/form of Anakin but the ugly eyes of a Sith do: ergo, Anakin Skywalker is dead, to Obi-Wan Kenobi, the shining bright soul that was Anakin Skywalker betrayed and most foully murdered by the evil ways of Darth Vader. And this shatters him. Utterly. Completely. He gathers together enough of a semblance of control to keep it together long enough to get Luke to Tatooine and Owen and Beru, and then he goes out into the wilderness of the deserts as a madman, keening his grief into the winds and letting them carrying away his pain and his memories until he is little more than the shell of a man. If he's not entirely insane at that point, he's so close to it that it makes little difference, either way. And it's here that my dreams really start bleeding together, because I get a series of events from here that lead up to a slightly difference version of the "cantina" scene then (after Anakin has struck off Palpatine's head, when he came to Mustafar to "save" him and watched the Sith Lord go up in flames, in the lava), one with Anakin still as Anakin (no blasted black box of armor). Falling into the Rakatas cave/temple jolts him back into a semblance of himself, but it's only temporary. And that sense of self is subsumed and destroyed by the pain when he remembers Anakin's betrayal and loss again. Betrayed and tumbled back to his grief once more by the desert, he flees the cave and the sands for the nearest town and another form of oblivion - one that is drug-induced and cannot be interferred with by such insignificant things as thoughts, because in the grips of such oblivion, thoughts cannot exist whole. And there he is met with Anakin - an Anakin who has killed Palpatine and come crawling back to him as if the addition of another murder to his long litany of deaths could be enough to make up for the crimes he has committed! And there Obi-Wan fulfills his vow and meets this stranger clad in the painfully familiar form of Anakin Skywalker with his drawn lightsaber. And the next part is such a morass of agony and tears and hurting and the deliberate infliction of pain, far too much of it and too violent to rest easy with me at all, frankly, that I can't bring myself to try to work my way through it to see what lies beyond. I'm scared of it. I'm frightened of the amount of pain in them and the propensity towards violence that it breeds. I don't want anything to do with it. Nope. Nope. Nope. And no. *Claps hands over ears to shut out the crying and firmly averts eyes to an image of the boys cuddling in bed* And I think I've dwelt on this about enough. Any longer, and I'll never be able to sleep tonight.