yet more lady jedi (now with added angst!)
Feb. 2nd, 2012 12:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bedlamsbardPrevious parts here, here, and here. I guess at some point I'll turn this into actual fic? Since I appear to have, like, a plot and stuff.
The death of a single Jedi, violent, unexpected, can leave ripples in the Force for decades, even centuries afterwards. Twenty-six Jedi had died on Jabiim. Anakin had spent months thinking it was twenty-seven, that she had been the only Jedi to make it off the planet alive, before they’d found out that Obi-Wan’s death had been faked. She braces herself for the inevitable psychic backlash as the Falcon lands in the spaceport and sees Obi-Wan flinch gray, her fist clenching on the hilt of her lightsaber before she forces her hand away. Cobalt Station hadn’t been very far away; Anakin hears Zule’s last words in the Force like a broken droid on a loop: may the Force be with the others may be the Force be with the others may the Force be with the others.
Anakin presses the heel of her hand to her forehead, willing her shields up so that she doesn’t have to relive the worst days of her life. It forces the backlash out enough that Anakin can breathe again and reconfigure her shields so that it fades to low-level misery. It still throbs in her head, badly enough that it makes her short and sharp with Han when he sends her off with Luke to pick up the parts she needs for the Falcon’s repairs. She pulls her hood up over her hair, knowing that no one on the planet will recognize her – she’s not that Anakin Skywalker – but she can’t shake the feeling that any minute now someone’s going to look at her and point, shout, “Murderer!” and “Traitor!” and “Monster!” at her.
“I don’t think I’ll ever get used to knowing that there are planets where it rains this much,” Luke complains mildly. “I grew up on a moisture farm on Tatooine, I think it rains more here in one day than we collected in a year.”
“Mmmph,” Anakin says, then rouses herself enough to say, “I know what you mean. I grew up in Mos Espa.”
“You won the Boonta Eve!” Luke exclaims. “Aunt Beru told me once, I went and looked up the records.”
“Yeah, I did that,” Anakin says. The memory makes her cheer up a little and she starts looking around for a junk shop in earnest.
They find one that looks promising on the second floor of one of the market’s outer squares. She looks around with satisfaction, her hands tucked in the sleeves of her robes, and starts bartering with the owner for the parts she wants. It’s like old times, like being back in Watto’s shop. It hadn’t been so awful, really; she’d gotten to spend the whole day fixing things, usually whatever she wanted, and she had had a home to go back to in the night. It could have been a whole lot worse, Anakin knows. She had been a cute kid; the way her mother looked at her, she knew that she was going to grow up to be a pretty girl, and she knew what happened to pretty girls on Tatooine, especially ones who came under the eyes of the Hutts the way a podracer did. In a few years, Jabba or Gardulla or one of the other Hutts would have bought her from Watto, and then – well, it doesn’t bear thinking of.
Luke pays the owner, wrapping up the parts in waxed paper and tucking them inside his cloak. They had back out into the market, Anakin pulling her hood up again even though the walkway is covered. Rain beats down on the roof, a drumming sound that raises the hair on the back of her neck in remembered misery – more than remembered, the backlash is still echoing through the Force even after more than twenty years.
“Thirty-seven days,” she mutters. “Thirty-seven days before the sun came out, for one miserable hour.”
Luke grabs her arm, pulling her quickly behind a pillar. “Wait,” he says. “Stormtroopers –”
Anakin follows his gesture. “Clones?” she asks.
“Imperial forces,” Luke says, reaching for his comlink. “Han, I’m with Anakin, there are stormtroopers here in the southern square. We’re – oh, no.”
“What?” Han says, sounding irritated.
“I think they just recognized Leia.”
Anakin peers down into the square, which Leia and C-3PO have just entered. She sees the stormtroopers and steps quickly behind a pillar, Threepio following behind her, but it’s too late; one of the stormtroopers has already seen her and has started advancing. Luke is muttering anxiously into his comlink, reaching for his blaster with the other hand.
Anakin pushes her hood back, unclipping her lightsaber from her belt. She sends a wordless warning through the Force for Obi-Wan, and says to Luke, “Tell Han to get the ship ready. This might get messy.”
Luke’s gaze goes to the lightsaber in her hand. “What can I do?” he asks.
“Keep out of the way,” Anakin says, steps up onto the rail, and jumps, lightsaber blazing into existence as she somersaults down into the midst of the stormtroopers. She sweeps it sideways, snapping her bootheel into the helmeted face of one stormtrooper and putting a little bit of the Force behind it, sending him flying backwards into three of his comrades. Blaster bolts bounce off her lightsaber blade as she deflects them. In a distant part of her brain, she realizes that Leia and Luke are shooting too, while Threepio blithers in the background.
“Time to go!” she says when she reaches Leia and Threepio. Luke has joined them, rain soaking his hair to his face and his blaster steaming in his hand. There’s shouting all around them; Anakin deflects a thrown stone with her lightsaber, cursing. Apparently, Jabiim hasn’t forgotten how much they hate the Jedi.
Nobody waits to be told twice. Anakin covers their retreat, reaching out with the Force to see if there’s anyone in their path, and finds Obi-Wan making handy work of another troop of stormtroopers back at the spaceport. More are closing in on their position, alerted by their comrades. The Jabiimi aren’t making it easy, either, shouting and throwing things – mostly at Anakin with her lightsaber and Jedi robes, but Luke and Leia are getting their fair share of abuse too. Anakin will have to apologize later. She can’t deflect rocks the way she can blaster bolts; one sheers in two on the blade of her lightsaber, one half flying back to strike the side the side of her face. Anakin spits blood aside, snarling and not caring that she probably looks like the Jabiimi image of the original mad Jedi.
She deflects blaster bolts as they retreat into the spaceport, coming up beside Obi-Wan, who’s doing the same. The area around them is littered with dead stormtroopers, like every battlefield Anakin has been on in the past five years. Funny to think that the clones lived on while the Jedi died.
“Come on!” Han shouts from the Falcon’s on-ramp. “We’re loaded up, let’s get out of here before more of them show up!”
Luke and Leia run past them, Threepio doddering afterwards, and Anakin and Obi-Wan back cautiously up, their lightsabers flashing. Obi-Wan thrusts her hand out, using the Force to close the entry doors, which buys them a few minutes to retreat back onto the Falcon, the ramp already closing as they leap onto it, leaving them panting and sprawled on the floor in the loading bay.
“We’ve got company!” Han shouts from the bridge as the Falcon leaves the ground, ascending rapidly into the upper atmosphere. “Dreadnoughts!”
And something else, Anakin realizes, clasping a hand to her head at the same time Obi-Wan draws in a ragged breath.
“Sith,” she spits out.
*
“How the hell did they know where we were going to be?” Han demands, pacing back and forth.
Chewbacca grumbles something about spies in the Rebel Alliance that makes Han frown at him, alarmed.
“I’m sure that everyone in the Alliance is loyal,” Leia protests. “We’ve been very careful about that – and this mission was need-to-know, and I am personally familiar with every person on that list.”
Anakin flips a screwdriver between her fingers, her muddy boots discarded on the floor. “So? That doesn’t mean they won’t betray you. It happens all the time.”
Leia gives her a sharp look. “Not to me!”
Anakin snorts, having heard that before. Obi-Wan leans forward from her cross-legged position on the armchair across from Anakin. “What about the Sith Lord that was with those dreadnoughts?” she inquires. “Is it possible that he – or she – has been tracking you? We have records of Jedi who were strong enough to track their adversaries halfway across the galaxy using the Force.”
“But not for many thousands of years!” Anakin protests. “And they’re not really records, just stories – children’s tales to amuse the younglings. Even I’m not powerful enough to do that.”
“Perhaps it is not a question of power, but one of knowledge,” Obi-Wan argues. “With the Jedi fallen –” she falters a moment, but not long enough for anyone but Anakin to notice, “− who knows what might be hidden with the Archives? Master Nu has long suspected that there are files lost in the depths of the Archives that the cataloguers have missed.” She perks up, her eyes bright, and Anakin smiles fondly at her. If Obi-Wan didn’t have such a strong righteous streak and a nasty knack for violence that betters most Jedi, she’d probably be Master Nu’s ideal successor.
“Look, right now, who cares how they did it?” Han demands, raising his hands. “Not that I have any clue what a Sith is –”
Anakin sweeps a hand through her hair, pulling out the tie and wrapping it around her fingers. “Think of the Jedi. Then think of everything that’s inimical to the Jedi Order. That’s what a Sith is – everything that’s wrong in the galaxy. They use the Force, but they twist it, they use it to murder and torture and destroy.” She clenches her durasteel fist, and the hairtie snaps between her gloved fingers.
“Like Darth Vader,” Leia says softly.
“Yes,” Obi-Wan says, leaning her elbows on her knees. “Darth is the title the Sith lords take for themselves. I haven’t heard of this Vader, though.”
“He’s an abomination,” she spits. “A monster. He destroyed my planet!”
Anakin and Obi-Wan both flinch. “Alderaan?” Anakin says. “There’s no weapon that can destroy a planet –”
“We destroyed the Death Star,” Luke says. “For now, anyway. They’re building another one.”
“What a terrible name,” Obi-Wan says, her mouth curling. “This Vader, where did he come from? Do you know anything about him?”
“No,” Leia says. “He just turned up at the end of the Clone Wars. There’s a rumor that he was once a Jedi Knight, but you have to understand, he wears a mask. There’s very little of him left that’s biological; his own mother wouldn’t even recognize him.”
“It’s a rare Jedi who knows their mother,” Obi-Wan murmurs, absent. Anakin sets her mouth at the words, upset, and enough of that must leech past her shields into the Force, because Obi-Wan turns to give her an apologetic look, which doesn’t really make up for it but is more than Obi-Wan would have offered up four years ago.
“I think I’d like to meet this Darth Vader,” Obi-Wan goes on, thoughtful. “I’d like to know who it is I’ll have to warn the Council about when we get home.”
“But you do know him!” Luke says suddenly. “I’d forgotten – Ben once told me that Vader was a pupil of his when he was still a Jedi. So you must know who he is –”
There is a strange kind of roaring in Anakin’s ears, drowning out Obi-Wan’s dissembling about the class she’d once taught at the Jedi Temple. Her vision seems to go strange, everything blurring before her, and for the first time in years she is acutely aware of the differences between durasteel and flesh, clenching her metal fist over and over and knowing, for once, exactly where her own skin ends and the metal begins. There’s very little of him left that’s biological.
You are walking his path, this universe’s Obi-Wan Kenobi had said, as if it was a foregone conclusion. It could be coincidence – but there is no coincidence, just the will of the Force.
Anakin stumbles upright, feeling ill, and blurts out something about a concussion from the rock that had struck her. She hears Obi-Wan come after her, sending out soothing tendrils of the Force that coil against her shields, gently suggesting that she take a moment to breathe and calm down, think this through and not leap to conclusions. Anakin doesn’t really feel like calming down; she feels like throwing herself out an airlock, because that has to be better than – no. Stars of Alderaan, no –
She slams her way into the Falcon’s engine room, Obi-Wan still following, and puts her back up against the wall, putting a hand out to rest on the hyperdrive engine, which hums softly beneath her bare palm. Obi-Wan flicks her fingers at the door to close it and stops in front of her, not quite touching but close enough that Anakin could reach out for her without difficulty.
“Ani, it doesn’t mean anything,” she says.
“Of course it does,” Anakin says dully. “That man, that bastard, he broke every rule in the Code. No wonder the other Obi-Wan looked at me and hated me so much –”
“We don’t know that Vader is this universe’s Anakin Skywalker,” Obi-Wan insists. “There’s no proof –”
“You’ve only had one apprentice!” Anakin almost screams at her – holds it in, because the ship’s not that big and she doesn’t want the others to overhear this. It comes out a hiss instead, ugly with pain.
“And Luke did not say that Vader was Obi-Wan’s apprentice, merely his pupil! I know many Jedi, I’ve taught classes in the Temple, I’ve watched over Padawans whose master are absent or dead – don’ t you think that if his own Padawan had turned to the Dark Side, he would say it?”
“Would you?” Anakin demands bitterly. “If I turned to the Dark Side, would you be able to say it? Would you be able to say the words? My former Padawan, my partner, has betrayed the Jedi Order and become a Sith Lord.”
Even saying it makes her feel like throwing up. She sweeps the back of her gloved hand over her mouth as if to clean the taste of it away.
Obi-Wan closes her eyes for a moment, then opens them again, as blue as her lightsaber in the dim lights of the engine room. “Whatever choices that Anakin Skywalker made, if he did make them, do not inform what choices you will make,” she says. “You are not him, Anakin.”
“But I am him, Master,” Anakin says. “We’re the same. If he fell to the Dark Side, then I –” She puts a hand to her mouth, nauseated again. “Then I could too,” she says, the words oddly muffled to her ears, like listening to something from the other side of a closed door.
“You could,” Obi-Wan agrees. “So could I. So could any of us. The Dark Side is a constant danger for all Jedi.”
“Not for you,” Anakin says. “You’re the last person who’d ever – well, you and Master Yoda, maybe. But I’ve – I’ve done things. Horrible things. I’ve broken the Code, I’ve had – attachments.”
“Your mother.”
“Mom. Padmé.” She raises her head and looks steadily at Obi-Wan. “You.”
Obi-Wan sighs. “Most of the Jedi in the Order have broken that tenet, if only with our Masters or Padawans. It’s gotten worse since the war began. We have all begun doing dangerous things for each other. There are so few of us left –”
Anakin is so startled that all she can do is stare at Obi-Wan, who’s probably the last person in the Order she’d expect to ever admit to breaking the Code. “You wouldn’t,” she says, distracted for a moment from the mystery of Darth Vader.
“Wouldn’t I?” Obi-Wan asks, reaching out one hand to touch the curve of Anakin’s cheek. She turns her face into it, closing her eyes. Obi-Wan strokes a thumb gently over her cheekbone.
“You are not weak, Anakin Skywalker,” she says. “Whatever he did, whatever you’ve done, you’ve told me about it. You will not fall into darkness. I will not allow it.”
“This Obi-Wan couldn’t stop it,” Anakin says, the despair rising up again. Obi-Wan’s callused palm is warm against her cheek, the Force wrapped around them like the comforting folds of a Jedi robe.
“I am not him,” Obi-Wan breathes. “You are not him. Do you remember what you told me last night, about what you said to the Supreme Chancellor?”
“I am a Jedi,” Anakin says, and opens her eyes. Obi-Wan is very close, close enough to kiss, and her breath is warm against the curve of Anakin’s jaw.
“We are Jedi,” Obi-Wan says. “Whatever else we are, whatever else has happened, we are Jedi. Even if we are the last Jedi left in the universe – any universe.”
“We are Jedi,” Anakin repeats, her voice scratchy to her ears.
Obi-Wan leans forward and presses a kiss to her forehead. “You were my Padawan, you are my partner, and I trust you with my life no matter what anyone says. We are Jedi. You and I, together, until the day we die. We are Jedi.”
Anakin swallows. “Why would he do it?” she whispers.
“It doesn’t matter,” Obi-Wan says. “You aren’t him.”
“No,” Anakin says. “I’m a Jedi.”
The death of a single Jedi, violent, unexpected, can leave ripples in the Force for decades, even centuries afterwards. Twenty-six Jedi had died on Jabiim. Anakin had spent months thinking it was twenty-seven, that she had been the only Jedi to make it off the planet alive, before they’d found out that Obi-Wan’s death had been faked. She braces herself for the inevitable psychic backlash as the Falcon lands in the spaceport and sees Obi-Wan flinch gray, her fist clenching on the hilt of her lightsaber before she forces her hand away. Cobalt Station hadn’t been very far away; Anakin hears Zule’s last words in the Force like a broken droid on a loop: may the Force be with the others may be the Force be with the others may the Force be with the others.
Anakin presses the heel of her hand to her forehead, willing her shields up so that she doesn’t have to relive the worst days of her life. It forces the backlash out enough that Anakin can breathe again and reconfigure her shields so that it fades to low-level misery. It still throbs in her head, badly enough that it makes her short and sharp with Han when he sends her off with Luke to pick up the parts she needs for the Falcon’s repairs. She pulls her hood up over her hair, knowing that no one on the planet will recognize her – she’s not that Anakin Skywalker – but she can’t shake the feeling that any minute now someone’s going to look at her and point, shout, “Murderer!” and “Traitor!” and “Monster!” at her.
“I don’t think I’ll ever get used to knowing that there are planets where it rains this much,” Luke complains mildly. “I grew up on a moisture farm on Tatooine, I think it rains more here in one day than we collected in a year.”
“Mmmph,” Anakin says, then rouses herself enough to say, “I know what you mean. I grew up in Mos Espa.”
“You won the Boonta Eve!” Luke exclaims. “Aunt Beru told me once, I went and looked up the records.”
“Yeah, I did that,” Anakin says. The memory makes her cheer up a little and she starts looking around for a junk shop in earnest.
They find one that looks promising on the second floor of one of the market’s outer squares. She looks around with satisfaction, her hands tucked in the sleeves of her robes, and starts bartering with the owner for the parts she wants. It’s like old times, like being back in Watto’s shop. It hadn’t been so awful, really; she’d gotten to spend the whole day fixing things, usually whatever she wanted, and she had had a home to go back to in the night. It could have been a whole lot worse, Anakin knows. She had been a cute kid; the way her mother looked at her, she knew that she was going to grow up to be a pretty girl, and she knew what happened to pretty girls on Tatooine, especially ones who came under the eyes of the Hutts the way a podracer did. In a few years, Jabba or Gardulla or one of the other Hutts would have bought her from Watto, and then – well, it doesn’t bear thinking of.
Luke pays the owner, wrapping up the parts in waxed paper and tucking them inside his cloak. They had back out into the market, Anakin pulling her hood up again even though the walkway is covered. Rain beats down on the roof, a drumming sound that raises the hair on the back of her neck in remembered misery – more than remembered, the backlash is still echoing through the Force even after more than twenty years.
“Thirty-seven days,” she mutters. “Thirty-seven days before the sun came out, for one miserable hour.”
Luke grabs her arm, pulling her quickly behind a pillar. “Wait,” he says. “Stormtroopers –”
Anakin follows his gesture. “Clones?” she asks.
“Imperial forces,” Luke says, reaching for his comlink. “Han, I’m with Anakin, there are stormtroopers here in the southern square. We’re – oh, no.”
“What?” Han says, sounding irritated.
“I think they just recognized Leia.”
Anakin peers down into the square, which Leia and C-3PO have just entered. She sees the stormtroopers and steps quickly behind a pillar, Threepio following behind her, but it’s too late; one of the stormtroopers has already seen her and has started advancing. Luke is muttering anxiously into his comlink, reaching for his blaster with the other hand.
Anakin pushes her hood back, unclipping her lightsaber from her belt. She sends a wordless warning through the Force for Obi-Wan, and says to Luke, “Tell Han to get the ship ready. This might get messy.”
Luke’s gaze goes to the lightsaber in her hand. “What can I do?” he asks.
“Keep out of the way,” Anakin says, steps up onto the rail, and jumps, lightsaber blazing into existence as she somersaults down into the midst of the stormtroopers. She sweeps it sideways, snapping her bootheel into the helmeted face of one stormtrooper and putting a little bit of the Force behind it, sending him flying backwards into three of his comrades. Blaster bolts bounce off her lightsaber blade as she deflects them. In a distant part of her brain, she realizes that Leia and Luke are shooting too, while Threepio blithers in the background.
“Time to go!” she says when she reaches Leia and Threepio. Luke has joined them, rain soaking his hair to his face and his blaster steaming in his hand. There’s shouting all around them; Anakin deflects a thrown stone with her lightsaber, cursing. Apparently, Jabiim hasn’t forgotten how much they hate the Jedi.
Nobody waits to be told twice. Anakin covers their retreat, reaching out with the Force to see if there’s anyone in their path, and finds Obi-Wan making handy work of another troop of stormtroopers back at the spaceport. More are closing in on their position, alerted by their comrades. The Jabiimi aren’t making it easy, either, shouting and throwing things – mostly at Anakin with her lightsaber and Jedi robes, but Luke and Leia are getting their fair share of abuse too. Anakin will have to apologize later. She can’t deflect rocks the way she can blaster bolts; one sheers in two on the blade of her lightsaber, one half flying back to strike the side the side of her face. Anakin spits blood aside, snarling and not caring that she probably looks like the Jabiimi image of the original mad Jedi.
She deflects blaster bolts as they retreat into the spaceport, coming up beside Obi-Wan, who’s doing the same. The area around them is littered with dead stormtroopers, like every battlefield Anakin has been on in the past five years. Funny to think that the clones lived on while the Jedi died.
“Come on!” Han shouts from the Falcon’s on-ramp. “We’re loaded up, let’s get out of here before more of them show up!”
Luke and Leia run past them, Threepio doddering afterwards, and Anakin and Obi-Wan back cautiously up, their lightsabers flashing. Obi-Wan thrusts her hand out, using the Force to close the entry doors, which buys them a few minutes to retreat back onto the Falcon, the ramp already closing as they leap onto it, leaving them panting and sprawled on the floor in the loading bay.
“We’ve got company!” Han shouts from the bridge as the Falcon leaves the ground, ascending rapidly into the upper atmosphere. “Dreadnoughts!”
And something else, Anakin realizes, clasping a hand to her head at the same time Obi-Wan draws in a ragged breath.
“Sith,” she spits out.
*
“How the hell did they know where we were going to be?” Han demands, pacing back and forth.
Chewbacca grumbles something about spies in the Rebel Alliance that makes Han frown at him, alarmed.
“I’m sure that everyone in the Alliance is loyal,” Leia protests. “We’ve been very careful about that – and this mission was need-to-know, and I am personally familiar with every person on that list.”
Anakin flips a screwdriver between her fingers, her muddy boots discarded on the floor. “So? That doesn’t mean they won’t betray you. It happens all the time.”
Leia gives her a sharp look. “Not to me!”
Anakin snorts, having heard that before. Obi-Wan leans forward from her cross-legged position on the armchair across from Anakin. “What about the Sith Lord that was with those dreadnoughts?” she inquires. “Is it possible that he – or she – has been tracking you? We have records of Jedi who were strong enough to track their adversaries halfway across the galaxy using the Force.”
“But not for many thousands of years!” Anakin protests. “And they’re not really records, just stories – children’s tales to amuse the younglings. Even I’m not powerful enough to do that.”
“Perhaps it is not a question of power, but one of knowledge,” Obi-Wan argues. “With the Jedi fallen –” she falters a moment, but not long enough for anyone but Anakin to notice, “− who knows what might be hidden with the Archives? Master Nu has long suspected that there are files lost in the depths of the Archives that the cataloguers have missed.” She perks up, her eyes bright, and Anakin smiles fondly at her. If Obi-Wan didn’t have such a strong righteous streak and a nasty knack for violence that betters most Jedi, she’d probably be Master Nu’s ideal successor.
“Look, right now, who cares how they did it?” Han demands, raising his hands. “Not that I have any clue what a Sith is –”
Anakin sweeps a hand through her hair, pulling out the tie and wrapping it around her fingers. “Think of the Jedi. Then think of everything that’s inimical to the Jedi Order. That’s what a Sith is – everything that’s wrong in the galaxy. They use the Force, but they twist it, they use it to murder and torture and destroy.” She clenches her durasteel fist, and the hairtie snaps between her gloved fingers.
“Like Darth Vader,” Leia says softly.
“Yes,” Obi-Wan says, leaning her elbows on her knees. “Darth is the title the Sith lords take for themselves. I haven’t heard of this Vader, though.”
“He’s an abomination,” she spits. “A monster. He destroyed my planet!”
Anakin and Obi-Wan both flinch. “Alderaan?” Anakin says. “There’s no weapon that can destroy a planet –”
“We destroyed the Death Star,” Luke says. “For now, anyway. They’re building another one.”
“What a terrible name,” Obi-Wan says, her mouth curling. “This Vader, where did he come from? Do you know anything about him?”
“No,” Leia says. “He just turned up at the end of the Clone Wars. There’s a rumor that he was once a Jedi Knight, but you have to understand, he wears a mask. There’s very little of him left that’s biological; his own mother wouldn’t even recognize him.”
“It’s a rare Jedi who knows their mother,” Obi-Wan murmurs, absent. Anakin sets her mouth at the words, upset, and enough of that must leech past her shields into the Force, because Obi-Wan turns to give her an apologetic look, which doesn’t really make up for it but is more than Obi-Wan would have offered up four years ago.
“I think I’d like to meet this Darth Vader,” Obi-Wan goes on, thoughtful. “I’d like to know who it is I’ll have to warn the Council about when we get home.”
“But you do know him!” Luke says suddenly. “I’d forgotten – Ben once told me that Vader was a pupil of his when he was still a Jedi. So you must know who he is –”
There is a strange kind of roaring in Anakin’s ears, drowning out Obi-Wan’s dissembling about the class she’d once taught at the Jedi Temple. Her vision seems to go strange, everything blurring before her, and for the first time in years she is acutely aware of the differences between durasteel and flesh, clenching her metal fist over and over and knowing, for once, exactly where her own skin ends and the metal begins. There’s very little of him left that’s biological.
You are walking his path, this universe’s Obi-Wan Kenobi had said, as if it was a foregone conclusion. It could be coincidence – but there is no coincidence, just the will of the Force.
Anakin stumbles upright, feeling ill, and blurts out something about a concussion from the rock that had struck her. She hears Obi-Wan come after her, sending out soothing tendrils of the Force that coil against her shields, gently suggesting that she take a moment to breathe and calm down, think this through and not leap to conclusions. Anakin doesn’t really feel like calming down; she feels like throwing herself out an airlock, because that has to be better than – no. Stars of Alderaan, no –
She slams her way into the Falcon’s engine room, Obi-Wan still following, and puts her back up against the wall, putting a hand out to rest on the hyperdrive engine, which hums softly beneath her bare palm. Obi-Wan flicks her fingers at the door to close it and stops in front of her, not quite touching but close enough that Anakin could reach out for her without difficulty.
“Ani, it doesn’t mean anything,” she says.
“Of course it does,” Anakin says dully. “That man, that bastard, he broke every rule in the Code. No wonder the other Obi-Wan looked at me and hated me so much –”
“We don’t know that Vader is this universe’s Anakin Skywalker,” Obi-Wan insists. “There’s no proof –”
“You’ve only had one apprentice!” Anakin almost screams at her – holds it in, because the ship’s not that big and she doesn’t want the others to overhear this. It comes out a hiss instead, ugly with pain.
“And Luke did not say that Vader was Obi-Wan’s apprentice, merely his pupil! I know many Jedi, I’ve taught classes in the Temple, I’ve watched over Padawans whose master are absent or dead – don’ t you think that if his own Padawan had turned to the Dark Side, he would say it?”
“Would you?” Anakin demands bitterly. “If I turned to the Dark Side, would you be able to say it? Would you be able to say the words? My former Padawan, my partner, has betrayed the Jedi Order and become a Sith Lord.”
Even saying it makes her feel like throwing up. She sweeps the back of her gloved hand over her mouth as if to clean the taste of it away.
Obi-Wan closes her eyes for a moment, then opens them again, as blue as her lightsaber in the dim lights of the engine room. “Whatever choices that Anakin Skywalker made, if he did make them, do not inform what choices you will make,” she says. “You are not him, Anakin.”
“But I am him, Master,” Anakin says. “We’re the same. If he fell to the Dark Side, then I –” She puts a hand to her mouth, nauseated again. “Then I could too,” she says, the words oddly muffled to her ears, like listening to something from the other side of a closed door.
“You could,” Obi-Wan agrees. “So could I. So could any of us. The Dark Side is a constant danger for all Jedi.”
“Not for you,” Anakin says. “You’re the last person who’d ever – well, you and Master Yoda, maybe. But I’ve – I’ve done things. Horrible things. I’ve broken the Code, I’ve had – attachments.”
“Your mother.”
“Mom. Padmé.” She raises her head and looks steadily at Obi-Wan. “You.”
Obi-Wan sighs. “Most of the Jedi in the Order have broken that tenet, if only with our Masters or Padawans. It’s gotten worse since the war began. We have all begun doing dangerous things for each other. There are so few of us left –”
Anakin is so startled that all she can do is stare at Obi-Wan, who’s probably the last person in the Order she’d expect to ever admit to breaking the Code. “You wouldn’t,” she says, distracted for a moment from the mystery of Darth Vader.
“Wouldn’t I?” Obi-Wan asks, reaching out one hand to touch the curve of Anakin’s cheek. She turns her face into it, closing her eyes. Obi-Wan strokes a thumb gently over her cheekbone.
“You are not weak, Anakin Skywalker,” she says. “Whatever he did, whatever you’ve done, you’ve told me about it. You will not fall into darkness. I will not allow it.”
“This Obi-Wan couldn’t stop it,” Anakin says, the despair rising up again. Obi-Wan’s callused palm is warm against her cheek, the Force wrapped around them like the comforting folds of a Jedi robe.
“I am not him,” Obi-Wan breathes. “You are not him. Do you remember what you told me last night, about what you said to the Supreme Chancellor?”
“I am a Jedi,” Anakin says, and opens her eyes. Obi-Wan is very close, close enough to kiss, and her breath is warm against the curve of Anakin’s jaw.
“We are Jedi,” Obi-Wan says. “Whatever else we are, whatever else has happened, we are Jedi. Even if we are the last Jedi left in the universe – any universe.”
“We are Jedi,” Anakin repeats, her voice scratchy to her ears.
Obi-Wan leans forward and presses a kiss to her forehead. “You were my Padawan, you are my partner, and I trust you with my life no matter what anyone says. We are Jedi. You and I, together, until the day we die. We are Jedi.”
Anakin swallows. “Why would he do it?” she whispers.
“It doesn’t matter,” Obi-Wan says. “You aren’t him.”
“No,” Anakin says. “I’m a Jedi.”