Chapter Text
Chapter One – The Last Sunset
Chapter Lyrics by Pearl Jam – Black:
And now my bitter hands cradle broken glass
Of what was everything
All the pictures had all been washed in black
Tattooed everything
I take a walk outside, I'm surrounded by some kids at play, ooh
I can feel their laughter, oh, so why do I sear?
Mmh, and twistin' thoughts that spin 'round my head
I'm spinning, oh-oh-oh, I'm spinning
How quick the sun can, drop away
And now my bitter hands cradle broken glass
Of what was everything
All the pictures had all been washed in black
Tattooed everything
All the love gone bad, turned my world to black
Tattooed all I see, all that I am
The twin suns of Tatooine, glowing orbs of brilliant gold and burnt orange, sank slowly below the jagged horizon, staining the sky in deep crimson and muted lavender. Obi-Wan Kenobi stood at the edge of the Lars homestead, his silhouette framed against the vibrant backdrop as he watched the light fade. It felt as if everything he cherished was slipping away, like water through his fingers.
He remained still as the weight of the moment pinned him to the ground, a heaviness in his heart he was not ready to release. In his bones, he felt a profound clarity forged by a lifetime of grappling with loss. He knew that the instant he looked away from this hallowed place, the grief would solidify into an unchangeable reality. Although he never considered himself superstitious or overly sentimental, at least that was the mantra he repeated to himself, in this moment, faced with an undeniable finality, he questioned the validity of that belief for the first time.
Just moments earlier, he had stood atop a rocky ridge, looking down at the homestead as shadows cloaked it. A thought drifted through his mind: This is where hope goes when it has nowhere left to turn. He wrestled with whether this realization brought solace or despair. Perhaps both were intertwined, a bitter symbiosis that echoed the remnants of his spirit.
Not long ago, he had gently placed the infant Luke into Owen Lars's arms. Owen's grip was firm yet hesitant, a physical embodiment of the tension in the air. He bore this burden reluctantly, and Obi-Wan could hardly fault him. He felt as though he were teetering on the edge of an abyss, reluctant to plunge into the unknown.
Beru stood at the threshold of the homestead, her figure framed by the soft glow of the dim interior, silently observing. Her gaze held a tenderness that spoke of maternal love emerging even before full comprehension. When their eyes met, she offered the faintest nod, a gesture laden with unspoken understanding. In the quiet of the coming night, that simple nod would resonate in Obi-Wan's heart as the only thing from that day that didn't stab at his sorrow.
As Obi-Wan turned to leave, Owen remained silent, a fitting farewell in its own right, echoing the unspoken words of their shared anguish.
The trek back to his starfighter felt interminable, a slow march that eclipsed even the agony of fleeing the Temple or the ruin of Mustafar's infernos. At least those paths had ended with a sense of purpose. This journey led him into a vast silence, pristine yet suffocating, as though he were walking through the aftermath of something irrevocably concluded.
The sand shifted beneath his boots, each grain a reminder of Tatooine's relentless harshness. Comfort was a luxury this world rarely afforded, leaving only a stubborn will to endure, and even that grudgingly.
When he finally reached the starfighter, nestled in the long shadows of a weathered sandstone outcrop, it felt all too fitting. The ship, marred and weather-beaten, bore the scars of countless journeys and repairs, much like the man who piloted it. He rested a hand against the sun-warmed metal, letting a fleeting moment of comfort wash over him.
Then he climbed aboard, settling into his seat with his hands resting heavily in his lap, delaying the inevitable as he stared into the void ahead. The engines were silent, the antithesis to his racing thoughts.
*~*~*
He sought the Force as he always had, with a profound stillness that enveloped him like a soft cloak, with each measured breath that expanded his awareness, and with a particular interior quiet he had diligently cultivated over a lifetime. Once, he had been exceptionally adept at attaining this state. In those moments of stillness, he discovered a deep peace an active mind could never manufacture, a serene calm that flowed through him like a gentle breeze through an open window, present and purposeful, entirely indifferent to his needs and desires.
Now, it felt as if he stood outside a locked room, straining to hear the muffled warmth of voices inside, pressing his ear against wood that offered only the faintest glimpses of connection. The Force was there. He could feel its pulsing presence like a heartbeat, yet it eluded him. He was cut off, as if a barrier stood between him and it, perhaps created by the sheer weight of his grief, a sorrow so profound it generated its own interference, a frequency that jammed any attempt to reach out.
For three long days since leaving Luke at the Lars farm, he had called for Qui-Gon, his voice reverberating through the emptiness. The relentless desert answered with a suffocating silence, a response in itself, though far from the solace he sought.
He closed his eyes, surrendering to the nightmares that came unbidden, relentless as the tide. Resistance was futile, an exhausting effort he could no longer sustain.
Sometimes it was not Mustafar that haunted him. Sometimes it was the Temple, where he could almost smell the aftermath, that sickening blend of charred flesh and what remained of a sanctified space, an aroma of marble dust mingling with the ashes of destruction. A building that had withstood a thousand years of trials was now desecrated in a single devastating night. Other times it was the chilling security footage he had forced himself to watch, a necessary evil, a morbid curiosity that felt like a dagger twisting in his gut. He recalled sitting with his hands firmly at his sides, knowing that was the only discipline he had left to cling to.
At times, it was Satine. Not the vibrant Satine of better days, who would passionately debate the Council's neutrality, wielding her brilliant intellect like a weapon and joyfully sparring with him when he stood his ground. Not that Satine. The nightmares conjured the Satine of Mandalore: the weight of her in his arms in a dimly lit room that smelled of ancient stone, her gentle hand brushing his cheek with a tenderness so deliberate it felt like a silent apology. Her voice lingered in his memory, soft and unhurried, as if she had all the time in the galaxy, though she knew full well she did not. I love you. Her last words, etched into his soul. He hadn't returned the sentiment, not out of a lack of feeling, nor because the emotions were insufficient, but because he had spent two decades ensconcing those feelings within a fortress of silence. That silence had become structural, a load-bearing wall in the architecture of his heart, and in the end, it had made no difference. Maul had already made the choice for both of them.
He had convinced himself that silence was the wiser path. Now he was haunted by an incessant question: what, precisely, had that silence protected? Not Satine. Not the mission. Not even the Code itself, which had shattered with everything else. The silence had safeguarded distance, but that distance had ultimately protected nothing of value.
Sometimes, amid the swirling chaos of war and conflict, there was just Anakin.
Not the foreboding figure he could barely recognize at the end, not the blazing silhouette that loomed like a dark specter over the charred banks of the lava river, the embodiment of despair the galaxy would soon know as Darth Vader. What haunted Obi-Wan was the man caught in the middle, the one who had stood beside him for thirteen tumultuous years. The one with whom he had shared playful bickering, laughter that felt like sunlight breaking through clouds, deep-seated worries, and heart-wrenching failures that only someone capable of profound love could endure, all while clinging to the belief that he was doing everything right.
Anakin had been undeniably funny. That detail pressed itself insistently into Obi-Wan's mind, especially in quiet moments when memories washed over him like a gentle tide. It wasn't the immense power that had become the subject of their legendary escapades, extraordinary and well-documented in every respect. It wasn't even the recklessness woven into the fabric of his legendary, occasionally devastating reputation. It was the humor. Anakin had a brand of wit that was genuinely, effortlessly, and devastatingly funny, the kind that took you by surprise, arriving in all the wrong moments with perfect precision. He had a talent for stealing Obi-Wan's best lines and delivering them with an infectious energy that outshone even the originals. He had the uncanny ability to complete thoughts Obi-Wan hadn't even realized were forming.
Once, on a particularly dismal day amid the war-torn landscape of Christophsis, where the ground trembled beneath their feet and the odds loomed darkly against them, Anakin turned to him during a fierce firefight. With a glimmer of mischief in his eyes, he delivered a line so absurdly perfect that it broke through Obi-Wan's tension, eliciting a genuine laugh, a sound that bubbled up from within, unexpected and liberating. That single moment, a spark of levity amid despair, somehow made the difference between enduring the next five harrowing minutes and not.
They had been more than friends, more than brothers entwined by destiny. Each could scarcely imagine life without the other. The brutalities of war had fused their souls into a single, inseparable unit. They had become the stalwart team on which the Republic relied when victory was essential, and they had emerged victorious in most of their endeavors. In the moments of relative calm, they would bicker playfully about footwork and piloting, debating who had sparked the last spat and whose turn it was to submit the ever-daunting mission reports. It had been a camaraderie that Obi-Wan hadn't known he could call home until it was cruelly lost.
The holofilms will not capture that, he thought. Whatever remains of this story, whatever shape it takes as time marches forward, it will depict the fall, the consuming fire, and the heartbreak of it all. But it will never show the quiet afternoons we shared.
He had known about Padme, not from Anakin's heartfelt confession, for that admission had never come. Instead, he had witnessed them together in a corridor of the Jedi Temple the day after Anakin's knighthood. He felt the Force resonate between them, an unmistakable frequency that echoed the bond of two souls who had already made their choices, intertwining with an intensity that could not be denied. He had chosen silence in that pivotal moment. He had rationalized it as an act of compassion, thinking of his own near choices involving Satine, and decided: let him have this. Let Anakin have what he could not grasp himself. In that choice, he had called it mercy, feeling an uncharacteristic generosity, never once confronting the truth that it was not mercy at all.
The answer, which crystallized in his mind somewhere over Coruscant's sprawling cityscape during the somber hours after Mustafar, was this: it had been mercy for himself. He had been unwilling to face the truth. Knowing would have demanded action, and acting would have meant shattering the elegant veil of professional distance he had meticulously woven between himself and the one he held nearest in the galaxy. Breaking that distance would have required admitting that it was not wisdom guiding him, but rather a deep-seated cowardice masquerading as a Jedi Master, cloaked in the deceptive guise of serenity.
Anakin, searching for comfort, had turned to Palpatine instead. He had confided in the man who would eventually bring destruction, revealing the most sacred and fearful parts of his heart, parts Obi-Wan had kept secret, pretending not to notice the growing bond between Anakin and Padme. Obi-Wan had mistaken his silence for wisdom, while the door between them had always remained slightly shut, hinting at unspoken truths that lingered just beneath the surface but were never fully acknowledged.
He was worse than a murderer. He was the man who had seen the shape of the ending clearly enough to recognize it afterward. He had the information, the proximity, and the love, yet still found himself entirely in the wrong place when it mattered. He had called his silences kindness, labeled his distance discipline, and deemed his inability to express the simple, necessary truths a virtue. Anakin had paid for that particular virtue with everything he had.
He had always assumed, like many unexamined beliefs, that when he died, Anakin would be there with him. This unspoken assumption had supported thirteen years of partnership: no matter what happened to Obi-Wan Kenobi, he would not face it alone. It was similar to how he had approached Utapau, planning his tactics while quietly expecting that Anakin would unexpectedly appear at the perfect or worst moment, just as he always did.
The man he had called his brother was now ash and machinery on a black beach. Obi-Wan was in a desert at the edge of nothing, calling for a dead man who had not yet learned to answer.
On Mustafar, at the end, he spoke the truest words he knew how to say.
You were the Chosen One. It was foretold that you would destroy the Sith, not join them.
You were my brother, Anakin. I loved you, but I cannot save you.
The words had bled out of him, true, too late, and entirely insufficient, the way truth always arrives after the moment when it could have changed the outcome, but the time has already passed. Then he turned and walked away, his back straight because the alternative was something he could not afford. He carried that burden away from the black shore, and he still bore it.
*~*~*
He methodically pieced together his decision like a skilled craftsman delicately handling a fragile object, each thought and potential outcome scrutinized with the same care as a man weighing the peril of stepping off a precarious ledge, every step taken with utmost caution.
His very presence on Tatooine radiated like a beacon, steady and bright within the depths of the Force. It was a signal the Emperor's Inquisitors, trained to hunt such flashes of light, could easily detect and trace. These relentless pursuers were methodical, capable of following every ripple through the cosmic fabric back to its source, and unyielding in their patience. That certainty was unnerving, as they remained unerringly precise in their conclusions. He realized that remaining on this barren planet would effectively illuminate Luke's location for the Empire. Conversely, retreating into the shadows would shield the child, cloaked in the protective anonymity offered by the mundane lives of Owen and Beru, the unremarkable existence of a moisture farm on this desolate desert world at the furthest reaches of the Outer Rim. No one looked for hope on Tatooine. That was the point.
The logic threading through his reasoning was impeccable. Yet, with the same uncompromising honesty he intended to apply to everything else that night, he recognized that this rationale also served as an eloquent escape from the last remnant he had left to protect. He acknowledged this reality and tucked it away for consideration. The actions he was preparing to undertake were undeniably correct, but not for reasons that met the standard of integrity.
He expertly programmed the starfighter's navigation system for the Unknown Regions, a vast and enigmatic territory on the fringes of known space, shrouded in mystery and poorly charted, where the Force twisted and faltered, and the Empire held no dominion. It was a realm where he could vanish, a sanctuary to mend his wounds, if any vestige of healing still remained accessible to him.
In a bid to soothe his frayed nerves, he promised himself he would return when the time was ripe. This assurance was spoken with the misplaced confidence of a man who had been profoundly mistaken about crucial matters more times than he could count, yet remained blissfully unaware of the far-reaching consequences of that harrowing track record.
*~*~*
The jump to hyperspace unfolded like a dazzling explosion of light, enveloping him in a radiant embrace. The galaxy transformed into brilliant streaks of color, the familiar blue-white tunnel curling around the ship like a gentle tide around a stone. He inhaled deeply, relief washing over him. For the first time in days, he was in motion.
But then came the tangle.
It struck with brutal swiftness. One moment, the tunnel glimmered in a steady, comforting blue-white. Next, it shattered into a chaotic maelstrom. The light fractured, splintering into layers that vibrated at an unsettling frequency, sending sharp shocks through his jaw and rattling the bones of his face, reverberating in the back of his skull. The ship convulsed violently, as if a colossal hand had seized it by the nose and was shaking it with deliberate force, probing its worthiness for the journey ahead.
In an instant, the navicomputer went dark. All console instruments extinguished at once, not gradually fading out but disappearing as if an unseen force had reached inside the machinery and erased its core information. The Force writhed and twisted, contorting in a way he had never experienced in his thirty-eight years of connection to it. The sensation wrapped around him before he could understand it: a stomach-churning disorientation, the overwhelming fear of stepping into a void with no ground, as if the universe had suddenly suspended its own rules.
He gripped the controls with both hands, summoning every ounce of focus he could, closing his eyes against the chaos. He drew steady, deep breaths from his center, just as Qui-Gon had taught him during far simpler crises. Panic was a luxury he could ill afford. He centered himself on what remained constant: his grip on the controls, the vibrating hull, and the truths that still resonated in that tempestuous void.
He reached for the Force with everything he had.
It responded from an entirely unfamiliar direction. Not wrong, precisely, just different. It carried a new quality of presence, a distinct resonance, as if the Force he was encountering were a familiar symphony played on a different instrument, the same music arranged in an uncharted key. It was still the Force, yet it emanated from a place for which he had no map.
Then something tugged at him, not merely at the ship but at something more fundamental, buried beneath the machinery and below his seat and deep within his own being. A point of consciousness in the living Force, and whatever sought to pull at it did so with unyielding certainty, leaving no room for doubt.
The brightness consumed everything.
For a span of time that defied measurement, there was nothing. Not darkness, which signifies the absence of light within a space that still exists. Something altogether different, a state the Jedi texts had alluded to but that Obi-Wan had never fathomed he would encounter personally.
Then came the atmosphere. Then the sensation of heat, the resistance against him, and the anguished wail of a ship reentering at a perilous angle in conditions it was never designed to survive.
He opened his eyes.
Below him, a planet unfurled, a breathtaking tapestry of green and blue, pulsing with vibrant life, ensconced in a swirling cloak of clouds and radiance, alive with the unmistakable brilliance of a world untouched by war for ten millennia. It was the most magnificent sight he had witnessed in what felt like an eternity.
Yet his tactical mind, unyielding even in extremis, discerned the grim truth: he was hurtling toward the planet at an alarming velocity, and the impact would render the next few minutes exceedingly complicated.
He seized the controls and braced himself. The Force enveloped him, abundant and enigmatic and vibrant in a way he had not felt on Tatooine, rising from the green and blue surface below with a generosity befitting a world that had never known strife.
He took a breath. He calculated.
He did what he had always done in the face of the important things: he held on, and he found the stillness inside the storm, and he let it carry him toward whatever came next.
The planet soared toward him. He did not look away