Chapter Text
When Anakin’s eyes turned yellow, Obi-Wan’s world turned black and white. The galaxy drained itself of everything bright and shining when Anakin’s blue, hopeful eyes burned yellow with anger and darkness.
The serrated edge of Anakin’s rage had cut into him, sharper and more painful than a physical blade. He would rather be cut down than see, feel, Anakin fall away into something he was not. Or maybe, he had been this way the whole time and Obi-Wan was too blinded by his own fondness, his own love, to notice.
He wondered if it was worse to not see the signs at all, or to see them and rationalize them away. He was not sure which one he had done, though he had a sick feeling it was the latter.
The latter was worse because the eyes that stared Obi-Wan down in that heated battle on Mustafar were not new to him. These were the eyes that haunted his most turbulent visions and darkest nightmares, even as a youngling, even before he knew Anakin. The Force had been warning him all these years, but it failed to provide a complete picture just as he had so clearly failed Anakin.
Everywhere he went, the yellow eyes pierced into him, unblinking and swirling with rage and all Obi-Wan could think was where did I go wrong?
Perhaps he was never right to begin with.
Even now, far away from those fiery shores, he saw the yellow eyes. They haunted him – staring at him through his nightmares, unblinking and stinging like venom. He saw the yellow eyes in the swirling sands – endless and eternal as they were.
Obi-Wan’s mind flashed back to a boy huddling under a kitchen table in fear, to a teen running away when he felt slighted or unsure, to a young man desperately clawing at the unforgiving passage of time, willing it to bend to his own desires.
How could he have missed all of that? Nobody could have missed that.
If only he had had more time, if only he had paid attention, if only…
Obi-Wan sighed and let go of those thoughts. He knew better than anyone that what-ifs and if-onlys were a pointless waste of time and a calamitous waste of heart.
Besides, he had a job to do — and that job was too important to be crushed under the weight of past mistakes.
So Obi-Wan turned to the yellow suns and dreamed not of what might have been, but what was still to be.